The Blue Taxi (19 page)

Older now, in-lawed, widowed, nieced and nephewed to children far inland and one-two in Dubai whom she never saw, Bibi had
a lot of time for the things that she was good at. Of the boxy clock that let loose Alpine phrases now and then, and the fans
that spun unevenly and did not bring much air, she was often unaware. The only sounds she really heard, clearly and unfailingly
(because she loved them both so well, would have traded all the gossiping in China for a grandbaby or two!), were Nisreen’s
and Issa’s voices. Sometimes, too, the clash of pans downstairs and Mama Moto’s heavy feet—because Bibi liked to eat, and
these sounds signaled meals—and—perhaps because she, too, liked to be alert to glittering things that can be plucked from
thickets with an eye, a needle, beak—the hot sound of the house crows flapping in the air. But not very much else.

When she stitched her words and pictures in the mornings and in the afternoons, Bibi didn’t even hear the children in the
alley or the buses, arumble and ahoot. She was utterly dependent on the shiver at her neck or the trembling of a hidden thing
at the corner of her eyes—the secret-love that sometimes made her stop what
she was doing and look down into the street to see what she could see. It was this kind of shivering luck that had made her
look up from the hanging that was just beginning to read
Al-Fadh
… as the
Al-Fadhil
-bearing bus bore down on Mad Majid’s little boy. But now, she thought, there was something else at work, as if she herself
were being pierced by a great needle, caught up in a tapestry so large and fine that she would never see it all with only
her poor eyes. For it wasn’t just the bus. What about the peacock spilling from her fingers on the same day Sarie Turner trotted
out her daughter in the sunshine and headed for
that house?

She would open herself up to whatever forces drummed. She would have to try. And, after four long, luckless mornings, which
she considered training, Bibi saw, at last, a form emerging from the dark. Rounded, glowing. Could it be a crescent moon,
with a little star before it? No. The outline of a skiff? Not either. Tsk, what
was
it? Could it be, she asked herself, a cow? Rounded, with a hump? No, really, not a cow. An animal, but blue, and what should
she (
No Banyan, I, no Hindu
, Bibi thought, a little bit mixed-up) do with a blue beast? She breathed a little deeper. When the thing came fully into
shape, undeniable and purring, she could see it well, but what she saw she couldn’t quite believe. A car. A light blue Morris
Oxford.
Just a moment
, Bibi thought.
A taxi?

She saw it now as clearly as, had her eyes been focused on the world, she would have seen the soft mass of her chest, rumpled
in her shift: sharply, fully, as if it had been parked right there in her bedroom, door ajar for Bibi to get in. She watched
it for a moment, blinked. How brilliant the thing was—just washed! Perfectly sky blue, the way so many Morris taxis were,
with a pale, pale cream-white bonnet. Yes, indeed, a car that Bibi liked, had she been forced to say. A Morris. She had memories
of these, oh, yes. Of riding on the seafront in them, of going off to picnics with Nasra
and Zainab. And even of a teacher she had had who’d loved his own so much that he had put it on the boat with him when he
moved to the mainland. Indeed. A blue Morris with a bonnet. For a moment, Bibi smiled into her memories and thought,
Of course, that is what I will make
. She lolled a moment in relief The real thing had come through. But then she frowned, and scratched her knees. What could
she be foretelling? What could a taxi mean?

Bibi stretched her toes as far as they would go, as if she’d reach a better understanding through the arches of her feet.
A taxi. Was she to take a trip? Would they be having guests? She thought about it for a while, even told herself that she
might mix two kinds of thread to get that gleaming blue. But something shifted in the room. While she’d started out the morning
thinking of herself as famous, special in the holy scheme of things, now that she had a thing before her, Bibi faltered just
enough that her enthusiasm waned. It was one thing saying bravely she would take up any vision and another to commit herself
to stitching it, in full view of her own household. Of course someone would see her. Of course Nisreen would ask, “What are
you stitching now, Bi?” And Mama Moto might hold it in her hands and look at it while Bibi was asleep.
Foolishness
, she thought.
Who do you think you are?
Might it not be sinful to have thought herself so special?
Just an old, old woman who wants a baby in the house. It’s a cruel trick
. She wiped a tear from her eye.

