The Blue Taxi (8 page)

Majid Ghulam was genuinely surprised. “Here?” he said. He cocked his head and looked sideways at her. “Mrs. Turner, you are
local!” Sarie did not smile. “I lived with nurses there,” she said. “The Sisters.” Majid Ghulam did not know what to make
of that.
“Your mother and your father?” Sarie shook her head and pressed her knees together. She looked up at the clock and told her
host she’d lost them very early. Majid Ghulam expressed sympathy, shook his tilted head. Sarie said—a little loudly, as though
his sorrow were misplaced—“But I do not remember them!” She sat up in her seat. She hadn’t come to talk about herself “I’m
used to it,” she said. And, as if in explanation, as if husbands could eclipse the value of one’s past, she tugged lightly
at her earlobe, cleared her throat, and said: “My husband was attached to the Vunjamguu High Court. He was in the Service.”

Majid Ghulam did not wish to pry. He did not press her further. Sarie had the fleeting thought that this was a relief. Taking
charge again, she asked about his wife. A poet with three sons must have somewhere a Mrs. Perhaps she had gone out and would
come back at any moment with shopping bags or news. But, no. Majid Ghulam looked behind him for a moment as though making
certain that he would not be overheard. “Oh, Madam,” Majid Ghulam said. “My only wife is dead.”

It was thus for Majid Jeevanjee an afternoon of firsts. Everyone he knew already knew about Hayaam. And because they thought
of him as mad, they rarely came to see him; and if they did come close and speak, they didn’t dare say anything that might
provoke his madness. But there it was. He’d said it, and saying it was strange. “What can anybody do? She died many years
ago, may she be in peace.” At the fresh announcement of something so familiar and so old, Majid was disconcerted by a feeling:
a little pang rose up just below his ribs and something in him flinched. Yes, he was still sad, for wasn’t he just that? Sad
and Mad Majid? But when he unfurled himself again, he became aware of an even stranger thing: the pang had given way to a
conviction that, despite the sweet kaimati, he might now have a biscuit.

Hunger? Hunger and not grief? He was alert enough by now to be taken quite firmly aback. Was it Tahir’s missing leg that made
him hungry, suddenly, for filling empty space? Did his hunger stand for wishing old things to come back? Or for—this he could
not think too clearly then, not with Mrs. Turner polka-dotted and life-sized on his very own blue settee—new things to replace
the older ones that kept being subtracted, shoring up the gloom?

Sarie Turner said, “I’m sorry,” pushed the dish towards her host, crossed her easy legs, and elaborately adjusted the collar
of her dress. Majid Ghulam said, “Thank you.” Looking for a moment all the world like a person plucking a soft flower, he
took another Nanji.

At their father’s nod, the boys took Sarie Turner’s daughter, who had been patient all this time, who had been waiting just
for this, to see their little brother. One and one-half legs covered by a patterned cotton sheet in the room he shared with
Ismail, Ali, and Habib, Tahir Majid Jeevanjee was sleeping. Ali, like a dart, poked at the boy’s pillow, shook him by the
shoulder. “Here,” he said, “is the last living person in the world to have seen your missing leg.” Clever and impious, Ali
had turned it all into a game, pretending from the day Tahir came home that the missing limb would be returned to him as soon
as it was found. Ismail and Habib were grateful. “Dad’s a paper man, remember. They’ll put ads out every day. Full page.
Wanted: Leg! Last seen on India Street.
” Ismail rolled his eyes. There was only one newspaper in those days, and on its rather military board no Jeevanjee had allies.
Tahir knew full well it wouldn’t happen, but he let Ali have his way. Tolerant, he blinked.

Agatha, though she’d had visions of the leg sewn back on herself could tell Ali was lying. The older boys did not impress
her. She
thought his brother’s teasing might make Tahir cry—a prospect that neither pleased nor troubled her but of which she took
note. What did happen surprised her. Tahir Majid, undeterred by the guest’s newness, reached out for her arm and pulled her
in towards him. Agatha allowed it. Like her mother, in a way, Agatha was curious and could also be impassive. Tahir took up
the border of the sheet with his left hand and whispered, “Do you want to see?” He gestured with his pointed chin towards
the odd place on the bed where the soft sheet simply sank, just below his knee. Tahir was a wounded boy, for sure, but he
also had good sense. Displaying his own stump with pride was better, after all, than moping or pretending he was whole.

