The Blue Taxi (41 page)

Not thinking anymore about whom he might see on his way, who might see him or might whisper, say, “There goes Mad Majid,”
he had walked down India Street in the direction of the sea. And he had stopped at the corner of Mahaba,
Where
, he thought,
it happened
. Where Tahir lost his leg. The aunts had done this. Come to look. Yasmina had gone back to Kudra House after her first pilgrimage
in elaborate hysteria, describing the great puddles of blood—their little Tahir’s!—that must have dyed the road. How a person
could still
tell
that an accident had happened, even once the rain had washed that blood away; how that road gave her the shakes every time
she passed, made her angel-hairs perk up. Even Sugra said she’d stopped there, looking into the store windows of Hisham’s
Food and Drink, and wondered, thought about, how little Tahir must have felt, what he had been doing when the rattling bus
came down. Majid had not done it.
Just a road
, he’d thought.
Another road where somebody has suffered
. He hadn’t gone so
far as to say what he did feel:
So what, so what? Nothing for us but sorrow. Why go seek it out?

But the intersection jarred him. He felt a little bus-crash in his gut, a pulling in his arms as if the very air itself were
urging him to stand where his own Tahir had. To cross the road and pause, tilt his head and close his eyes, think of shooting
at a crow. Imagine. What
had
Tahir been thinking? But Majid went no further. Awakening, Majid might be, but he was not like the aunts.
Let the inside stay inside
, he thought.
The knife of life is sharp; we take the blade but must not ever flinch
. And while his chest and belly quivered at the thought of little Tahir being crushed by a big bus, Majid’s two legs held
him steady, and he swallowed. Did not look away.
That’s where it all happened
, Majid thought.
And this is where I am. All right
. The most important thing, he thought, was walking, without muttering or shouting, without glaring meanly at any passersby,
without feeling that at any moment he might weep. The most important thing was being equal to it all.

He’d thought to pause at Hisham’s Food and Drink, where the aunts had gone to get the news from Iqbal when Tahir’s leg first
fell, and where, long ago, Hayaam had liked the ices. That would itself be a poem, no? Going to the very place where so much
news—about his little son and even, surely, in the past, about his own craziness and grief—had been made up and tossed into
the world. But he was not quite ready for all that. One day, yes, sometime, but not yet. Hisham’s was too bright.

However, thinking about Hisham’s—cutlass patties, ices, eggs embedded in potatoes, almond sweets—decided him to eat. He passed
A. Tea Shop and Tea Shop J., named for Alibhai and Jaffar, and chose not to go in. He crossed the street away from Habib’s
Restaurant, where the bajia mix was sweet. All of them too
known, he thought. Majid, who had hurled himself so firmly into the broad, consuming jaws of sadness for so long, was now,
instead, emerging, and willing to be tender with, at last, himself. He’d stick to places in which he would not elicit any
detailed memory, friendly or unkind, where he would not have a presence. He turned along Mahaba Street and settled on the
New Purnima Snack, where, in the long shade of the flame trees, three ancient island men sold cinnamon and cloves.

The Purnima was just right. There was old Vijay Mehta—whom he’d only known by sight and to whom he had, as fir as he recalled,
not done grievous harm: black hair dyed as ever, mustache as trim and neat, bent over the fryers. There was the bright calendar,
the plastic flowers poking from the cracks—pink and yellow, tangerine. There was the blue table, the old sink by the mirrored
wall. Majid sat far in the corner, by the window near the taps. A gloomy waiter came to him, and Majid, smoothly, in one phrase,
ordered up a large plate of jalebis and a cup of milky tea.

