The Blue Taxi (34 page)

To such an inundation, Sarie was unused. So much had happened in one week that Sarie was surprised she still knew the way
home. The sky—after all, a city sky that she had known for years and should have felt was hers—seemed lush and suddenly like
powder. Ponderous and feathery, brittle, delicate, and grand. The house crows were gray flashes in the hidden wings of things—sometimes
a swift rustle, sometimes a hard caw. The houses, too, which she had known a little while in other, better days, looked older
and more secretive than she had ever thought them. She wondered to herself if she was seeing things through the eyes of love
or through her lover’s eyes. The second (ever practical) she discarded as a physical impossibility. But, without for all that
being certain she knew what it was, she liked the first one: love.

Heading for the roundabout, where she would make a turn and start towards the water, Sarie said something to herself for the
first time, because this was an afternoon of firsts:
When I was young, I did not expect to live here until I became old. But here
, thought Sarie, noticing for the first time that the trees in front of the old mosque were not mango trees at all but another
sort of rich and green, thick thing,
I am
. Next,
I will be here forever. And this
—with a bit of drama, now a sigh, an exhalation whose temperature exactly matched the air outside her mouth—
is where I am going to die
.

She experienced a moment of surprise, a shock.
When I am very old
, she thought,
I will remember Mr. Jeevanjee. Perhaps
, she thought,
perhaps I will still know him
. In the evening street, Sarie felt an overdue, a much-belated, orphan’s pang. In her soft, loose state, unfolded as she was
by her secret man’s caresses, and perhaps by having been beside—as she saw him—a
poet
, it struck her, years after the fact, that her parents were both dead.

In Jilima, Sarie had thought more than once that when she became old enough, she would go back to Belgium and would learn,
properly this time, how to be a nurse. But she hadn’t. She had been, it struck her, passive about things. It would not have
been simple to go back. There was no one left to see. After the War’s end, there had been too much to do, renew, expand, recover;
the Sisters, to whom she’d grown accustomed, seemed to feel themselves in the middle of the future. They were busy planting
vegetables, building a new hut. They’d studded the two cows. And they themselves had no idea how to take her home. They’d
waited without saying so for this: a husband, for someone else to show her what to do. It was easier to stay. Sarie grew up
and grew tall, and when the Magistrate’s assistant hit a donkey with the car and came to them for help, she was, it seemed
to everyone, ready to be wed.

She had thought (in the vague, mild way that she had long been used to thinking) that she might end up in England with her
husband. He was British, after all, and wouldn’t he, as British people did, long somehow for old, familiar things? Know what
his home was? Europeans, Sarie had once heard, didn’t die in Africa unless killed in native wars, or by terrible diseases,
or unless they were, as the Jilima Sisters had all been, inexplicable, for good or ill, and determined to remain.

But when other expatriates packed up, made steamer reservations,
and held their final dos, and Gilbert Turner, longing to be different, afraid of failure back at home, had gone running in
the opposite direction, dug himself right in, Sarie, unperturbed, had exchanged one future for another with a few words from
a husband. “If we are to be resting here,” she said, “I will take back all the blouses which I was going to give away.” How
full of accidents life was! She’d simply plucked her blouses from the box she had prepared and set them on the shelf. She
hadn’t asked herself, or him, a thing.

At home on Mchanganyiko Street, Gilbert was asleep, but he was shaken by the sound of Sarie’s voice as, finding Agatha alone
on the dark steps, she told her to wash up. He yawned, stretched his pale, short fingers in the air. He heard Sarie opening
the door and thought, not entirely awake, confused,
How simple marriage is
. He was proud of Sarie for attending that long luncheon. He felt sympathetic towards her, tender.
How she must have suffered
. He made up his mind to ask her what the ladies at the Council had to say, if Hazel Towson had proposed anything outlandish,
whether she had thought to bring back any cake. He wasn’t sure that he would tell her that he had spent the afternoon composing
the most important letter of his life. Or that, once the thing was done, he had taken Agatha for ice cream at the Parlor,
where he had given the blue envelope to Mr. Frosty, who would give it to a steward who was flying to Dubai and on to London
the next day.
Not quite yet
, he thought.
It will be like a gift
. He’d surprise her with it all once he’d had an answer.

Sarie, loosened by her walk, and feeling—because making love can do this—that her body was uniquely suited to affection of
all kinds, stepped into the bedroom and touched Gilbert on the
shoulder. The openness and gratitude she felt for Mr. Jeevanjee, her Majid, spilled out also onto Gilbert. She had—and though
it disconcerted her, she gave over to it the way one gives in to a swoon—the same desire to protect him that she had had at
Kudra House, for Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee and his sudden little verse. Gilbert touched her hand with his and laid his cheek
upon it. Sarie pressed her fingers down, released them. She felt able, well, and proud. In charge of both her men.