Agatha did not need to be asked twice. She wanted very much to see. She clambered up beside him, and Tahir raised the heavy
sheet, invited her to peer into the cotton-flowered gloom. The brothers’ silence was complete, and Agatha forgot them. In
each room of the house, it seemed—down the hallway in the parlor, and here in their own bedroom—female shapes were ushering
new times. Agatha, more brazen in some ways even than her mother, having seen what she had come for, pulled her head out from
the tunnel Tahir Majid had devised, and tugged a pillow from behind him. “I need this,” she said. She sat beside him firmly.
Tahir, wincing but hospitable, gave his guest more room.

She’d surprised him, too. Propped up on one elbow, she asked him if it hurt. His brothers didn’t like to ask, even soft Habib;
they already knew the answer, didn’t like to hear it. With Agatha so close to him and stark, Tahir almost said that yes, it
did, it did, and not a little, either. That he felt the absent calf and foot as keenly as if they were still there. He might
have added that having lost a leg had brought him new embarrassments, that the clever brothers had to bear him to the toilet
if he needed to expel a poop (though this
they did with a solemnity and tenderness that they had never shown him in his fully four-limbed days). He might have told
her that when the distant aunts came (bringing their own juice, and nuts, and sweet, dry, yellow cake), he knew they came
because they had to, because what had befallen Majid’s little boy was too-too-terrible, they said. That he could tell from
how they passed the cashews, chomping, busy lips asmack, that they did not hold out much hope. “Two cripples in the house!
Mad Majid whose mind should have a walking stick, and this! Now
this!
What else should we now fear?”

They spoke their thoughts out loud when they believed he was asleep, more softly when they thought he was awake. Suddenly
the crafty brothers—clever, yes, but unreliable, indeed—appeared more viable to the big aunts than he did. Even his Aunt Sugra,
who people said was good, whispering to Tahir (was it just a month ago?) that he was the only hope, the only boy whose head
for numbers might not put him in jail—Sugra had turned to leggy Ismail and Ali, and even stout Habib, the slowest of them
all, and, holding out her hands, told them they were all their poor baba had left. That it was up to them now. Sugra! The
only one who gave them money, came to visit; who could manage Tahir’s father when nobody else would. Sugra, who still loved
them! A sore betrayal, it had been. But Tahir didn’t say these things to Mrs. Turner’s daughter. He waited for her lead.

Pushing at her bottom lip with a sharp but creamy tooth, Agatha considered him. She asked again: “Really, does it hurt?” Tahir
felt exposed. The skin around his eyes went tight; he sniffed, and looked away. But he remembered what the aunts had said
(they had gotten it from Iqbal, at Hisham’s Food and Drink).
This
was the girl who had unlaced and laced his shoe, done something to his limb while the firmer parts of him lay well across
the road.
Aunt Yasmina had told Sugra that this girl had not flinched. That she had sat there on the sidewalk (panties showing, nevermind!)
and watched over Tahir’s fallen leg as though it were a baby goat or doll. Had spoken to it, even. Agatha was perhaps not,
thought Tahir, a guest into whose shoulder he could cry.

With a valiant shove of lashes, he swept his tears back. “It doesn’t hurt. It itches.” He pushed his thin chest out and pressed
his lips together. “It doesn’t hurt at all.” If Agatha could push, insist, then he could do it, too. She closed one eye; he
could see the wet pink point of the girl’s tongue. He exhaled, and said, again, “It itches. Didn’t you hear right?” He pulled
the sheet above their heads and motioned down beyond the bandaged absence to make sure she could see. If Tahir’s leg could
be put back, thought Agatha, the foot would reach just there, to a swirl of printed leaves. Tahir loosed his fingers from
the sheet and let it flap down very gently over Agatha’s bent head. She pulled it back to show him she was frowning. “The
bad thing,” Tahir said—Agatha felt here that she ought to pay attention—“is that now I’ve lost my slingshot.”

