by A. X. Ahmad
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This is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE LAST TAXI RIDE. Copyright © 2014 by A. X. Ahmad.
All rights reserved.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Ahmad, A. X.
The last taxi ride: a Ranjit Singh novel / A.X. Ahmad. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-01686-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01685-0 (e-book)
1. Taxicab drivers—Fiction. 2. East Indians—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Motion picture actors and actresses—Crimes against—Fiction. 4. Women East Indian—Crimes against—Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3601.H573L37 2014
813'.6—dc23
2014008313
e-ISBN 9781250016850
First Edition: June 2014
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Copyright
Prologue
Part I: The Woman in White
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part II: Bloodstained Cotton
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part III: The Woman in Red
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by A. X. Ahmad
Prologue
BOMBAY, 1979
Her daughters were late. They should have been home by now.
Nusrat Begum leaned against the rooftop balustrade of their small, crumbling house and squinted up at the sun: almost four o’clock.
Shabana and Ruksana should have arrived forty-five minutes ago, their shrill voices breaking the silence of the courtyard below.
Nusrat peered into the winding lane leading to the house. An auto-rickshaw went by, then a cluster of women returning from the bazaar. No sign of two twelve-year-olds in blue St. Agnes Convent uniforms, their neatly plaited hair tied into two loops with red ribbons.
Nusrat could go out into the dusty city and look for her daughters, but the thought frightened her. Though she had lived in Bombay for half her life, she only ventured out with her husband; she still obeyed the customs of her hometown, Peshawar, which now lay in Pakistan, on the wrong side of the border.
Her pretty, pale face turned hot with anger. The girls had probably gone to the movies again at the instigation of Shabana, the younger girl. She was dreamy and movie-obsessed, and often convinced Ruksana to take her to faraway cinemas to see old films.
The hot afternoon sun shone down and Nusrat felt her wet, waist-length hair beginning to dry. As was traditional, she had never cut it, and today she had rubbed it with coconut oil, then washed it with well water. She still had to perfume her hair, and the girls’ late arrival was disturbing her ritual.
To calm herself, Nusrat retrieved a small charcoal brazier from the corner of the roof and lit it. When the coals became ashy, she added some drops of perfume from a small glass vial, bent her head, and fanned her long hair over the smoking brazier.
As the smoky, musky scent impregnated her hair, Nusrat imagined her husband returning home that evening. Noor Mohammad would kiss her neck, bury his face in her hair, and say, “You smell like home to me.”
She knew that the musk of her hair would soothe his homesickness. Noor’s family was of noble lineage, and back in Peshawar his family still owned a large haveli, a palace. Like many other young men in the 1940s, he had taken the Frontier Mail train to Bombay in search of stardom, and ended up, so many years later, as a badly paid extra for third-rate films.
As the perfume filled her hair, Nusrat felt a sudden rush of sadness. Just last week she had sold the last of her wedding jewelry—a necklace studded with emeralds and two bangles of eighteen-karat gold. All she had left were her small gold earrings, shaped like flowers, but she quickly banished the thought from her mind. What did earthly possessions matter? If it was important for Noor to live in a house, to throw lavish dinner parties, to send the girls to a school run by nuns, so be it.
Hearing shrill voices below, Nusrat looked down into the courtyard and saw the dark heads of her daughters. Their teachers claimed that they couldn’t tell the girls apart, but Nusrat found that hard to believe. Even from up here, she could identify Ruksana by her thick hair; Shabana’s was thin and lifeless.
Nusrat hurriedly doused the brazier and took the stairs down, her relief eclipsed by anger.
It was Noor’s fault that Shabana was so irresponsible: he had taken her to see Pakeezah, the story of the doomed courtesan, at least five times. Shabana had memorized the whole film, knew all the lyrics, and could recite Meena Kumari’s lines. But what use was that? Ruksana was more practical: she had learned to cook and sew; she, at least, would be able to keep a man happy.
Entering the kitchen, Nusrat saw the fright on Shabana’s face, while Ruksana stood shamefaced in the doorway.
“Aare, where have you two been?” Nusrat poured some milk for them into a battered saucepan and put it on the stove to heat. She stepped into the center of the room, her hands on her hips. “Well, who is going to answer me?”
The girls looked at each other, but remained silent.
“Are you both deaf? Will a slap loosen your mouths?”
It was finally Shabana who spoke, just as the milk on the stove began to sputter and sizzle. “Ammi, it’s Ruksana’s fault, the nuns made her stay late at school. We missed the bus, we had to walk.”
Ruksana’s nostrils flared with anger. “You wanted to go to the movies, and you’re blaming me? You lying witch!” She reached out and grabbed her sister’s shoulder.
Shabana wriggled away and ran across the room, heading toward the stove, with Ruksana right behind her.
