The Blue Taxi (18 page)

Eventually, if what she thought was true, when she had tired of the waiting or grown dizzy from the whirl of that inscrutable
potential, something, a real thing that had meaning, would have to slip out from the mass. Colors formed and spilled away.
She wondered. For example, what was that pink orb? Was it just a speck of light, the kind that plays behind an eyelid in the
sun? Or was it something else? A flower bud? Should she stitch a rose?
Oh, no
, she thought,
definitely not
. A rose! What could a rose portend that a peacock hadn’t done? Weren’t roses too predictable, like ylang-ylang blooms and
jasmine? She was, she realized, slowly losing faith in flowers of all kinds. Flowers called up the hot scent of opened petals,
the enticing tightness of closed things, strokes and love and kisses, and Bibi did not want to dwell too long on memories
of those.

Love hurt, see? She’d been talking about love with Issa and Nisreen for months now, how love makes homes fill up, how they
ought to make a baby, how she wasn’t getting any younger and could they please see their way clear? But where had all that
gotten her? Nisreen’s stomach flat and humpless as a brand-new Danish road, and Issa cringing, banging books, if Bibi brought
it up.
And tears
, she thought,
at night
. It wasn’t really pleasant, making Nisreen cry.

And there was, too, the other, older thing, which she didn’t like to think of but which, in such a childless house, she found
herself confronting more often these days. She herself had nobody to squeeze or even think of kissing.
Her
husband, unlike Sarie Turner’s or Nisreen’s, was buried in a plot that had long been overgrown—and though she never mentioned
it (and how upset she was whenever Issa did!), there were three small ones out there, too, who
hadn’t stayed for long. Shriveled little buds. Flowers, thank you, no. She’d branch out, if you please. Roses were too easy.
And the peacock, which she liked, with its potential for a preening and a strut, was, perhaps, something like a has-been—was
complete, had been done before.

Now for something else. Hm. Bibi groaned and sighed. How hard it was to tell a veritable vision from a habit, from defaults
that float about! What were these nice squiggles? Ah. Elaborate herufi, twined, in pleasing aqua blue. Perhaps a well-designed,
inspiring “by the grace of God” to bless a new endeavor? A pretty
Bismillahi
. Bibi clicked her teeth and sucked air narrowly between them. Why did nothing suit? No, she’d had enough of words. The squiggles
thickened, took on the look of leaves. A scroll of ivy, in memory of distant ladies who had taught her how to sew? Bibi almost
giggled. She had not made leaves in years. In a way, she would have rather liked to—that rich and creamy green, so deep, the
wicked points that, to a needle, were so dear! Botanical, it’s true, not so different from flowers. But ivy was a special
thing, altogether other. Not to do with love. Ivy?

No
. She sighed. As Issa often hastened to remind her, and as so many other things suggested (potholes, Royal Jubilees replaced
by Chinese acrobats, the
sarakasi
, agriculture shows, the very layout of her home), it was a different country now. She wouldn’t go for ivy. Too British, too
much a sign of Empire, too foreign and too green. And alien things should not, as the radio happily announced at morning-noon-and-night,
be unduly encouraged to gallivant and prosper where they did not belong. No ivy. It wouldn’t be, thought Bibi, seemly. Though
she did think there was more to Empire than people these days said. Had it all been bad? Bibi mused a bit. In fact, she thought
(though she couldn’t ever say such a thing to Issa), she owed Empire a lot. Her stitching gifts, for one.

Like everybody else, of course, like Mad Majid, and Sarie, Gilbert, and also Mama Moto, Bibi had a past. As a girl in a high
and creaky white-washed rag-and-mangrove house that overlooked the sea, Bibi had spent hours locating the special spots from
which she could, unseen, be a silent witness. Principally called Kulthum in those days—before age gave her the titles Mama
Issa, and then Bibi, shifting what had come before—she’d been, from the start, very skilled at stillness. “Born without a
sound,” her mother often said. “So quiet! Never a complaint!” For this a mother should be thankful, no? But wait—surprise!
A fussless girl, as it turns out, can also bring you down.

