The Blue Taxi (17 page)

She had come up with potatoes and some rice, put them down, and looked at him more closely. She said she’d gone down to the
clinic and had not been heard yet. But she reminded him that she did not shy from combat. “If they don’t give me crutches
soon, I will go to that doctor’s house myself.” She raised her arms and made a face and jumped and swayed from side to side
like a bogeyman, a spirit. “Like this!” She’d made Majid laugh.

That morning Majid did another thing he had not done before: he thanked her specially. He had risen from his seat and squeezed
her hand and thanked her. And she had looked at him again as though he were not quite the man she knew, and had pulled her
hand away, suspicious. “All right, now. Quit it, please. I’m going.” And this, too, had made him laugh. Majid was feeling
better. He was trying, yes, for now, as Sugra herself thought he should, to put that grief behind him.

After lunch, he had slept on the blue settee while Tahir, whom Habib and Ismail had carried carefully into the parlor, sat
and ate bananas by the window and looked at an old book. While Majid slept, a restful half sleep that did not bring him dreams,
he had been conscious most of all beneath his skin of that forward-moving force—which ebbed, oh, yes, and flowed! He’d felt
the presence of his son not far from him, and this had made him glad, as if things were going right. He’d woken without visions.
He had
bathed. As Agatha and Sarie turned the final corner, he felt fresher than a glass of lime juice—giddy, he was hoping, hoping,
that Mrs. Turner would come back.

When she saw that he was greeting them more graciously than ever, Sarie, happy, felt a fool. Here the kind man was, perfectly
polite—he’d shaved!—and clearly glad they’d come. She tucked her handkerchief into the collar of her dress with her left hand
and took Majid Ghulam’s fingers with her right.
He wants this!
Her palm curled around his knuckles, settled for a moment.
Il me vent
. Her pale eyelashes fluttered.

It seemed to Majid that her eyes were very bright, the whites of them a little paler than before. And that she’d been breathing
hard. Had she been so eager, so desperate, to see him? The thought made him feel tender, brought a pulsing to his throat.
As she released his fingers, she bobbed down a little so he should not feel her height. He was touched by the way her scalp
showed through her hair, that she was, almost, bowing down to
him
. She reminded Majid for a moment of a schoolgirl, even cousin Sugra, curtsying to the British queen at a Diamond Jubilee.
The idea—
little Sarie kneeling
—made him smile.

At the lifting of his lips, Sarie almost swooned. She felt her eyes well up, grow hot. Her knees buckled a bit and she wanted
to fall down in relief. But she did not let herself collapse. She sniffed to push the tears back. Her nostrils rippled greatly
and her legs went strong again.
Mr. Jeevanjee feels just the same, like me
. She raised her eyebrows and she beamed.

Majid was happily prepared. He had counted out what Sugra had been able to secure for them and sent Habib to the shops for
fruit, which is good when one has guests. As soon as Sarie sat, Agatha beside her, he brought out more bananas and a bowl
of tangerines. Such kindness! Sarie’s blue eyes glowed. Majid, who
had thought of everything, turned to Agatha and said, “Take some in to Tahir, won’t you? He has things to tell you.” Agatha
did not need to be told twice. She took three bananas in her hands (one for Tahir, two for her) and three sweet tangerines.
Her small bare feet made furry thuddings in the hall. The door to Tahir’s room fell open and then narrowed. Majid looked at
Sarie.

Now that Agatha was gone, Sarie—having had a tangerine—was calm and fine inside. She settled back into her now-familiar seat
and crossed her legs, this time without shame, hoping they looked nice. She said, “What happened here last week—” She stopped.

Moved by a twisting in his bowels and how Sarie’s presence made his breath feel thick and slow, Majid prevented her from starting
up again by pressing a small banana towards her. “Madam, please.” He paused, and tried it out. “
Sarie.
” Sarie blinked at him. “There isn’t any need,” he said. It came out as he had practiced.

She handed him a quarter of her fruit, and, mightily aware of the shape of their two hands, he took it from her seriously.
Sarie nodded to herself.
D’accord. Here I am
, she thought.
And here I will repose
.

That afternoon, Majid read out an old poem she had not yet heard; it was about the charming jasmine bush, whose heady blooms
enhance the sweetest couplings and bring warm scent to old clothes. Sarie had, it’s true, never done a single thing with jasmine;
she had never worn it, pressed its flowers into oil, or presented a desired man with a package of its buds tied together in
a leaf She had never left a favored gown to sleep, flowers in its folds. But Majid was not a stranger to the ways that jasmine
could push certain things along. He had been married, after all. Though Sarie would not have said so clearly, would not have
known exactly what it meant, the poem was an offering, and this much she understood: it gently told her what there was no
call to do (panic, worry, flee),
and artfully suggested that other needs, for more than fruit and gazes, might at some future date be met. Majid looked at
her to witness his effect. Sarie was still flushed, and marveling at the shivers in her limbs.
He has not even touched me
. She raised a hand up to her hair. When he turned towards her, she uncrossed and crossed her legs, put her palms on her big
knees, and asked Mr. Jeevanjee—no,
Majid
, please—to read the thing again, from beginning to the end.

