The Blue Taxi (33 page)

Once beyond the metal doors, Sarie was relieved not to see Maria right away. It was one thing not minding how she looked,
out there, on Mosque Street and on Libya. But in Kudra House’s alley, Sarie was unsure of Maria. When upstairs with tea or
sweets, Maria did not seem like a threat, no, was simply Majid’s house girl. But if Sarie saw Maria by herself out here in
the courtyard, she had the sharp, unpleasant feeling that she was being weighed. Maria made her nervous. She could hear Maria
on the other side of Kudra House, running water from the tap. Not in sight. Occupied elsewhere.
Today I am so lucky
, Sarie thought. She closed her eyes, sighed with her mouth open in a tickled, private way, and stopped for just a moment
at the threshold. Next, to bring her heartbeat back to center, she held her breath and counted slowly to sixteen. Then, both
hands curled over its mouth, she pressed her purse tight against her stomach and walked up those cool stairs. She felt almost
pretty. To bring some color out, she bit her lip with her top teeth until she could feel the lower ridge come near to popping
through the flesh.

On the second-to-last stair, she called out “
Hodi,
” in the local manner. Once. The parrot’s cry rang out, “Who? Who?” There was no other answer.
Hm. Has Majid not heard my voice?
Sarie stepped inside, confused. Where was he? “
Hodi!
” Twice. Surely he would come and greet her, pull her towards him and squeeze deeply at her fingers. Sarie could see the shadow
of the parrot’s cage swaying clearly on the wall, marking out the pattern of the talking bird’s excitement. “Guests now! Guests
now! Guests!” Remembering Maria down below, she called out rather formally: “Hallo, Mr. Jeevanjee!” Then, with tenderness,
a lightness in her heart, she
called out more softly: “Majid? Majid?” The caged bird had gone quiet. Majid did not answer.

Is he not at home?
Sarie felt a pang, a momentary sinking, called again; and then (relief!) Majid Ghulam’s clear voice rang out from fir back
in the house. It said: “Come in! Come in! You’re welcome.” Sarie thought how different his way of speaking was from Gilbert’s,
how much more in charge of words he was. He said, voice steady, “Come in all the way, please, until you are inside.” She set
her purse down on the settee, checked her hair with happy hands, and smoothed out her short dress. She stepped with ease out
of her negligible shoes and slid them with her toes to rest beside Majid’s leather sandals and a pair of worn-out cleats shared
by Ali and Habib. Affectionate, she thought:
Their shoes
.

“Majid?” She was aware as she pronounced his name that it had become one among the sweetest, softest sounds that Sarie-in-the-present
could imagine (others: night wind through the leaves of plantain groves, her footsteps on the ground). Passing, for the first
time unaccompanied, beyond the coffee table and down into the hall, Sarie felt, without quite knowing how, that she had undergone
a subtle alteration. What new status, whether she had slipped up or down the scale of honor, she could not decide. Was she
from here on in to simply saunter up the stairs and step through the blue parlor, dispensing with hallos and welcome-welcome
please? The idea of it thrilled her.

She came out on the high balcony and saw her lover squatting. Huddled at the end of the veranda, Majid was examining the henna
seedling in its rusted metal tin. He looked, she thought (and she approved), like a nurse about to give a patient a massage,
assessing the stiff limbs before making a first move. He tugged lightly at the thickening stem, then patted at the earth with
both his palms spread out. With a wave of his ten fingers he sprinkled water near the roots. Satisfied, he urged her to come
near. Eyes encouraging
and nice, he nodded. “You aren’t a guest here anymore.” Sarie shivered, thankful. All her doubts were gone. It didn’t matter
if she came to see him every day or only now and then. He’d greet her, she thought, just like this, any time she chose.

When he did get up, Majid brought a slender forearm to his brow and sent his trousers properly back down his thin legs with
a tugging at each thigh. He bent forward and unrolled the tattered cuffs, which had come up to his knees. Sarie held her hand
towards him, but he pointed out that his was dark with soil. She touched his wrist instead. He blinked at her. Sarie’s face
was open, sunlit. She felt very, very tall, indeed, as though her weight were concentrated in a mass that hung far above her
skull, balanced on the distant needles of her feet. His smile made her feel dizzy.