What, he wondered, had come over him? How tasty the air smelled! How fine the Mehta elders looked, smoking narrow cigarettes
and waiting for the peppers and the chutneys to be brought for their kachori! How charming Mrs. M. looked, chatting at the
till in her workaday brown sari! For just a moment—the space of a long swallow or a restful closing of the eyes—Majid felt
as happy as he had when Ismail was born and as light as he had been when Sarie Turner (so
he
remembered it just then) bared her breasts for him so suddenly and willingly in the blue, surprising hall and reached out
for his arms.
Sarie
, Majid thought, guiltily at first. What if she’d expected him?
What if she has come?
The Mehtas’ ageless man shuffled over in a white coat like a doctor’s and set down Majid’s tea. The jalebis would be right
along, he said. Majid thought:
Jalebis. Fryers all asteam. Old men who make certain there is
sugar to be had
. Something in him swelled, and Majid forgot Sarie. He could just then not bear to feel himself in any way relied upon, by
anyone. Did not want to feel responsible at all.
Well. If I have missed her
, Majid thought,
she is sure to come again
.

Bibi had been trying to perceive for several minutes exactly what Salma Hafiz and her husband—or another man, yes, wouldn’t
that be better?—were doing in the bedroom she could just vaguely make out between the curtains that hung across the way (light
green, were they, with a rice or barley print?). Had Salma’s husband’s trip into the highlands really been so smooth, successful,
quick?
Has he come back so soon?
Bibi’s neck was strained, her head pushed forward from her chest. If she could, she would have sent her head all the way
across the street, like a telescope or wire. Her neck, she thought, amused, would have been just like a bridge from her balcony
to Salma’s. She could look under the bed, check the cups for dirt. Identify that print. She wished her body were as large
as any building, so she could twist and turn and reach and witness everything that happened. Her eyes would be like windows.
I’d be Big Kikanga Bibi!
Bibi laughed, felt light.

The pale curtain whisked and dangled, and Bibi couldn’t tell if that dark square was emptiness beyond, or Salma’s dress, or
the turned head of a man, moving in the room. But she didn’t mind so much just then. Sometimes it was the seeking, and also
the not knowing, that gave her the most pleasure. She finally gave up. It didn’t matter, in the end, what Salma Hafiz really
did. Because Bibi was working out the envelope, and remembering the Ladies’ Sewing Club, where blue was meant for boys. And
because the night before, as she’d gone up to bed, had she or had she not heard some loving laughter and a thump from Nisreen
and Issa’s room?

She’d been about to turn back to the envelope, which was coming along nicely, when she caught sight of Mad Majid Ghulam. When
Bibi spotted Majid stepping out alone, and not simply stepping down from Libya, but coming
up
from India Street, as though he’d been on a trip into the city—perhaps down to the docks! or to see about a permit!—she sat
up with a gasp and let her stitching fall. There he was. Crazed old bad-luck Jeevanjee, alive as Mama Moto or Nisreen. And
whereas she could crane her neck and peer and squint and didn’t care if people saw when she was spying on poor Salma or on
Mama Ndiambongo, upon seeing Mad Majid, Bibi felt that she should make herself as small as she could be. She blushed. She
felt a swelling in her skin. She felt, indeed, as if she were seeing with her own very naked eyes a man about whose heft she’d
had a pulsing, sexy dream. Or a long-admired movie star appearing from the blue. Unprepared, caught out and excited.
There is old Majid!
Bibi clutched the stitching to her chest and pressed her face against the grate. She placed her round chin carefully between
the panels of a heart. Where had Majid been? And where could he be going?

He looked, thought Bibi, much, much younger than she had been thinking he would look. Had her eyes gone bad? Could she trust
what they were seeing? Look how his hips swaggered, just a little, how his head was high and undisturbed in the busy morning
air! He was a little gray around the ears, it’s true, but that was not important. Who was not, these days? He looked, she
thought,
Attractive
. Not poorly preserved.
He’s left his crumbling house!
she thought. And then:
Where is Mama Moto? This I’ll tell Nisreen
. She watched Majid look about, a little like a cat deciding whether it should cross, or leap, or sit, and fastened her eyes
to him as he moved, finally, with a confidence she would never have surmised, into the New Purnima Snack. There she saw, she
thought, Majid
Ghulam Jeevanjee say something to handsome Mr. Mehta, greet the busy Mrs., and take a table by the sink. Her old fingers twitched.
A thing like a trapped bird went wild behind her eyes. Change quivered all around.
At last
, she thought,
new times bring new things
. But, oh, how hard it was to know exactly
when
, or
what
, and
what it meant
, if one was stuck at home and on a balcony, no less. What was Majid
doing?

