The Blue Taxi (27 page)

She sighed, and smoothed the white cloth she’d been stitching out over her lap.
Babies
. Oh, perhaps everything had babies hiding in it, a little army of soft bodies, just waiting to be thought about and brought
into the world! Babies in a fruit, babies among flowers, babies everywhere.
Poor silly Nisreen!
Bibi looked a little sadly at her, feeling all the love she had in her gather in her chest. Nisreen, stretched out—so small!—on
the bright sofa, was not listening any longer to the news, though when the broadcast had begun she’d paid very close attention,
giving frowns and clucks about Johannesburg and Cairo whenever Issa made a fist or shook his thinking head. Now Nisreen was
sinking into sleep; her heavy glasses had dropped down from her eyes, lenses at an angle, just above her mouth. Watching Issa’s
wife stretched out like that, and feeling all the sweetness-sadness of the nighttime at her shoulders like a cloak, Bibi wished
again that Nisreen would swell up.

What a thin girl Issa’d taken on! “For smarts!” That was what he’d said. A girl who’d studied hard, had been apprenticed in
a pharmacy. A girl with glasses on! How Bibi had argued. She knew several nice girls who’d studied in a pharmacy—for one,
Ilham Masoud, who was beautiful and strong and who had stopped her studies when she married; Salma Ali also had studied medicine
a while, found it couldn’t hold her. And how could she forget? There was Majid Ghulam’s cousin, too, and hadn’t he been on
her mind? Of course, of course, charming little Sugra, who had even known Nisreen. And Sugra was
now married, and as far as Bibi knew,
her
husband didn’t make her work for others, potion-smarts or no. Now
there
was an example. Wasn’t Sugra blooming, fat and round with babies at her breast and back, doing many interesting things that
did not ruin one’s eyes?

“Aren’t
you
smart enough alone?” Bibi had asked Issa at his suggestion of Nisreen. “Don’t you know smarts above mean nothing down below?
Neck down, I mean to say?” But Issa had insisted, and when a mother loves a son so much, what is there to do? In the end,
Bibi had to tell the truth: she liked Nisreen, she did. How could one not love a girl who did almost everything one asked?
Who could fail to be impressed by a person who could solve the word games on the radio and read poems out loud?

But glasses meant poor eyesight, didn’t they? From studying too much! Which brought gray hair, too, as it had to Bibi’s boy.
Hadn’t Issa’s hair gone quite white at the edges from all that looking at the clouds and checking how-much-rainwater-has-fallen
in the calibrated cups? He’d come back from the meteorological institute almost, almost, an old man! And where were the girl’s
breasts? What hips could the girl claim?
A baby would get stuck in there, no room to move around. Come out narrow like a twig, would snap in any wind!
And,
She limps
, she thought,
a hobbling child we’d get, if we got one at all. When she thinks too hard her eyes cross. If these two had a child
, Bibi concluded—because when the thing a person wants is nowhere to be seen, it’s useful to decide that thing was never good—
we’d get a blind boy with bad knees. Or even get a girl!

Issa grunted at the radio, and Bibi, frowning, turned her thoughts to him. When she tired of blaming one, she set out towards
the other. Couldn’t he keep at it? He thought too much, indeed, but in men that’s not a threat to things, not always. Issa,
she was sure, was perfectly all right. Could function. Yes, of course he
could. Who’d dare think otherwise? One small look at Issa was enough to make her glad again, and proud.
Look at that big man!
she thought.
What hands!
As his mother looked on tenderly, Issa leaned in towards the radio and propped his ankle on his knee, holding it for balance.
How the boy can concentrate
, thought Bibi.
Like a dog on a lost chicken, like a shark on an old man!

“What’s that they are saying?” Bibi asked. Issa didn’t hear her. “
Weh!
Issa!” She wished that he would look up from the radio and explain the news to her, not because she cared for details, but
because she liked it when he spoke. And it seemed to her that he did not speak very much these days. “What’s going on out
there?” Bibi asked again. Issa’s head came up. He raised his eyebrows at her. “What’s that, Ma?” He gave an absent nod and
turned the volume up.

The broadcast finally ended. The nation’s plodding anthem wheezed into the air. Issa turned the radio off before the band
could finish. Nisreen, pulled away from sleep by sudden stillness in the room, stretched her arms and caught her glasses as
they fell. She sat up and smiled. Issa bent to fold the newspaper. He yawned and rubbed his eyes.