II

Eight

I
n the mornings, the sounds of Mansour House awakening rose up to Bibi in her bed. She could hear Issa and Nisreen and the
other, darker bibi—Mama Moto, the one who cooked and cleaned. Issa moved around sharp-sharp, stepping, sitting, quick and
firm like a machine, uttering bright questions (“Are you ready?” “Where’s the tea?” “Have you seen my belt?”). Nisreen laughed
in answer and moved slowly, shuffling in bare feet. Mama Moto made one-syllable pronouncements, noncommittal, bland. Bibi
liked the sound of them,
her
people. She liked knowing they were safe, and hearing them about. And also teacups clashing in the basin, the rattle of boiled
water, breakfast being made. But, although it was her habit to wake hungry, she had begun to wait. Morning, she’d heard people
say, was the best time for ideas. And she had work to do. She wanted to discover, firmly yes or no, if indeed she had a gift:
she was fostering visions.

She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone—that convergence in her stitching, with the napkin and the bus—and she was not going to
until she was quite sure. Not one of them, she thought, was worthy of her news. Not one of them was really willing, not as
Bibi was, to entertain a possibility and thrill to it. They thought she made things up; they thought she was a gossip.

To be fair, Nisreen, in her own measured way, did welcome information. Being the receptionist at pink Kikanga Clinic, she
herself was often privy to interesting news, which she sometimes shared with Bibi. But Nisreen dispensed her wares at intervals,
dangling them like sweets—more to placate Bibi than to indulge in a shared treat. If Bibi asked her what was new, Nisreen
would look up in that vaguely cross-eyed way of hers and shrug, say, “Nothing. The usual, you know. No, nothing I can think.”
She’d go on folding sheets or picking at her fingernails or polishing her shoes without another word. Bibi had to wait. And
then, perhaps, she’d say (as if she’d suddenly remembered), “Oh, well. There
was
something today. Guess
who
came in with a bruise like a brinjal swelling on her face, brought in by an aunt?” Earnest, slow, Nisreen would generously
describe the symptoms, how much blood there was, the trimmings of a trauma, but she wouldn’t stand for too much guessing about
who or what had been behind a punch or slash. While Bibi, caught up like a fish, would twitch and flap and ache, Nisreen would
turn away and start combing her hair. Hours later, when Bibi had finally left off asking her for more, she might look up from
a book and say, “Oh, yes. Here’s a story, maybe.
Who
do you think has gotten pregnant
when?
” And later, much, much later, when Bibi had begun to think, again,
This Nisreen is not made of stuff like mine
, Nisreen might give in, surprise her, saying, “And wasn’t Ahmed Shah seen hanging round the paan shop just beside the clinic,
overjoyed with his fat self when Salma’s husband was away?”

Unreliable, she was. Nisreen might be a good girl, Bibi thought, but her pleasure in such things was idle, unpredictable at
best; she didn’t live for news, and, more than Bibi cared for, she’d sometimes look away as though she had been wounded and
say, “Please. This one I won’t believe!” So Bibi shushed herself and did not say: “What if I am a seer?” What if Nisreen laughed,
which, not knowing how it cut a person short, she was rather good at doing?

Issa also liked to be informed, but he had ideas of his own about what constituted news. He’d spent too much time in school
and not enough in life to think with seriousness of things like
signs, ineffable connections. He’d gone out to Kiwingu for a year before marrying Nisreen, hadn’t he, to study meteorology,
measuring the clouds and speed-clocking the wind, and what was more inimical to her kind of prophecy than
that?
The children, Bibi knew, would think she had gone mad. That she had finally passed the point at which old women could be
trusted. Disrespectful, this new youth. “A coincidence, Ma, just luck,” she could already hear him say about the bus-and-cloth
connection, Issa with that great mustache dolling up his lips. He might suggest she get herself a stand at Mbuyu Mmoja Park,
join the charlatans and quacks.

Mama Moto, in a way, was the hardest of the three. She stood up to Bibi, made no bones about it, often told her she was foolish;
and sometimes, in the middle of a story, Mama Moto left the room, pretending she had urgent work to do. Bibi wasn’t ready
for that kind of treatment, not so tender as she was. So she kept it to herself

In the mornings, after praying, dressing, and securing the remains of her fine hair away from her round face, Bibi, hoping
to be entered by the new (she hoped) prophetic spirit of her stitching, got into bed again to lie flat on her back. In her
room, spread out like an X, Bibi felt secure. There was nobody to laugh at her, nobody to see. She stared up at the ceiling,
seeing not what others might—fine cracks, damp spots by the rafters, or the fan—but rather the dark pools and fine recesses
of her embroiderer’s mind. Before her inner eyes, Bibi called up patterns. Which one, she had wondered every day, which one
ought she to push into the world, and what might it foretell?

Her bread-roll belly rose softly and then fell and rose again while she waited for a pattern to make its outlines known. She
kept her eyes as wide as they could be without reaching up with her own hands to peel her eyelids back. Her fingers trailed
along the faded cotton sheet, tapping, thrumming, seeking something.
Outside, the clever house crows shuttled and convened along the wires in the courtyard.