“Don’t you two start that nonsense—”
Just then Shabana turned and pus
hed her sister, and Ruksana staggered backward, her elbow hitting the long handle of the saucepan. The pan jerked upward, and the scalding milk flew out, splashing the side of her face. She screamed and fell to the floor, clawing at her eyes, and the smell of seared flesh filled the air.
“Ya khuda, what has happened?” As Shabana cowered in the corner, Nusrat crouched over Ruksana, prying the girl’s hands from her face. “Can you see? Are your eyes burned?”
Ruksana’s eyes were squeezed shut, but then she opened them and looked up. Her eyes were spared, but the boiling milk had left a fist-sized burn on the left side of her face.
Nusrat saw the blistering, purple skin and knew that this would be a permanent mark. She turned her anger on Shabana, who stood stock-still, her eyes wide with horror. “You bevkoof, look what you have done! Run to the bazaar and get yogurt and honey. Tell Ramdas I will pay him later!”
While Nusrat waited for Shabana to return, she quickly cut a potato and pressed a thick slice onto Ruksana’s cheek; it would cool and soothe the wound.
“Meere jaan,” Nusrat said, stroking her daughter’s hair, “you will be all right, don’t worry. This is all your wicked sister’s fault. Oh, how I’m going to punish her.”
Ruksana whimpered with pain, but seemed too dazed to complain.
When Shabana came back, sweating and breathless, Nusrat quickly made a poultice out of honey, yogurt, and turmeric and applied it to Ruksana’s face. The rest was out of Nusrat’s hands; only time would reveal the full extent of the damage.
Seeing the terrified look on Shabana’s face only increased Nusrat’s venom. “Who will want to marry your sister now? What chance does a scarred girl have, when there are so many pretty ones? If your sister does not get married, I will make sure that you take care of her for the rest of your life!”
Shabana fled into the living room, and Nusrat screamed after her, “And you will not go to the movies anymore! You are punished!”
In the ensuing silence, Ruksana sobbed as the pain set in. Nusrat held her older daughter and looked blindly out at the small courtyard with its flaking plaster walls. She felt a sharp headache coming on, and all her hopes for the night faded away. No doubt Noor would take Shabana’s side and say it was an accident. Like most men, Noor was charmed by the girl; all she had to do was pout and furrow her pretty eyebrows, and he did her bidding.
Twelve years old, and Shabana, on the cusp of womanhood, was already going in the wrong direction. She just lay around the house, getting by on her easy charm. Noor must drill some sense into her and put an end to all this movie watching.
Movies just caused girls like Shabana to live in their dreams.
I
THE WOMAN IN WHITE
If I had a palace made of pearls, inlaid with jewels,
Scented with musk, saffron and sandalwood, a sheer delight to behold
Seeing this, I might go astray and forget you,
And your name would not enter my mind.
—Guru Granth Sahib, Siree Raag
Chapter One
August in New York City. The place is a ghost town, thirteen thousand cabs desperately roaming the streets in search of a fare.
Ranjit Singh sees the woman in the white dress waving at him from the other side of Broadway and swerves his yellow cab across a lane of traffic. Horns blare and a bicycle messenger shouts Asshole! as he screeches to a stop.
A bare brown arm reaches for the door handle. It clicks open and the cool air-conditioning leaks out, replaced by the smell of hot asphalt, sweat, and the faint, pungent odor of melting bubble gum.
Ranjit watches the woman get into the cab, the same way he watches all his passengers, looking for signs of trouble. Seasoned New Yorkers barely even notice Ranjit’s red turban and full beard, but out-of-towners gape at him, reassured only by the hack license posted on the plexiglass partition. The crazies, of course, want to talk and talk.
This woman is different.
One long leg enters the cab, wearing a white wedge-heeled sandal, each toenail painted a perfect crimson. Her crisp white dress reveals smooth brown shoulders, her face is obscured by large oval sunglasses, and her glossy black hair cascades to her shoulders. She piles three crisp white Prada shopping bags on the seat next to her, and they crinkle against her hip.
“Seventy-second and Central Park West, please.”
Her voice is low and modulated, but there are Indian undertones to it, as familiar as the voice of a long-forgotten lover.
I know this woman, he thinks, then corrects himself. That’s absurd.
He nods in acknowledgment and pulls out onto lower Broadway, thinking of the quickest route: right onto Prince, swing over onto West Houston, cut through the Village on Sixth Avenue, and then a straight shot through Midtown to Central Park West. After two long years of driving a cab here, the city’s streets are burned into his brain.
They turn and hit a red light. The taxi is caught in the seething, rumbling flow of traffic and Ranjit feels an equivalent disturbance inside himself. The woman in the white dress is looking out of the window, lost in thought, biting down on her plump lower lip.
