The Blue Taxi (32 page)

Fourteen

A
fter bathing, wet hair dark, Majid Ghulam took up the little scrap of mirror Ali kept stored on the sill. Ismail and Ali thought
a lot about their looks. They battled over hair oil and pomades; they each owned a comb. Ismail had recently acquired aftershave,
a dark brown, slick concoction with a sharp metallic scent. Inspired by his brothers, Habib, too, sometimes checked for acne
in the glass. But Jeevanjee had not ever, not since Hayaam’s death, and not since what was like her second death (the wraith;
a living woman’s body; his brand-new filling-out), really taken stock.
And yet
, he thought, remembering a poem,
there comes sunlight on the ruins
. Another:
Peacock males do strut
. What did he look like this morning?

The slender shard, broken in the sideways shape of a lateen, felt light between his fingers. Like a person holding a soft
creature, examining its fluff and checking it for fleas, he held the mirror with his palm and brought it to his face. No fleas,
indeed, but a hard-lined face and some rather sagging skin. His eyelids seemed enormous. He rubbed a flake of white stuff
from his upper lip and assessed his thin mustache; it was tufted, not as neatly shaped as a dapper man would like. But he
could find some scissors, or a better blade.

At first conscious of the effort, then with greater courage, he smiled into the glass. It didn’t matter so much what he looked
like. He knew that eyes and mouths and skin and hair, and the cut of a mustache, weren’t all there was to romance. He knew
that manner,
bearing, mattered almost more. It was poems taught him that. He’d often written long and hard about the way a person walked,
the sway of certain feet, the shape of shoulders tensed. The way a cherished voice can pump the smitten heart. He’d once known
something about love. He’d always had, he told himself, a sense of deeper things. Of spirit. Sarie Turner’s recent, unexpected
absence had given him the chance to think: How should he understand it? Was it romance? Was it love? Majid wasn’t sure.

He thought of how, the other day, Sarie Turner had dissolved beneath him on the bed, how she had met his limbs with kindness
and with, he thought, a need that was something like his own. How, resting her head in the very heat of things, upon his shoulder,
she had bitten at his skin and caused him a sharp pain. He’d felt a recognition. Was that it? Was that the source of pleasure?
That something in tall, hard Sarie Turner felt like something in himself? Perhaps Sarie, too, had sorrows in her life, things
she couldn’t speak of, that had ruined everything, turned her plans around and given her thick jolts that she had never wished
for. Perhaps she too had long been torn from how it should have been. She was an orphan, after all, and she did not, except
for her small flat, Majid thought, really have a home. What if they were, together for a moment, on the edge of a rebirth?
Each to find new things?

He did like to think of love, of being in love, feeling love. He hadn’t, in so long. And yet how thrilling it could be! He
had wanted only, in those first days after the eager battle on his bed, for her to keep coming to his house, and touch him
as she had. His skin shook with it, his legs and back and chest. How grand it was to feel a woman in his arms. Hayaam lurked
no longer in the corners of his sleep. He could look in on Tahir without guilt. He didn’t know if Sarie Turner was the end
of things—if she was what the feeling that he had (lambent change, a freshness!) meant,
or if she was more like a signal, a signpost on the road. He didn’t know what his boys knew or if they had suspicions. And
he didn’t care, even if Maria, with her strutting and her scowling, was issuing a judgment. He didn’t want to know. Shutting
many questions out, Majid wished just this: to bask. Lust had made him strong, determined. And virility had brought another
sense, a slowly growing feeling that he, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, might have some things to choose from and that he might stage,
at a not-too-far-off date, a bright reentry to the world he’d left so long ago for grief.

Sugra came that morning. He knew she’d come before she called to him to say that she’d arrived. The metal doors below gave
out a squeak and bang. He heard the thump of Sugra’s feet, then Sugra shouting to Maria, to say “Hello, hello!” He walked
slowly down the hall and greeted her from the top of the dim stairs. “Come up! Oh, I am glad that you have come.”

At the bottom of the steps, Sugra placed her elbows at her hips and peered at him through the fust in an exaggerated way.
Majid had surprised her. “Glad? You are, are you? Glad? What? Can you say that again?” Sugra’s voice was loud. Sometimes,
Majid thought, she hollered. And on some days he lacked the strength to please her. But he didn’t mind saying it again, not
today, when he was feeling brave. “I’m glad, I’m glad,” he said. He took a step towards her. “Have you heard me now?” Sugra
cocked her head and waited. Something in her cousin surely was ashift, and though she did not know the cause, she had decided
to be gratified to see it. “Say it one more time.”

Majid laughed at her despite himself and heard his laughter echo on the walls. He found that he was not only laughing at his
cousin, but also at his laughter. He teased her. “I cannot believe the
sun can rise when you are still asleep. Your husband must have sunglasses; your children all must squint. I am so glad to
see you I feel I’ve not been glad before.” By this time, Sugra was halfway up the stairs. She brought her face close to his
and frowned. She twisted up her mouth and raised an eyebrow, steep. “Who’s this?” she asked. “Who’s this man I see?”

This was a bit too much for him. Majid looked away, moved back up the stairs. Glad. How long had it been? A silence passed,
and sobered him. He led her to the kitchen. She straightened her long dress and looked down at her bag. More seriously, she
said, “Ghuji. You are sounding like a poet. What is happening to you?” Majid swallowed, turned away from her and asked, “Have
you been to the clinic?”

He had not gone himself. He’d promised Tahir that he would, that he would secure crutches, and that he would personally hurl
any doctor who was slow to give an answer out the nearest window. But everyone who’d heard him—the aunts, the older boys,
and his smallest son—had known he did not have it in him. He hadn’t left the neighborhood for as long as they recalled; he
never left the house. When he’d made the promise, Sugra, from across the room, had given him a gentle look. She had raised
her hand and pressed her fingertips just slightly to her chest, bent her head a little, before turning away to offer someone
sweets. He had known that she would do it. Get the crutches for his boy. She was the type to make connections, after all,
to remember people’s names. And she’d once studied with the doctors, long ago. If anyone could get something tricky done,
she could.

