The Blue Taxi (3 page)

Hisham’s Food and Drink was open by this time. The owner, named not Hisham but Iqbal, brought out a bucket full of passion
juice and a set of metal cups for the watchers who remained. This
he did because all humans are involved in this big life and sometimes need refreshment that should not be bought. For Agatha,
however, because white children can for good or ill inspire certain things, he made a show of proffering a straw. The litter-woman
drank without tilting her head back. The coffee salesman, preferring his own beverage to theirs, did not accept the offer.
The newsboy, whose days out in the sun were thirstier than most, came back for a refill, which he felt he deserved.

Upstairs on the balcony of Mansour House, Bibi happily took up her stitching once again, stopping now and then to shake her
head in awe.
Won’t Issa be surprised, how I’ve mastered his appliance?
She was happy with herself She tucked her chin down towards her chest and smiled into her lap.
At how modern his ma is?
Nisreen would tell him, too. She’d heard that phone ring all the way around the corner, after all, and picked it up herself
And, more than this! Had not Bibi’s scandal-seeking sense been accompanied by portent? Had she known all along, without knowing
that she did, that an
Al-Fadhil
-bearing bus would surge into the day? Had she, in deciding for
Al-Fadhil
on that hanging instead of something else (
Kids are wealth, A marriage is a tomb, Business is a blessing
), been fingered by the cosmos? Not simply to catch things as they fell, but to
forecast
with her work? While Bibi stitched and mused, below on India Street the driver’s tout, fearing that the next professionals
to swoop might hold handcuffs and batons, snapped his fingers and then vanished. The driver was long gone.

Two

A
t home again that day and for the following five, Sarie mentioned to her husband several times that she wanted to discover
where the hurt boy lived. But Gilbert Turner was suspicious of, and did not like:
involvement
. Much better, he thought, to let the world unfold around oneself and, as a rule,
not make any stink
. He therefore did not believe that Sarie should involve herself expressly in the life-business of strangers. For five days
like a husband and a father, he did manage to dissuade her. But Agatha, who could not stop thinking of the limb she’d cared
for in the sun, wished to find out for herself if the shin and calf and foot had been sewn back onto their owner. She seethed
with anger at her father, pouted at her mother, and stamped her little feet. “Leave well enough alone!” said Gilbert, and,
“Forget it, won’t you, now?” when Sarie asked again. He added something about sleeping dogs, which Sarie did not understand,
and sent Agatha outside.

Sarie’s husband did not like involvement because it made him feel unsafe. As many people do, Gilbert masked his shyness with
elaborate shows of expertise that were sometimes impressive. He kept up a fair library that experts might have thought an
amateur’s good show. In leather, paperback, and cloth, the writers of his books purported to lay bare the logic beneath peculiar
local lore, exhaustively detail the mores and the habits of this land’s many tribes, and explain
how natives are;
others, less imaginative, discussed the (so they said) obscure ins and outs of agricultural procedures under tropical conditions,
described how boats and homes were
built; still others tried their hand at generating history. From his volumes, thumbed and eyed and loved, Gilbert had acquired,
in some measure, the tenor of authority.

Drawing on the things he’d read, and also on his days in the Colonial Service (when more able men had drilled him), Gilbert
said—among other things—to Sarie: “Muslims won’t consort with any likes of us, my dear.” He was reading at the time a pamphlet
that seemed relevant, and he had gleaned from Sarie’s talk (about Hisham’s Food and Drink, a mention of the Aga Khan) that
Muslims the boy’s family must be. He found some pleasure in the word “consort.” He tried it out again, this time for himself
“We can’t
consort
with Muslims, dear. Just think!” Sarie turned to face him and did not, for once, speak, which pleased him. Thusly, he thought,
gaining ground, he added, in a tone he meant to be consoling, “My dear, what will you ever do? What will you ever do if they
should want you first of all to be
unshod of your shoes
, and leave them in the hallway?”