Beneath her mother’s precious Zurich clock, Kulthum practiced hush. Tamped her breath, stiffened and grew fallow. Motionless
as water in a mtungi water-jar, tensed for movement as a scorpion. One-minute-two-minute-three-and-very-nearly-four. Exhale!
Even when there was nobody to hide from, Kulthum hid and held her breath. Now and then she fainted and would come to in the
dark. It happened frequently that nobody could find her. She acquired a reputation for being absent when there was hard work
to be done. “Lazy! Disappeared again! Never home just when we need her.” But, almost always, watching and immobile, or knocked
out from the looking, Kulthum
was
precisely there—only not quite in the way her tired parents wished.

She practiced under high besera beds, curled up with her toes against the stepladders that led up to the mattress. She peered
from low space through the watery light of rooms. She practiced between gunnysacks that smelled sharply of cloves, dozing
now and then, sometimes staying for so long that her tender skin turned red from the dried-up buds’ sharp heat. She hid along
the
wall beneath her mother’s clothes rack, buried in the hanging pants and cloaks that smelled of basil and wood smoke. Do we
need to say it? She laid her eyes on certain things that she ought not have seen.

She saw, for instance, from underneath the bed, her middle sister Nasra weep, two stiff kilua flowers milky in her hands.
Kulthum, in whom, even then, facts led to surmise, dreamed up a Busaidy boy whose parents would-not-never have Nasra for a
wife. Tragic. Awful. So terrible that Kulthum also wished to cry. Kulthum also saw her father beat the boy who helped them
load the cloves into the shop, imagined him a thief And other things: the kitchen girls skimmed palm-sized heaps of rice from
Kulthum’s parents’ stores; her father counted money in the nighttime and listened to the radio; her mother liked to play before
her mirror, moving like a star. For many years Kulthum went unnoticed. She saw but did not say, saw and did not move, almost
twitched and didn’t. But her own secret was let out one monsoon day when, hiding in her sisters’ clothes, pressed tight against
the wall, she was bested by her gut.

What little Kulthum saw? A form of human congress. She saw nice Uncle Amal and her oldest sister Zainab gnash and flutter
at each other, then fall softly on the bed after clear-thinking Amal had ascertained—mouth pressed to Zainab’s outstretched
throat, one eye zooming to the latch, free hand flapping at the lintel—that the door was safely closed. Next, Amal covered
Zainab’s mouth with the hot cup of his palm, and Zainab closed her eyes. They shuddered on the bed so much the glass panes
rattled in the frame. Kulthum held her breath for one-two-three-and-almost-four. She tried. But she was stricken not with
tears, in the end, and not either with fear, but by a wave of laughter that came up from her stomach and clattered up her
throat, then burst out into the room despite
the fact that Kulthum—who had felt it coming, who had tried valiantly to stop!—had pressed both hands over her mouth to push
the thing back down into the privatest of gullies where it properly belonged.

So
this
is what they did! And
this
is why Amal, who already had a wife (a headstrong, jealous wife whom he kept at Fumaniwa, facing the Seychelles in a great
house so she would look the other way), came to visit them so often! And
this
is why her parents had been scrambling to get Zainab a man. As Kulthum laughed and laughed, Amal bounded off the bed, pulled
his trousers up, unlatched the door he had so carefully kept shut, fled down-the-hallway-through-the-courtyard-the-back-alley-in-the-rain,
not to be seen for months. Not knowing what had happened, Zainab pulled the sheet over her head and shook there for a while;
Kulthum crept up to her and peeked under the sheet and tickled Zainab on her breasts and sticky bottom until the two of them
were howling on the bed and their mother strode inside to see exactly what was up.

It was thus Zainab and Amal, unwittingly, and the complexities of love, that set Kulthum on a course towards hooks and cloths
and thimbles; it was after that, after they had found Zainab a man who could take her far away, that Kulthum’s parents ordered
their last child to make something of herself. They had decided what. It would get the secretmonger well away, and keep her
fingers busy. Even better, it would work the bad girl’s brain and keep those greedy eyes of hers fastened to her lap. If she
could learn to thread a needle, Kulthum’s mother said, their lives would be improved.