Sarie came to call her. Agatha slid gently off the bed and faced him. She noticed how his eyebrows slanted towards each other,
pointing to his nose. She returned the pillow to him, then reached out and pinched his face. “I don’t think it’s true,” she
said. Her words were like a hiss. Tahir felt the tautness at his eyes return. He blinked. She whispered: “I think it hurts
a lot.” Then, as grown men dismiss matches, she flicked the soft part of his cheek with a rapid parting of her forefinger
and thumb, and skipped towards her mother. Leg and cheek both smarting, Tahir took his pillow back and held it, not sure what
had happened, or if he should be glad.

Sarie hesitated before stepping towards the bed. They’d come for his sake, after all. And yet now that she was in his room,
she faltered. Out on India Street, she had stroked this child as intimately as she (sometimes) stroked her own. As we touch,
strangers though they be, those whose pain is great enough to warrant unabashed care: one dispenses with formality. Yet now
she felt that he was owned, by that nice Mr. Jeevanjee, even by the house, by the long-dead mother whose name she had not
learned, and by the empty chairs between the beds, meant for visitors whose vigils were expected. She felt that touching Tahir
Jeevanjee might require a permission from his father that she had not obtained.
He never knew his mother
. It occurred to her that in this way she and Tahir Jeevanjee were very nearly linked, but she was not one to stop for long
on sad and tender things. She focused on the boy.

Other women come to sit themselves down here. They touch him
. She saw an army of them, heavy, scented ladies dressed in pinks and blues—colors the Kikanga mansions had once been—women
meant to be there, petting the sick boy and speaking very softly. Comfortable and right. She knit her light eyebrows together.
Thinking—of the once-bright wife and visitors (whose absences had weight), the height and girth of Kudra House, the parrot
squawking in the gloom—made a heavy knot in her. She wanted to behave in such a way that if Mr. Jeevanjee had been a witness
(he was not; subject to an unknown lightness in the other room, he was eating biscuits, still) he would find her actions irreproachable
and right. So she leaned in above the boy and tugged softly at the covers. “I am sure that everything,” she said, “will soon
be going well.”

Tahir could not make out the features of her face. He noted only that Mrs. Turner’s hands were freckled and that she smelled
faintly of talcum—not the kind Aunt Sugra wore, which smelled of wood and roses, but like what mothers patted on their babies’
chests and rumps after they’d been oiled. Agatha, also tugging on cool cloth, pulled her mother’s dress. Sarie, used to Agatha’s
imperium, sighed, and gave her the five pineapple sweets. Agatha eyed the brothers for a moment; then she made her choice.
Firm, she took smart-mouthed Ali’s bony hand and opened it with hers. She liked a challenge, too, and she could see that he
was sly. Too surprised to pull away, he trembled nonetheless. She slipped the sweets into his palm then closed her fingers
tightly over his, pressing to make certain they would stick. She had made him nervous. “No telling what girls like that will
do!” he later told his friends, who, though they’d seen the smuggled magazines in the corners of the paan shops, had never
spoken to a white child, let alone had one pull open their hands. Agatha released his shivering fist and pointed at the patient
in the bed. “They’re for him,” she said. She was looking at Habib, sensing even then that Habib was the softest, could be
counted on to make sure that kindnesses were done. “All five of them. For him.”

As the Turners left, Majid Ghulam walked down the stairs behind them. He was barefoot, still, and Sarie was aware of the light
shuffling sound his flesh made on the steps, something like a whisper. She thought she felt his eyes fixed on the middle of
her back. At the bottom, in the doorway, Majid Ghulam behaved like a good host, as a decent person should. He even said to
Mrs. Turner that he hoped she would return. That she and her small girl could visit any time. Agatha—he smiled at her so that
the corners of his eyes curved down like two arrows—Agatha, he added, hadn’t seen the parrot.

Outside it was cool, still light, but promising a heavy evening blue. On the balcony at Mansour House, Bibi craned her neck
and thought she saw a heavy figure in a dress stumble in the alley. “Orange, yes, I think,” she would later say. “A trampy
little rag, too short to be believed.”

Four