Gilbert liked to view himself as a strong man and as an able husband. And so he often told himself that Sarie, no matter what
she said or did, was a fragile thing, unsure of what she wanted, and that she needed him to tell her what to do. Sarie was
aware of this and sometimes played along, but there were limits to what she could accept. Her days, aside from making small,
plain meals, keeping track (if absently) of Agatha, and wishing without making any plans that life was rather different, were
not exactly full. And Agatha had reached a restless age. With her “when-can-we-where’s-his-leg’s” she had become a nuisance.
From what was but did not seem to be a notably long distance, Sarie looked at Gilbert. She weighed her knowledge of him with
her eyes.
J’complete
, she thought. Indeed: although he wore a singlet and a shirt, she knew precisely where, below two ashen nipples, the flesh
sagged from his
chest. She could have pointed out exactly where the soft mass of his belly was dimpled and was not. She knew without having
to look how many ribs he had. And she was tired of his talk.

She breathed out through her nose. “If that is what the Muslims want,” she said, “then I will take them off.” Demonstrating—in
one motion, without losing her balance—Sarie slipped her two big feet from her orange rubber thongs. Gaining some momentum,
feeling contrary and sure, she went on: “It is not as if I had the sandals to unstrap.
Regarde!
One, two.” She put the shoes back on, then slipped them off again. She did a peppy dance step on the rust-red, tattered rug.
“It is not”—and here she sighed—“as if I had some stockings. Or fancy Bata pumps.” For the moment she had given up on giving
in to Gilbert. Daring, really, almost happy, she placed one of her large feet square onto her husband’s lap. “See? It takes
no time at all.”

Sarie’s toes distracted him. She did not often touch him. Gilbert moved his pamphlet to the side, adjusted his small hips,
and smiled indulgently at her. “Oh, Sarie.” He wrapped a round pink hand around her weighty ankle and looked up at his wife.
Sometimes Sarie’s looks and height slipped Gilbert’s mind completely. Was that the little nose he’d liked, with the hint of
lioness about it? The soft shoulders that were strong? Was that the ceiling fan, just beyond her hair? On their wedding day,
he thought, the flush of love had made her seem so small! He looked back at his hand, her ankle, at her toes, which flared
and curled towards him. Oh, he knew she wanted shoes. He wished she would forget. “You just won’t understand,” he said.

Sarie, aware still on that day that husbands need attention and timely, kindly acts, softened her approach. She leaned down
from afar and kissed him on the brow, which, despite the argument at hand, thrilled Gilbert’s thin hair. She crooned: “I understand
much
more than you can know.” Gilbert, not quite catching what she said—hearing, in fact,
I understand
, and nothing of the rest—was touched by Sarie’s gesture and the sweet smell of her face. Perhaps, he thought, she didn’t
really mind his lack of permanent employment, his staying in during the day, skimming his old books, his wandering in the
afternoons and evenings. She loved him, after all. Is that not what wives were for? Sensing that her husband had gone mild,
was dreaming, Sarie put an end to the debate. “I am taking Agatha today,” she said, “and we will see that little boy.”

Gilbert, bested by her touch, relinquished his objections. She had leaned down from the distance of her body and come close.
Had pressed her toes against his thighs and had not pulled away, when, beneath her arching foot, his loins gave out a shiver.
She had kissed him, after all. He could still, he imagined, feel her mouth on his bare brow.
Let her do just as she pleases
, Gilbert thought at last.
What harm is there in it?

Completely unaware that Sarie would soon access some freedom of her own, he crossed his feet, which were doughy, damp, and
he smiled up at his wife. Decided to be generous.
Fair is fair, old man. Why shouldn’t she go out?
“All right,” Gilbert shrugged. “Do just as you like.” Sarie put her foot back on the floor. Gilbert sighed and turned back
to the pamphlet:
His Holiness in Africa: An Account of Dr. Saheb’s Tour of Light and Love Among the Vunjamguu Adherents
. He himself was planning, reading done, to take an early evening stroll to the Victorian Palm Hotel, where he hoped, as always
and as idly, to find a fellow ex-colonial on the lookout for a partner in a business. Someone who would notice all he had
to offer and who would take him on in a reassuring, easy venture that would unfold for him at last the future, which he vaguely
dreamed of now and then but did not know how to find.

