The Blue Taxi (14 page)

In her bedroom, hands now on her head as she bent over, thinking, Sarie pictured Betty’s finger sliding on her brow, how pale
her hair had been. She smelled the fresh sheets in the air. What had the Kuria-man told Angélique beneath the croton tree,
or from his mountain-looking bed? Was any of it true? When she thought about her own surprising man, she reassured herself.
She was not at all like Sister Angélique. Oh, no. No, she wasn’t. She was not. She had not
done the thing. La chose
, she thought. Not yet. She looked into the mirror, steeled herself: “Mr. Jeevanjee has never stolen cows. He is no bad-smelling
Kuria-man with an ulcer on his leg. He knows how to read. And I”—she touched her brow and neck—“I have yellow hair.”

After an hour in the courtyard, Agatha came into the bedroom. “Look,” she said. She opened her closed palms and let her newfound
stones spill across the folds of her parents’ unmade bed. Intent on her pebbles, she didn’t see how very still her mother
was, or how she stood, sideways to the mirror, fingering her hair as though uncertain it was hers. “Kudra House,” said Agatha.
“Nineteen thirty-two. When should I get dressed? “And, “We’re going to have juice.”

“We are not,” her mother said. Upon a second, unmoored vision of Betty’s moving finger, and a third and fourth, Sarie had
decided that she surely wouldn’t go. She’d been foolish to think of going back so soon, to think of it at all. She had herself
in hand: she would make a lunch for Gilbert; she would take Agatha to market, seek laundry soap and beans.

Agatha was dogged. “When we go today,” she said, “I’ll wear my purple dress.” “You will not,” said Sarie. Agatha kicked the
air, tossed a pebble at the wall. But Sarie’s resolve held. She needed, she
decided, a little time to think. Indeed, what if going back to Mr. Jeevanjee spelled a great disaster, as great as Angélique’s?
What if
, she thought,
he makes me disappear?
Agatha complained. She cried, she stamped her feet, she pounded at her mother’s legs with vigorous fists, but Sarie, once
she’d made her mind up, could not easily be moved. “The Jeevanjees need time,” she said. “We have visited enough.”

They did not go back to Majid Ghulam’s house for four long, dreamy days. During those four days—because at the start of an
affair one feels a great variety of things—Sarie sometimes thought the thoughts she felt a newly chosen woman should:
I will take my time, I shall like to savor this, to think;
alternately, she felt she had been mad to go at all—that by her dismissal of the girl with glasses at the clinic, who had
been (hadn’t she?) somehow issuing a warning, she had sealed her fate. She wished for an alternative: she wished to do it
all again, to say instead to the receptionist, “You’re right. We will let him rest. Give him our regards,” and go right home,
straight from that pink room. And there were happy moments, too; when Sarie danced before the mirror, hugged her own self
tight and stroked her great, long hips. If thrilled like this, she wondered what Agatha would look like if she did not belong
to Gilbert. If Majid were her child’s real father, Sarie asked herself, would Agatha’s pale skin have come out nutty brown?
Would those high brows be dark? Would the willful girl have had poetic leanings (which, in her current incarnation as the
daughter of a man who couldn’t, Sarie thought, put two words old or new together in a bright or interesting way, Agatha, it
seemed, most certainly did not)?

What if her own hair were
not
as yellow as gelled ghee? She wondered what sort of clothing Majid’s long-dead wife had worn, and
would they look well on me?
She took her wonderings with her as she moved in the drab flat. She scrubbed the kitchen tiles, imagining
the floor in Kudra House, its furred, brown, bare cement gone black and damp beneath the flakings in the scarlet paint. She
peered out of the windows thinking she saw not Mchanganyiko Street but Libya, another world, indeed. What if
she
, and not the nameless love, had been married by the poet in her youth?

But a simple cough from Gilbert, a shuffle in the other room, or a look from Agatha, who
did
, no matter what, look very like her father—that round, round face, those light brown eyes like clear glass beads beneath
such opaquely brown hair—and who resented both the interruption of their visits and her mother’s recent habit of
staring
at her so, could make Sarie lose her happiness and think,
I’ll forget it ever happened
. At such moments, considering the back of Gilbert’s head or a dimple in her daughter’s arm with enormous concentration,
I will
, Sarie would think,
forget this man completely
.

Six

M
ajid also wavered, side to side, and down, and down, and up. He paced the hall and balcony of Kudra House; he walked the stairs
from top to bottom and to the top again, then back. At the bottom, in the doorway, Majid stood as Sarie had, looking up the
pitted steps into the bluish gloom. From this position, he made forays into the courtyard, which made Maria think that there
was something wrong: at the far end Majid looked at the old tap as if he’d never known that it was there, rusting and sporadically
aspurt; he eyed the upper rim of the old wall and noted, frowning, like a visitor from other realms, the passion vine that,
having snuck across from an unseen neighbor’s root, now clutched the coral bricks; he walked down the narrow alley to the
metal door, felt the street arush behind and almost pressed the panel out, almost crossed the threshold; then he turned around
and moved back towards the stairwell, as if he’d come in from the street. As he walked below, he wondered what the big woman
had seen, in their crumbling place, and him.