A memory floods through him. He was still a cadet at the Military Academy in Chandigarh, and on one stifling hot Sunday he wandered into a cinema, bought a ticket, and sank down into a seat, enjoying the air-conditioning.
He’d entered in the middle of a film, a romance, apparently, because the heroine was waiting under a concrete overpass for her lover. Unlike the other Bollywood actresses, with their ample bosoms and pale complexions, she was dark-skinned and slender, with vulnerable, doelike eyes. As she waited, it began to rain, and she shrank back against the concrete, biting down into her lower lip. Transfixed, Ranjit sat through the rest of the movie, then bought another ticket and watched it again.
He was twenty-two then, and the actress on the screen was barely nineteen, the latest discovery by the megaproducer S. K. Nagpal, who had supposedly seen her getting off a bus and said, “See that girl? I will make her into a star.”
The woman in his cab must be in her late thirties now: her voice is an octave lower, her slim figure filled out into womanly curves. Ranjit wishes that he could see her eyes, which are hidden behind oversized sunglasses.
The light changes to green, and the taxi nips around a bus, accelerating so hard that the woman in white is pushed back into her seat. She takes off her sunglasses and clutches them, and he can see her face clearly now. There is no mistaking her long-lashed, liquid brown eyes.
Shabana Shah catches him staring and smiles tiredly. “So you’ve recognized me. If you want an autograph, okay. But I cannot get you a movie role, or introduce your nephew to some producer, okay?”
He laughs. “Sorry to bother you, madam. No autograph needed. It’s just that you looked familiar, and I was trying to remember—”
“It’s okay. Happens all the time.”
Shabana Shah leans her forehead against the window and looks out at the flower district. A man pushing a shopping cart full of purple orchids hurries past, leaving a wet trail behind him.
Ranjit finds himself still talking. “My wife, she was a big fan of yours—”
“Was? Why, what happened? She doesn’t like my movies anymore?”
He feels his face flush, and remembers that Shabana’s last three movies were all box-office flops. Critics have said that she is too old to play the role of the young, vulnerable lover.
“No, no, that’s not what I meant. She’s still a fan, I’m sure. It’s just that she is in India, and I’m here. We’re … divorced.”
She looks at him with a spark of interest. “Divorced? Is that common for Sikhs?”
“No.” He feels the back of his neck burn with shame.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was stupid, forgive me.”
“Oh, there is nothing to forgive.”
Changing the topic, she gestures to the postcard he has propped on the dashboard: the Golden Temple in Amritsar, surrounded by the
calm waters of the sacred lake.
“So that’s where you’re from? Amritsar?”
He shakes his head. “No, no … I’m from Chandigarh.”
There is no way to explain that he used to visit the temple with his mother when he was a child. The postcard is a talisman: when he’s stressed out, he concentrates on it and meditates, leaving the fray of Manhattan for the quiet, sacred space of the temple.
The taxi speeds on, slipping through the knot of Columbus Circle, the tall lonely statue of Columbus mirrored in the glass slabs of the Time Warner Center. Turning onto Central Park West, Ranjit feels a stab of sadness that the ride will soon be over.
With Shabana in his cab, he feels something that he hasn’t felt in a long time: not just the quick flame of desire, but something weightier, a yearning to be recognized.
New York is full of unmoored women and a moving taxi is a refuge from the harsh reality of the city. Tired or lonely, some of these women hear Ranjit’s fluent English and want to talk to him. Most of the time he humorously deflects their advances, but once he gave in.
The day he received his divorce papers, he picked up a tall blond woman at JFK airport, returning from a yoga retreat in India. They talked all the way into the city, and when she invited him up to her sleek Soho loft it seemed natural. After a drink, she simply stepped out of her clothes, and her slim, tanned body aroused him; after sex she fell deeply asleep. Gathering up his clothes to leave, Ranjit was shocked to pass an open bedroom door and see a man sleeping inside. The encounter left him feeling soiled and lonelier than before, and he swore to never pick up another woman.
But Shabana is different, and he can’t help sneaking another look. Her black, lustrous hair has been artfully cut and falls in layers to her bare shoulders, almost too heavy to be supported by her slender neck. Her eyelashes have barely any mascara, and her lipstick is a modest shade of pearl, but she wears heavy makeup on her cheeks. She is older now, but he feels as though he has known her, has lain with her through a thousand and one nights, listening to her stories.
There is the sudden blare of horns on Central Park West. Ranjit hits the brake, bringing the taxi to an abrupt stop. A cop car is blocking the road, its lights flashing. Ahead, a long black limo is skewed across the road, a yellow cab with a crumpled fender stopped right behind it. No doubt the limo braked suddenly—livery car drivers drive like shit—but the cabbie always gets blamed.