In the bedroom, freed, Sarie called to Agatha. She put on her
best dress, a light gray thing with small white dots, short sleeves, and a scooped neck. With a finger and saliva, she nudged
accumulated grime from a yellow vinyl purse. Into it she slipped a pen and five pineapple sweets wrapped in glossy paper.
“We are going,” Sarie said. “Are you now content?” Agatha did not answer, but she nodded, satisfied. She sat down on the bed
and, watching in the mirror, aped her mother’s moves. She did not have a purse, but she rolled her shoulders and her neck
like a woman making an assessment of her looks, and, once Sarie was done, asked to be assisted with the zipper of her own
best thing (a long purple-buttoned smock with a radish-print design), and smoothed down her dark hair. Sarie zipped her up
and clipped her daughter’s mop with a cracked, worn plastic pin that had, in its first days, resembled a chameleon. Engrossed
in the next room, Gilbert put his lightly smelly feet on Sarie’s favorite table and set about imagining himself desired and
aglow among the dignitaries who were pictured milling pleasantly about a bird-filled Chancellor’s garden.
Peacocks
, Gilbert thought.
Surely there were peacocks
.

On the streets, the light was fierce, but Kikanga Clinic’s world was dim and still and cool. Sarie stood still for a moment
on the threshold, relishing the air. Agatha, waiting for the flashes in her eyes to quit, blinked six times in quick succession,
then raised her eyebrows high before blinking again. Everything looked green. Directed by her mother, Agatha moved spryly
towards the heavy wooden chairs that waited by the wall. Feet adangle, she sat looking up with one eye closed at two framed
pictures of the famous Aga Khan—each of which, healthy and avuncular, almost but not quite like the other self, flashed a
winning smile. The ceiling fan wheezed idly.

Sarie smoothed the dotted dress down over her thighs and moved up to inquire. The receptionist, a narrow girl with fine, long
hands and a sturdy pair of glasses over two perfectly round eyes (Bibi’s own Nisreen), looked patiently at Sarie. Nearly dropping
but retrieving one pineapple sweet that had got caught on the cap, Sarie fished her pen out. She zipped the purse back up,
leaned forward towards the girl, introduced herself, and explained why she had come. “It was me, you see,” she said. “It was
me who tried to help.”

Nisreen had heard about her from the medical assistants, who had, as it turned out, described Sarie very well. But they hadn’t
said she’d helped. Nisreen cocked her head and said, “I see.” She didn’t say it meanly. She looked past Sarie, towards Agatha
(the girl, she’d heard, who’d prevented them from going till she’d laced up the one shoe). “My daughter,” Sarie said. She
looked down a moment at her dress, then swayed a bit from hip to hip. “I, too. We want to see him. How he is.” She was not
sure how to proceed. Sarie did not go out much, not to visit people, and not to speak to strangers. She also did not know
what happened, ordinarily, to boys who’d lost their legs so suddenly. She had seen abrasions, stab wounds, ulcers, too, sometimes
broken arms and toes, small things plucked, removed, and once an amputation, but nothing quite like this. Was he still at
the clinic? Sarie clenched her jaw. Had he, perhaps, died? She didn’t ask these things out loud, but Nisreen understood.

Because she was obedient and responsive above all, before thinking to be careful, Nisreen answered Sarie’s question. “He’s
at home,” she said. The boy had been released. “He’s going to be all right.” Resting one long finger on a page of the reception
book, where coordinates were noted, she read Sarie the address, and Sarie, on a weathered scrap of paper she had slipped from
Gilbert’s special drawer, wrote the following down:
Tahir. Majid. Ghulam. Jeevanjee. 10 yrs. Fthr. M. G. Jvnjee. Kudra House. Flr. 2
.