A taxi!
Who, she thought, would want one? Certainly she didn’t, couldn’t picture hanging up a Morris stitching on the wall. What
words could accompany it?
A wreck can go no farther? Broken things are sweet?
Absurd. Nisreen might frown and ask her what it was about. She could hear Issa telling her, already, that she might as well
have made a picture of a rickshaw, a relic of the past. He wouldn’t want a Morris, either. Oh, such modern,
modern children. He’d want a Peugeot, a Land Rover, or perhaps a limousine. No, Bibi didn’t want to stitch a car. And what
would the leaders of the Sewing Club have thought? They had called for birds and flowers, hadn’t they? If a person strayed
from flora-fauna, they had said, then ships might be all right—for a ship’s a clever ocean plant, a bird in a wet sky. But
cars? Never once had Livery-Jones or Harries pressed anyone for cars. More recently, of course, like everybody else, Bibi
had seen for herself the printed cloths done up with Ferris wheels and lightbulbs, on one even an airplane. But those were
all new things. New things for a bright future. A broken-down old Morris, Bibi thought, though she felt a sweetness for it.
Wouldn’t that be shabby?

Bibi frowned, and forced herself back into the world. And though behind her eyelids still that Morris taxi danced, she pushed
its form away. She stood, rubbed her armpit absently; the breeze twitched at her hair. She cleared her thickened throat and
tried to smile into the city, which she sensed bright and fine and steaming out the open window. Just there, Hisham’s Food
and Drink. Just there—there, far off but not too far—the light green shape of dusty Kudra House.
No
, she thought, and so suppressed the truest thing she’d seen,
I’ll make a pineapple instead
. She wouldn’t give it words. She’d make a plain, clear thing. And pineapples were good. “Pineapples,” she said aloud, “can
only bring a very general, unobjectionable luck.”

By the time Bibi was calling for Nisreen to help her down the stairs, Nisreen was putting on her shoes and Issa was already
by the door. Nisreen was slower in the mornings than her husband. She liked breakfast more than he did, but not because she
ate a lot; in fact, they were both thin and not as interested in food as
(so Bibi told them when she could) normal people should be. Nisreen was slow because she liked to stretch her legs and hold
a cup of tea while Mama Moto did the washing up. She liked the smell of porridge, the gentle light of the low rooms. She liked
to hear the street begin to hum and clang and toot before she put her feet upon it. Nisreen liked to linger. Issa didn’t,
never had, not even at the start. He liked, as he often said, “to bring the street the day.” When Nisreen woke, her eyes were
sour mangoes, sharp and gummy, and her limbs always felt numb. She always woke up wishing that she hadn’t, that she could
roll over in bed and go to sleep again. But Issa’s eyes were always crisper than a rose apple, bright as life itself

“Come on,” Issa was saying. “What if there’s another accident out there and you’re late answering the phone?” Nisreen looked
at him and sighed. She smiled, and tried to slow him down. He was not being unkind, she knew. It was just that he was eager,
wallet, briefcase at the ready, the busy world already knocking at his heart. He looked lovely, Nisreen thought. That mustache
neat and gleaming, white shirt buttoned up. Efficient. She blamed herself for making Issa late. “Just now, just now,” she
said. The one leg that had troubled her since childhood felt a little heavy. She balanced herself on her husband’s arm to
get into her shoes. Issa paused, made sure she wouldn’t fall. And Nisreen thought,
He’s gentle, yes, I know
. She also thought, as she always did when he was still, and part of him was touching her, that she loved him very much.