That she’d looked at him at all caused Majid some amazement. That she had kept on doing so, that she had returned so many
times, that she had pressed his body to her and might do so again—it seemed beyond belief. He had never, never, thought that
such a thing could happen. Yet it had. There was a stirring in him, familiar and yet not. It made his skin feel strange. As
if he were aswell.
It must be
, Majid thought.
I am
. How odd! He felt himself grow ample, filling his old clothes! Indeed, in the days after the embrace,
it seemed almost to him as though, despite himself a younger version of Majid Ghulam, a healthy one whose arms could lift
a mattress without effort, whose fingers might undo a door-bolt without pause, a young man who could laugh, were threatening
to push old bereft-and-angry Mad Majid to the side.

He thought about his body, about his own and Sarie’s: the electric rattling between. Recalling Sarie’s limbs, how greedily,
how quickly, she had wrapped them all around him, Majid Ghulam felt restless, nauseous and excited.
How wild she was with me!
He recalled her as ferocious, nearly in a rage. He even thought she’d clawed him, growled a little in her throat. That ardor!
It cannot have come from the pale woman alone. Had it been called up in Sarie Turner by something within him, a force he had
not known? This thought pleased and jarred him. Yes, at some moments in his unraveling’s early wake, Majid felt like a new
and different man. His body changed, his mind shook. Was it the biscuits that they ate? The clutching in the hall? The showing
of the paper, after so many yellowed years? Majid didn’t know. And though he did not quite yet put any pen to paper, he remembered,
almost, too, what it had been like to face an empty page and will himself to fill it. To make a mark, out there, outside of
himself He thought of this:
Were you not once a poet?
Had he not once been so very full of clever words that they spilled out of him unsponged? Had he not once or twice been
really
listened to? Had he not had certain special, urgent things to say? Been praised for his fine wit? And in those days, he thought,
had he not understood why a girl or woman might look to him and smile?

The braver feelings were of course countered, too, by rather opposite emotions—emotions that in fact were not new, and had
priority, had squatters’ rights, over any thoughts of happiness, which were arrivistes, indeed. Inertia: the sort described
in Tahir’s science
primer, the inertia of a body that has too long been at rest. He was widowed, after all, a man who’d lost his wife. Or was
he? Though Majid would not have seen it, it is also possible to say that widower Mad Majid was not. For widowers can recover,
can emerge from forty days of managed grief with the unpleasant, perhaps, but inevitable impression that life itself continues.
Successful ones go on to take up other wives, to father other kids. Triumphant widowers take strolls to ease their sadness;
they linger in the world and find their wounds grown dull. Mad Majid, instead, had languished, had never taken strolls, and
had never felt before that life, skipping on without Hayaam, might show him a new thing. Perhaps he was no widower at all.
Not yet.

For years—and it had made him crazy, wild, unkind—Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee had refused to countenance the passing of Hayaam,
the dear, bright-eyed, heavy-breasted, fine-ankled, laughing sweet first love. When in the cruelest of tricks she had exchanged
her living self (which he’d been firmly promised!) for a whimpering baby boy, Majid had (here Bibi was right) as good as lost
his mind. He had, almost—had it not been for Cousin Sugra, who was strong and never failed to say exactly what she thought—not
gone to the funeral. He had almost failed to hold a maulid later on, after forty days had passed, when grief, it is assumed,
will have softened its mean grip and made room for a smile.
He
hadn’t held it, really; Sugra had, taking over, smacking him to make Ghuji behave, though he had, uncontrollable, anyway
announced to everyone (the cousins, the few still loyal brothers who’d wired from Toronto and from London, to the neighbors,
who first eyed him softly, then with fear, to passersby, who hadn’t asked) that there was nothing now to live for. That he
wished everyone would die. (That wet event with old Rahman, which Bibi liked to tell and tell and tell, was not made up at
all.)

Unspeakable, such things! Too much! What was
not
all right to say, what
no one ever said
. One said, instead, “The blade of life does sting, my dear, but we will not flinch, indeed.” One said, “Get hold of yourself.
Withstand this. It’s all part of the plan.” One said, “We’ve all got an appointment, a promised time, with God. There’s nothing
to be done.” And even, “Buck up, love, this was meant to be.” How could it, though? How could such things be meant? Hayaam,
after his failures, after the lost shop, the paper, after the embarrassment of not being a success, had been the sweetest,
truest thing, the venture that had bloomed. He’d found himself unequal to it and upset, despite the grievers’ wisdom, the
wisdom of it all. What good was life if all ended in death? What good was love, indeed?

Majid Ghulam forgot to eat, grew frail, and also ceased to bathe. While the abandoned sons grew large because Sugra was determined
that they should, his once-good teeth went bad. He cried, he swore, he shriveled. He did what no good Jeevanjee, what no good
man, had ever done in the whole swath of human history; he did what faithful humans mustn’t: he stopped attending funerals
and weddings. And what’s more, stopped making contributions to family events. Majid would not—do listen close—would not give
a shilling for incense or a shroud, or even for the sugar to make funereal sweets. He said:
I would rather die
. Rebuffed at first, then wounded, by Majid’s transformation, people stopped asking him for help. They knew what he’d become.
They called him Mad Majid, and they did not come to call.

He spent weeks in his own room. He dreamed of furious things, and woke to even worse. He saw things in the shadows, moving
in the walls. He felt visited by shapes. He was afraid to cross his room at night alone. He hated knocking sounds, and sounds
of married life that came to him over the walls, from other houses,
from the city’s air itself: the toothy scrub of graters, the clack and shift of pans in basins of cold water, the flap of
carpets in the air; these things made him shout. Indeed, Majid had lived (or not lived) nine solid empty years—of rage, then
sleep, and finally of worn and gummy grief He had not killed himself not with acid, knife, or pill. But he’d done as good
as.