And so to the Ladies’ Sewing Club—where, on weekday afternoons, qualified white ladies supplemented the daily training in
Domestic Arts the girls received in school with additional, decorative instruction—little Kulthum went. The Sewing Club, however,
while intended as a punishment, was not entirely so. The stitching did keep Kulthum out of private rooms and kept her eyes
in place. But, to everyone’s surprise, it also brought her pleasure: she had a talent for it. There was, in Kulthum’s sharp
and sharper eyes, a roiling swell of patterns that spilled right out of her digits into colored thread and cloth. Things she’d
seen before, and things she’d never seen. Flowers, deer (poised, at the white ladies’ suggestion, in pale blue fields of snow),
peacocks, stippled pheasants, guinea fowl (called
kanga
, because they liked to talk), trumpet flowers, fanlike kadi buds, palm trees (which the tourists liked so much), roses, which
were to be expected, daisies now and then, and ivy, ivy, ivy, which the British bought in piles.

Mrs. Harries, with her white, round pillbox hat (like a guy dressed for Ashura, or so some people said), and Mrs. Livery-Jones,
plump and always damp, who together manned the thing, approved. Their love of stitchery ran deep, was nationalist, in fact.
Both were firm in the conviction that girls who sewed were doing honor to the Queen, communicating with her spirit in some
way, mysteriously but certainly acquiring rectitude and rigor. Let men speak of guns and laws! Embroidery, they knew, would
lift the natives up. They dreamed a great expansion. Not simply city girls above the Egan Smythe Madrassa, but a huge network
of rural Sewing Clubs: country girls in hundreds stitching daisies and cat faces and green leaves into handkerchiefs and shams.
African and Asian girls versed in the Domestic Arts, they knew, could turn the world around.

Hands clasped to their pale bosoms, Mesdames Livery-Jones and Harries praised little Kulthum. She was a bright example of
precisely what they meant. Oh, they were impressed. She might even go beyond the ideal marriage that was every young girl’s
hope and attain
her
Independence. “With your quick hands and
skills, little Miss Kulthum, you could start a business.” Kulthum, unused to kind attention, stitched her thumbs and heart
out. What an easy thing of push and pull, pressures that with their rhythm and the way they took possession of her hands made
patterns grow along the surface of the cloth so easily she was surprised by hours passing, until Mrs. Harries clapped her
hands and led them all in calisthenics to get the blood in motion, turn those narrow girls into the good Imperial subjects
they were really meant to be.

At the Ladies’ Sewing Club, Kulthum learned to focus her attention on her lap. She made very pretty things. But all that silence,
all that focus, had a separate effect: the more she pressed her eyes into her lap, the more the skin behind her neck grew
soft and fine-tuned to the world. The more Kulthum performed the thing intended to divert her attention from other people’s
secrets, the more she sensed with all her other parts when she might catch a scandal at the corner of her eyes or in the tensed
skin of her wrist. Out the window once, alerted by a twitching in her knee that coincided with the movement of a bicycle,
she saw a stately man, respected for his learning, ease three fingers down a coffee vendor’s tin and make off with five slabs
of groundnut brittle while the owner looked away. From a shiver at her nape that matched a shift in light, she looked over
her shoulder and saw Mrs. Harries dab an unembroidered handkerchief at the corners of her eyes, a letter open in her lap.
Later, a tightening beneath the weight of her long braid caused her to see her very own Mrs. Livery-Jones’s husband (whose
short pants brought his scarlet shins into relief) dart nervous down a certain passage, followed seven minutes later by a
slim boy Kulthum knew.

The hours spent attuned to thread and thimbles, intended by her mother as a diet, thus nonetheless made Kulthum far more able
than she’d been. When she was done with all the jumping jacks and
twists, had packed her tools into a leather satchel that she had won at school (‘Made in England’—“
Madein,
” the groundskeeper would say, like a single German word), and had politely said goodbye to Livery-Jones and Harries, Kulthum
skipped out of the Egan Smythe Madrassa into the chalky streets, where she filled the stomachs of her eyes with the things
that other people did. The Sewing Club kept Kulthum’s family safe somehow, but out there in the world, it made her a new force.
From the Ladies’ Sewing Club, Kulthum-Bibi learned the lesson that presaged her watching in Kikanga and gave her future shape:
the best secrets of all, those that you can share, that thrill and bring least harm, belong to people who are not a part of
your immediate family.
These
you can discuss.