Sugra had been trying. She’d gone down to the clinic now three times. “The first time, that big doctor was not in. The second
time he was, and he did all the dancing-dancing that a good doctor should do. ‘Yes-yes,’ he said. ‘I promise you.’ We’ll see.
It’s because
he’s scared of
you
, you know, that he said he’d do his best. ‘Mad Majid!’ he is thinking.”

Sometimes Sugra’s forthrightness could startle him, make him feel that she was seeing things in him that he would have rather
hidden. Other people didn’t say, “I see that you are changing,” for example, or “People think you’re mad.” But Sugra let a
person know. She was looking at him still, and Majid turned away. She shook the dust out of her skirt. “What—what happened
this time?” he asked. She was now considering her sleeves. “This time,” she said, “I went into the reception and saw a girl
I went to school with. She works there; what do you think of that? I go in to get crutches and instead I see a friend. She’s
married now. No kids.”

He was thinking about Tahir’s missing leg—not as an event, not quite as a condition, but in a concrete sense, as an absent
limb. He thought about the thigh that ended in a stump, the emptiness below it. Very briefly, he thought about the shoe. Sugra
looked at him again and saw that any glumness he had lost was welling up again.

“Oh, Ghuji!” Sugra said. She had liked his teasing! Wished he would stay bright. “It’s not the end of things.” Sugra’s round
face shrank a little. It was hard work visiting a cousin who’d been gloomy for so long. It would have been easier for her
if Ghuji hadn’t teased her, hadn’t seemed, somehow, to be edging out of grief. Having laughed with him, after sorrow for so
long, it was harder not to wish that he’d be really glad again. She took steps towards Tahir’s room. Majid, helpless, shuffled
after. “Come on,” Sugra said. “I’ve heard Habib is working on a cane. For in between, so at least your boy can move.” Majid
blinked at her. Sugra shook her head and groaned. “I mean, until the crazy doctors give us something nice.”

In the afternoon, Sarie made her way to Kudra House alone. She was, she’d said to Gilbert, to meet with Hazel Towson for a
British Council Luncheon, followed by a lecture on the Public Health Campaign, and afterwards a tea. And couldn’t Gilbert
see his way to watching Agatha awhile? Gilbert had said, “Sarie, no. Not really? You’re not going to
that?
” He’d laughed. “I thought it was a joke!” But Sarie said she’d promised, and Gilbert finally shrugged. No matter what he
really thought of great big Mrs. Hazel, no matter how she made him feel, he thought: if they were going to have a business,
come into real money, it couldn’t hurt for Sarie to have some proper lady friends. Why should Sarie not get used to being
close to all of that, get ready to step in? Once they
were
in business, he’d be more than equal to Jim Towson’s brash wife; he could look her in the eye, say, “No,” or, “I don’t think
so,” and not feel terror in his heart. And so could Sarie, yes.

“All right,” he said, still scribbling. Sarie was already at the door and about to move into the stairwell when Gilbert raised
his head. He’d almost forgotten. “But what will you tell her about…” He gestured to his stomach. “You know. The baby.” He
looked shyly away. Sarie frowned a moment, then pretended she was thinking. She’d forgotten, too. But she knew what Gilbert
didn’t: she was not going to attend any British Council do. “Something, I am sure,” she said. And Gilbert, thinking of spare
parts again, did not ask her what.

Outside, the earnest, jovial sun was the color of a lemon. A light breeze tickled the high buildings, and the hot swath of
the sea was the happy kind of bluish-green that is reported here to keep bad luck at bay. Sarie walked to Kudra House with
a frothing in her heart. She felt as though she hadn’t seen her new man in a year. So very much had happened!

On Mchanganyiko Street, Sarie’s stride was easy. She did not worry that she would be seen. She thought, without knowing who
“them” was:
Let them all see me!
And she held her head up high. Something about those four days, her walking in the park and that productive visit to the
Mountain Top Hotel, made Sarie hope she
would
be noticed and remarked upon. She felt present, happy with the air, prepared to notice things, and, why not, to be noticed,
too.

She passed the narrow paan shops and the green-mango-chili stalls and thought how sharp they smelled. As usual, on Mosque
Street, the mendicants were out; the weaving woman registered her passing with a pause. Before the man with one blind eye,
Sarie, feeling generous, dropped a shilling on the sheet. He blinked, and shifted slightly. On Mahaba Street, Sarie stopped
before the window of the New Purnima Snack. Kachoris! How hot and good they smelled.

As Sarie moved along, she felt exceptionally alert. How busy and how nicely colored this day seemed to be. The soft blue of
the sky; such bright doorways and trees! She craned her neck to see the high fronts of the old houses: at one, thick plants
on the roof; at another, four pink windows, shut. At the balcony of a blue mansion, Sarie noticed an old woman looking down
and almost smiled at her. On Libya Street, Sarie walked more quickly. She passed the hardware men, mechanics, mamantilie women
who sold red beans by the ladle, cane-juice-coffee-oatmeal men, little boys, and bus touts, and felt part of a great pattern—in
motion and ashift. Everyone, she thought, yes, everyone, had business to take care of, lots to think about and do. Her purse
bounced lightly at her side; the rubber heels of her kandambili shoes snapped hard against the bottoms of her feet; her own
fresh cadence pleased her. Oh, how big the new world was! And how unthinkable, how lucky, that she
was going to see her lover on her own (she almost hugged herself), that she had one at all.