Nisreen said, “I thought it was morning.” Bibi turned to look at her and her hard thoughts slipped away. Nisreen did look
sweet, half-woken. And if she’d just stop wearing glasses, well, her big eyes were not bad.
And look
, thought Bibi,
how she does love my Issa
.

Nisreen, those eyes on her husband, did, indeed, look soft; but Issa didn’t notice. He was looking at his trouser leg, straightening
a cuff.
Nisreen wants what’s right
, thought Bibi,
despite that nothing-chest!
Nisreen folded up her glasses and ran her fingers through the hair that had got loose from her twist. She waited.
If I were Issa
, Bibi thought,
I’d make a sign right now, and lead her to the bed. What if tonight’s the night?
she thought.
What if she’s really ready? What if
—she looked down at her pineapple—
this one’s a sign, too?
Bibi
thought she would go first.
If I leave them by themselves, Issa will look over at his wife and see what I just saw. His loins will be stirred up
.

Bibi folded her new pineapple in half and, with a satisfying stab, fixed her needle to it. “I’m going now,” she said. She
got up from her seat and held the wall for balance. She shook her head at Nisreen’s silent offer to help her to her room.
Issa said, “Ma, are you sure? Can you get into bed?” and Bibi showed him that she could by taking one big step herself Nisreen
told her to sleep well.

Believing that if she thought what she was thinking hard enough, he’d do exactly as she wished, Bibi gave her son a look.
He was made of the same stuff as she was, after all. She’d held him in her womb! How could there not be deep communication?
Her eyes stayed focused on him even as she reached the doorway and stepped out onto the landing.
Make Nisreen a baby
, Bibi thought.
Put something in her pot
.

But when she lay down in her bed and listened, hoping she would hear what one
should
hear, she only heard Nisreen’s soft shuffle down the hall and Issa telling her good night, he still had paperwork work to
do. Bibi shook her head and turned over on her side. How difficult it was with such a modern, studious pair. Did she not prod
enough? Did they not understand how important children were? How things that start like nuts and grow in scarlet worlds grow
up to feed a person’s heart?
That’s it
, she thought. Perhaps she’d stitch a heart once the pineapple was done. Hearts were loud and clear these days, what with
bright talk of romance and those movies from the West. A heart. What if
that
swelled his loins up, to flood poor Nisreen’s gate?

There was no heart in the morning. Bibi’s fingers wouldn’t move. She had stitched too long the night before, and when she
woke up
the next day, her hands were cramped and stiff They hurt. She couldn’t stitch a thing. And that pineapple she’d worked so
hard on wasn’t even done!

Mama Moto gave Bibi some uji in a bowl so she wouldn’t strain her hands with bread or tricky fruit. When Nisreen came into
the kitchen, Bibi looked her over. If Issa and Nisreen had done the thing she’d hoped, love would show on Nisreen’s face.
She’d look fresh and clean and especially well bathed. But Nisreen, neatly dressed and spectacled, was plain Nisreen again—not
as she’d been for a moment on the sofa when she woke—and was already talking like a person whose head is full of busy-city-thought.
Nisreen said that she would ask the doctors at the clinic for an ointment and bring home spinach if she could. Issa, looking
like a businessman—
the important man he was
—asked Mama Moto please to bring a rope bed to the balcony so Bibi could lie down. And next the two of them slipped out the
door into the world, walking side by side, but with, thought Bibi, a space growing between them: a space she felt was mirrored
in her chest, as though her ribs were parting ways.

Once they’d gone, Bibi settled on the balcony. How early Issa and Nisreen got up! Out there, Bibi thought, Kikanga was only
just coming awake. But she also felt a bit of pride.
Early birds
, she thought, as Mrs. Harries had so liked to say.
Going for the worm
. They
did
take care of her, and nicely. Comfortable on the rope bed, Bibi didn’t think so hard about the babies, or
the
baby, the one she hoped would form inside Nisreen at any moment now. The balcony was Bibi’s place to think of other things.
There were other things to look at—things that, at first glance at least, didn’t always have to do with women swelling up.

Getting ready for the day, the street displayed for Bibi’s benefit its morning passersby. Mango-men prepared their tables,
organizing
salt and chili-pepper bowls, sharpening their knives; litter-women stretched their backs and rubbed at their thin necks before
getting down to work; the boys on cycles and on foot called out to one another; a chain of little girls in white and blue,
with satchels, moved past like a colored snake to catch a city bus; five Bohora ladies in light gowns, big purses heavy at
their arms, ambled towards the market. Bibi sighed. She watched. Got ready to take note.