III

Fifteen

A
nd so. In the days between Gilbert’s sending of the letter and the receipt of Uncle James’s reply, there was a certain stillness:
the surface of the world a smooth expanse, nothing to disturb it but the future’s unknown shade and twitch. Bibi, keeping
when she could an eye on Issa and Nisreen, nursed her aching fingers. Majid simmered quietly. Gilbert’s back itched intermittently
and seemed, sporadically, to show signs of improvement.

Sarie, laboring in secret, continued to feel doubled. She liked her private self increasingly, was enamored of the person
brought out by her walks to Libya Street and by Majid’s (now tender and now furious) investigative hands. In Kudra House’s
parlor and in Majid’s cool, damp room, it was sometimes for Sarie as if time itself come to rest on vast, oblivious haunches,
were nodding, happy, in the sun. That present self, which was Majid’s and her own, was prospering, and it pleased her. Squinting
as though from a glare, she did also think about the other one, the self-on-the-horizon. That self occupied the future, and
Sarie vaguely understood it as belonging rather to a public—or to Gilbert, Agatha, and even Hazel Towson. To customers, accountants.
She was hazily excited about the things she felt were coming; in that audience, surely, Majid also sat (
Where would he go
, she thought,
unless he was to die? He lives so close to me!
), but she could not either fathom
Majid’s Sarie
at the same time as she envisioned
the Sarie that moved forward
, into other days.

In that future life, did they still meet, like
this
, or had they
learned another style of being? Did they still take off their clothes? Did they go out to the balcony to feel the city’s air?
The future gave her headaches. She couldn’t see it clearly. And because it so confused her, she didn’t tell Majid about her
plans or Uncle James’s letter. She made no mention of the export business, volunteered no news about the husband she was fooling,
and kept her daydreams about visiting Jilima with Majid—on a train, in search of baskets, knives—mostly to herself Though
dream of this she did: Majid on a hilltop, beckoning to her; Majid close beside her in a taxi, slipping a warm hand between
the treasured trinkets and her thighs; Majid bringing breakfast to their table at a state-run coffee shop; Majid naked in
the empty, freeing rooms of far-off, strange hotels.

Without the special mix of attributes that made her who she was—that combination of great strength, curious inattention to
the things that milled around her, and an insatiable desire (for Majid, for the wonder of her own splayed limbs beneath another
body, for a house her legal, chairbound man could not, she thought, imagine)—she would not have been as equal to the task
of simultaneously administering to each separated self. Such projects are hard; she struggled, but Sarie was no weakling.
She became accustomed to the quivering between her present and her future, which was like a wall between her insides and the
outside of her skin; to waiting without knowing for what Uncle James would say; now and then to thinking deeply of the changes
he might bring, and wishing them intensely—just as she grew capable at once of forgetting Uncle James and Gilbert, and even
little Agatha, completely while Majid removed her clothes. Perhaps when things were set, when everything was sure, she would
regale her lover with a tale about how useful, independent-minded, she had been. Tell him something to amuse him. Tickle his
thin arms and talk about Dodoma knives and oval heads from Zambia. But until then
she would protect with all her might the winsome, fragile steadiness of those private afternoons.

Majid, for his part, grew a little easier about lolling on the bed with her after they had tussled, letting her go cool while
he left his hands to wander at her throat or spine. In between her visits, he finished three new poems, their completion punctuated
by his lover’s step. He, too, felt a gap between the present and the future—and, more importantly for him, between the
past
, this present, and, less clear and less certain, what might be to come.

To keeping some things to himself he was as attached as she. He didn’t tell her that the grieving-for-his-wife had shifted
with her coming (he’d told no one—
whom could he?
—about Hayaam’s visitation, could not speak of it at all), that he felt himself released, or that he was sure this newness
hinged in part on Sarie, on the very fact of her; or that sometimes as he held her he experienced his own hands as he never
had before: as variable and interesting. What strength! What gentleness! What ferocity, right
here
. He never mentioned Tahir. He didn’t talk about the practicalities of life: he never spoke of Sugra’s visits, how she brought
him money, sometimes of her own and sometimes from his brothers, who trusted her far more than they did him; that he wondered
what they’d do for food once Maria found a man; that he’d sent Habib to buy a notebook; that he now wrote every day; that
he still thought of
that shoe
, had dreams of sending Tahir to a well-run private school. When Sarie came, they only talked a little, and they kissed, and
he pulled off her clothes. But he thought of these things all the time:
I am writing once again. I am no longer Mad. And at any moment now, my boy will learn to walk. Something’s going to happen.
Perhaps I won’t be Sad
. And so while he held Sarie tightly, shuddering successfully at each one of her visits—thinking, sometimes,
Passion!
—he was also cognizant of something else, an even greater wave preparing to engulf him: a wave
that might propel him to a smooth and breezy shore, the pale contours of which he could, as yet, not fathom.