They heard Bibi from upstairs, and Issa rolled his eyes. “My mother’s also late today,” he said. “The both of you, slow-slow.”
Nisreen squeezed his hand and thought how nice it was when Issa teased her. Sometimes she teased him, “Why don’t you go help
her?” Bringing Bibi down the stairs could take a while, especially if she had a lot to say. But Mama Moto, who liked being
in Mansour
House the best when the two young ones were gone, was already rising from the dishes. She came towards them with her arms
out, as if shooing chickens from a yard. “You go on, go on,” she said. “Get out. I’ll take care of her. You have things to
do.”

Mama Moto—with her old unsmiling face and her flapping, bony arms—made Nisreen and Issa laugh. Issa held the door, and in
a moment they were out of Mansour House and in the yellow day. As they walked, Nisreen thought that she was glad Bibi hadn’t
been there while she and Issa drank their tea. She felt guilty thinking so, but she was growing tired of Bibi asking how she
was, asking with that
look
she had,
A look that begins just below my chin and ends under my skirt
. Bibi used Nisreen’s lingering against her. “It means you shouldn’t go to work,” she’d say, peering at Nisreen over her porridge.
“It means that you should lie in bed with your knees up for a while. It’s standing up so fast that keeps your belly empty.
Leaking, don’t you know?” Nisreen had grown tired of trying to explain that standing up and getting dressed and going out
to work didn’t stop babies from coming. When she tried to argue, Bibi asked, “If it isn’t that, my girl, what is it?” And
Nisreen wasn’t sure.

Nine

A
fter years of hoping vaguely for a turn in his own luck towards the success he felt was due, Gilbert had, despite his dreamy
talk, resigned himself to the idea that fortunes did not change. That nothing ever happened. At least not in real life, and
surely not in
his
, not at the close, familiar scale where he woke up and ate and slept and opened up a book, then ate and slept again. Out
there, elsewhere, great things did occur, of course. One only had to tune in to the VOA or BBC to know so. Independence and
Uprisings took place. Colonies disbanded. Wars were won and treaties signed, cities smashed, rebuilt. But as far as he could
tell, topplings, accessions, and other transformations primarily took place at the level of the State or of the Natural World
(disasters and the like). In History writ large.

In his story writ small, the world moved slow and usual, and nothing ever changed. Indeed, Gilbert thought of
change
as something brought about by Presidents, or War, or by what some called Acts of God. If brought about by men, then it was
brought by men who’d
done things
and knew how the world worked. Men, Gilbert thought sadly, other than himself. Unless a person did appear—a knowing Englishman
or German who might spot him at the Palm, a history professor who might admiringly look up the modest essays he had published—and
offer him a deal, a ready-made solution, nothing, Gilbert felt, could transform his little life. Certainly nothing that originated
there, or near him. Much less from within.
Or so Gilbert thought. But as Sarie’s visits to the Jeevanjees continued, he began to feel a shift.

He had gotten used to Sarie’s presence in his life—
their life
—which, while by no means ebullient or smacking of rich love, was in important ways reliable and steady. How long had it been?
More than fifteen years now, more than fifteen years of Sarie in his life. Sometimes it surprised him, seemed much longer
or much shorter than that. Sometimes Gilbert counted: four years before the end of Colonies, and eleven after that. And those
eleven, endless, slow, not thrashing with adventure or delight but still not, either, Gilbert thought, disastrous, were a
considerable stretch.

The ordinary tempo was, yes, sometimes interrupted by what Gilbert called Sarie’s “little tantrums” (those days when Sarie
pulled at her own hair and stomped on the red carpet, urging him to please,
monsieur
, why not get a job), and now and then she shouted and she snapped and, he felt, damaged him. But he had gotten used to what
he had; it was a constant, known; in that constancy, he had found some comfort. For instance: he was used to waking up alone
but knowing she was in the other room; accustomed, too, from the threshold of that tiny chamber, to watching Sarie read to
their one child, and not stepping inside. He liked to know that she could be presented with his laundry and that it would
be cared for. That she would make him dinner as expected. That she could be persuaded now and then to pluck a tune out with
one hand on the broken old piano while he stood behind. That she would roll her eyes at him sometimes. He had even made his
peace with her recurrent gloom.