The unfinished envelope felt hot beneath her hands.
Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee has stepped from Kudra House. He is ordering kachori
. Well, she was wrong about what Majid had gone to eat. At the New Purnima Snack the jalebis arrived, and Majid thought he’d
not tasted anything so sweet in a hundred million years. Not since Independence. But she was right that things were moving,
new things, shaking in the air. She was so excited about having witnessed unhinged, widowed, short-circuited, and wicked Mad
Sad Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee walk into the Purnima that when Sarie passed with Agatha ahead of her, Bibi didn’t see.

Nineteen

S
arie’s visit to Majid’s, the strange meeting with Sugra, left her troubled and bewildered. Sarie was upset—in part about Maria,
about Sugra, and the possibility that Majid lived a wider life—but also in a comprehensive way that placed many things in
doubt. Unsettling: for the first time in her life, Sarie felt consciously uncertain of her judgment. Accustomed to assuming,
as many of the Sisters had about themselves, and as Gilbert always did, that what she believed she saw was the same as what
there was, Sarie had never thought herself a person who was sometimes right and sometimes wrong about the layout of the world.
But now she was confused. She was sure Maria meant to harm her. But she wondered about Sugra.
Was
Sugra just a cousin? Was she Majid’s lover? If she wasn’t,
had
she been—before, or after his wife died? What were cousins, in the end? Didn’t Jeevanjees and many others in these parts
go with cousins above all? Had the late, unnamed Mrs. Majid not in all likelihood been a father’s brother’s child or another
close relation? Was Sugra really married to a man who was
not
Majid Ghulam, and did she only come, as she had said, “to bring our Tahir legs”?

How
kind
Sugra had been, how it had seemed that Sugra wanted most of all for Sarie to be welcome. Could one trust in kindness, really?
Or was kindness nothing more than the greatest trick of all? Hovering by the windows at Mchanganyiko Street, Sarie rubbed
her lips and face and wondered what was true. Maria was a thorn. And Sugra, well… Sugra, no matter how she’d
twisted Sarie’s heart, wasn’t the worst thing.
This
was: where had Majid gone? Had he not thought that Sarie might visit him that day, as she often did? Did she not occur to
him? Had he not
hoped
she’d come?
Had he
—and here the little verses did not seem as lovely as they had, contained in Majid’s rooms—
gone out to write a poem?
Did Sarie not matter at all?

She didn’t go again for quite some days, though Agatha—loyal, Sarie thought, to Tahir in a way she was not to her mother—cried
and stamped her feet. She would miss the changes in his walk, she said; she wouldn’t see him win. Sarie remained firm. “No,
no, no,” she said, though Agatha did threaten, said she’d throw herself under the cars her mother warned about each day, that
she’d run into the street. “I’ll go lie under that taxi! I’ll look for a big bus!” But Sarie was entrenched. “Then go,” she
said. “See if you can move me!”

She walked slowly in the flat, washed things she had left unwashed for months—the insides of the cabinets, slats of glass
on the hinged windows, the bathroom’s high, wide sill, the round drain on the floor. The present was no longer what she had
thought it was. She did not know what was true. And so what of the future? What was going to happen? What
had
Gilbert written to old Great-Uncle James? Write, he had, she thought, though he hadn’t told her, hadn’t answered, even when
she’d asked; had simply looked at her in that irritating, absent, beaming way. Had the letter reached its aim? How had Gilbert
introduced the idea of the business? Would Uncle James agree? In a far-off English place, had their fates been sealed? When
she tired of her husband’s smiles and pressed him, Gilbert shook his head and put a finger to his lips. Or tried to kiss her
on the cheek. Said things like, “Let’s not talk until it’s real,” and “Later, later, dear. Once we’ve gotten a reply.” And,
“Trust me, Sarie, please.” Was he doing what she thought? Would
he fail, again? Would this man she had accepted years ago bring ruin on them all?