Majid held the blue door open for her. She looked meaningfully towards him as she passed, leaned very slightly in. He moved
into the kitchen, beckoned. Sarie watched him wash his fingers, palms, and wrists with a stub of laundry soap. Then, thumb
and finger on her elbow, he ferried her into his room. “Tahir is asleep,” he said. Majid closed his eyes and placed, by way
of explanation, both of his clean hands flat against her chest. And so, before everything else, they riffled through each
other’s clothes. The dress, which she had so nicely straightened in the stairwell, fell, at her insistence, from her body
to the floor. Majid kept his shirt on.

He smiled lightly while they did the thing—not at her, exactly, but at the room, himself, and at their moistly urgent stew.
It pleased him that she frowned, that she tugged and plucked at him as though she were very busy drowning and did not especially
desire to be saved. That she seemed, he thought,
A wild one
. He pressed himself against her with a certainty he recognized: it was the same sureness he’d felt, years and years before,
when choosing the right word. When slipping commas into place.

Afterwards, Sarie wanted to stay naked for a lovely little while. When Majid held her dress out, Sarie shook her head. He
set it down, instead, upon a chair, and patted Sarie’s arm before going down the hall. She rested on his rumpled bed and waited
for him to come out from the bathroom, clean, shirtsleeves long again and fastened at the cuffs. She plucked idly at a kapok
tuft that had come creeping through a small tear in the mattress, and squinted at the window. Between the wooden shutters,
the afternoon was soft.

Sarie also listened, idly, for sounds from Tahir’s room. As Majid was pouring water from a ladle down his chest across the
hall, Sarie heard, from the other side, the side that held the boys’ room, something that sounded like a shuffle, a stretching
in the dark. How many things a person feels in the midst of an affair that has not yet firmly taken shape, or ended! She sat
up with a gasp, as though with Agatha’s absence, too, she were more naked than ever, more at risk of something:
His boy is awake!
She lurched forward for her dress, imagining that Tahir might come bursting through the doorway, finger pointed at her heart.
She had almost reached her dress when she had a second thought. She listened, listened. There was nothing. Then she calmed
herself with a tinny, awkward laugh.
He is not walking on his own yet. No one has got crutches
. Tahir’s new condition, Sarie thought, held a few advantages for them.
Even if he is awake, if he tries to leave the bedroom, he will hop and hop; then he will fall and be in need of help. A fall
must make a loud noise
. She yawned, too; then, stretching out her arms, determined that if Tahir was astir—her very will would force him back to
sleep. She wanted to be happy.

When Majid, trousers traded for a blue seruni cloth, came back and closed the door behind him, Sarie rolled onto her stomach
and
crossed her ankles in the air. She patted at the rumpled sheet, but Majid smiled and shook his head. “In a moment, Sarie.
Wait.” He moved away, and as Sarie’s feet described fine circles in the air, he sat down at his desk. He pulled a pencil from
a drawer and opened up a notebook she had never seen. She wondered,
Will he write me a poem?
She watched him in the mirror.

Majid, whose body had just lain with hers, who could still faintly smell her talcum and her other, rougher scents on the surface
of his skin despite his recent bath,
was
writing her a poem. Or, a poem about her.
This
, he thought,
is what she’s bringing me
. The pencil moved, slowly at first, jagged. He looked up into the mirror for a moment. Saw Sarie watching him.
How pale she is
, he thought.
How big
. She
was
big, much bigger than he was, and Majid, eyes resting for a moment on her jutting hip, then moving up her muscled arm, felt
awe. He wrote:
Above the quiet sea, a giant moon has shown
. He stopped. In the mirror, Sarie smiled at him. She wanted him to write a good one, then come to sit beside her, read it
while she rested her great head on his knees. “Is it for me?” she asked. Majid smiled but didn’t answer. Sarie watched his
head and back, the slight bobbing of his shoulders as the pencil scratched and stopped. She wondered,
Shall I tell him now about Great-Uncle James?
No, she’d wait, she thought. She liked feeling, when with him, that nothing else could matter, that what went on
out there
, with Gilbert, meant nothing at all. Telling him would change things, shift a balance. She didn’t want to, yet. She’d linger.