In the street and in the windows of the houses just across the road, she looked for faces she might know. Down there, Kirit
Tanna, shirttails loose over his trousers, shouted at a dark boy from the alley, demanding the day’s water. Abrahman Ferozi,
old and gowned, was heading out already to the corner coffee stand, where he’d argue about Pakistan and Zionists and Russia,
the price of coffee beans and oil, until, at noon, heart apatter and exhausted, he’d give a little boy some sweets to get
him safely home. Mama Ndiambongo, gray and hunchbacked, swept the courtyard at what had once been Lydia House. Behind two
dusty flame trees, the New Purnima Snack was almost, almost, open. She could see Vijay Mehta rolling up his sleeves, bend
to start fryers.

Bibi’s fingers hurt and Nisreen wasn’t pregnant, but overall, life was not so bad. Nevermind about the maybe-meaning of her
threads or the problems in her household. The pineapple was just a pineapple today. Out here on the balcony, she had a country
of her own. It would be good to have a rest. Bibi felt serene. Nothing there just yet, nothing to perk up her secret-seeking
sense. She rubbed her fingers in her lap and thought about Majid Ghulam, poor old widowed Ghuji, and how sad his fortunes
were. She wondered, too, about that European woman with bare legs, who now regularly stepped into Hisham’s Food and Drink
with the little girl beside her and, upon stepping out again, didn’t head back home.

Mama Moto came out of the parlor with a bowl of lentil broth and a brand-new red clay burner to place under the rope bed—onion
skins and basil, to soothe Bibi’s old hands. Bibi spread her skirts apart and let Mama Moto slide the burner right below her
bottom. Bibi, as she sometimes did when there was little going on and nothing to be stitched, told Mama Moto to stay with
her a moment. She had something to say.

Mama Moto, Bibi thought, was a serious woman, too. They were not so far apart in age. And they’d been together for as long
as Bibi could recall living in Kikanga, all her married life and after. She’d been hired by Bibi’s husband, who, as proper
husbands did, understood that wives needed some help. How right he’d been to do it, Bibi thought. She and Mama Moto had lived
together through some of the same things: the arrival of the radio, ration cards and blackouts, electricity and taps, the
golden times of Hollywood, freedom, revolution and kung fu, Independence, telephones, motherhood, and age. They’d see television
soon.

Each of them had an only son: Bibi’s darling Issa, and Mama Moto’s Idi—born not long after Bibi’s final child was washed and
wrapped and buried, but in his own way brave, successful just as Issa was, if in a less official world. People called him
Moto (and it had come back to his mother, and her new name had stuck) because with his hot hands he pilfered things, because
his goods were hot, and because now and then he vanished, like a fire’s rising smoke.
Mama Moto’s Moto is a thief
, thought Bibi,
but human shapes are many. God gives each a star
. She’d long stopped teasing Mama Moto for her child’s escapades. She tried to call him Idi sometimes and not Moto, to show
she understood that he was not all spark and flame. And it was true he’d lately grown so able at his trade that
he got caught only rarely, was really rather cool. But names don’t disappear. Mama Moto didn’t steal, in any case. She was
temperate and upright.
She’s almost like my sister
, Bibi sometimes thought.

When Bibi told her stories, Mama Moto listened. She also learned things on her own. If Mama Moto gave out what she knew, she
was most often direct; she didn’t spin things into tales that had to be unraveled before Bibi could decide exactly what was
what. Mama Moto was not, at heart, a gossip; and while this troubled Bibi in Nisreen, in Mama Moto it was a posture she approved
of. Mama Moto was reliable and, thought Bibi, truthful, in a way many other people weren’t. She named her sources when she
could, did not take things on faith. And because Mama Moto’s social world was different from Bibi’s, because she didn’t care
too personally about the Jeevanjees and the Hafizes, the Tannas or the Mehtas, Bibi, if she was uncertain or bored, could
make a story up and Mama Moto might accept it. She was also, Bibi didn’t like to say but often thought with pleasure now and
then, easy to make fun of. Bibi thus began: “What do you know, Ma, about the white woman who lives around the corner? That
white Mrs. Turner?” Mama Moto set the soup down and looked up. Her knees creaked as she rose.