Sarie stretched her legs, ran her toes along the panes in the high board.
How pretty those panes are
. A peacock, lotus flowers, waves. Some of them were missing. Majid was still hunched over his notebook, frowning, shaking
his bent head. Now and then he brought the pencil to his mouth. Sarie looked at her own legs, then arms, next at her smart
lover, then at her legs again. She felt slow
and long. This was nice, this quiet after making love. This sitting in a room while a good man wrote a poem. She thought Majid
looked handsome, and that the part of his face she could still see in the mirror looked feverish, intense. Sweetly, as she
might have thought of Agatha if the girl had been a boy, she wanted to protect him.

The thought she had surprised her:
He is not as strong as I am. These things he feels could kill him
. And Sarie almost laughed. How strange that she should feel that way about a man. And then, she thought,
Not so
. Had she not felt this way about young Gilbert Turner, too, once she had been married, once she’d seen him bare? That
she
, not he, could withstand anything to come? That
she
had bones, not he?

Majid was writing on:
Along the shore her sizely jewels are treasures for the poor
. Yes, the poem was for Sarie, somehow. At least it was for the Sarie he was thinking of just then, who was bringing him new
life. When he looked up at her reflection, Majid’s face was bright. The lines around his eyes were slack with gratitude, contentment.
Sarie’s wish to shield him sharpened and grew teeth. No, she would not tell him, yet, about planning for a business. She reached
out for her dress.
It might
, she thought,
upset him
. His job, Sarie thought, was to write, and write, and write.

“It’s late,” she said. It was. The light outside the window had acquired a greenish cast, gone deep. Sarie rose, and Majid
put down his pencil. “Don’t stop writing,” Sarie said. She came to stand behind him and touched him on the shoulder. “Just
please if you can zip my dress.” He reached out from his seat and brought the zipper up, pausing, as she bent, to touch her
tousled hair.

“The clasp,” she said. “Please you must also close the clasp.” Majid’s fingers flailed and stumbled at her nape, tried twice,
and
managed on the third. Sarie thought, but did not say,
I do not trust my husband to close my dresses for me without making a tear. But my lover, yes, my lover, is another sort of
man
. She didn’t let him walk her down the stairs. “You write,” she said. Majid took her hand and squeezed it. “You’ll read it
to me next time.”

Once Sarie was gone, Majid rose up from the dresser and went into the hall. He stepped into the boys’ room. In the dimness,
Tahir was an ashy shape, small beneath the sheets. A thin arm dangled to the floor. Something in Majid, a tiny anxious thing,
plucked once at his heart. “
It isn’t the world’s end,
” he thought.
That’s what Sugra said
. He tried to feel that this was true. And Sugra’s visit, Sarie’s (holding her! her legs!), and the poem, and the softness
he could despite it all feel rising now and then from unexpected places—in the bathroom, on the balcony, sometimes in the
very air itself—helped Majid to think that Tahir would be fine.
Patience
, that was all. He touched Tahir on the forehead, said a little prayer. From the hallway he could hear Maria. There she was,
banging loudly at a pot—bang! bang!—just as Sarie must have crossed into the street. The parrot, waking, let out a vivid shriek
that sounded like the slamming of a door.

Sarie walked home from Kudra House still feeling slow and thoughtful. She’d stayed rather late. The street was coming quiet.
Her thongs flipped lightly on the ground, a dull thud underfoot. She could hear her steps, her sighs, and also heard her hands
as they brushed against her dress. Her legs felt very long. On Libya Street the cane-juice man had locked away the grinder
in the empty hardware shop from which he rented space. Flecks and sprigs of cane flesh glowed pale along the curb. From behind
the boarded
doors, Sarie sensed the presence of the press, which was painted blue, which had (she could see in her mind’s new and eager
eye) an ornate metal wheel. Sarie stopped there for a moment, then moved again, cool beneath the awnings. From nowhere, everywhere,
from beneath her flip-flop feet, there rose the sweet and heavy under-smell of sewage. Sarie took it in. She wanted to smell
everything: cane and gasoline, and even rotting things, and talcum, and the heat of Majid’s chest. So many details, suddenly,
so many things to feel!