The Blue Taxi (47 page)

O
n her final visit to the pale green house on Libya Street, Sarie wore a very old but flattering yellow gown that made her
hair look bright. From Mchanganyiko to Mahaba and to Mosque and Libya streets, she bit her lips to make her mouth look sharp.
She dug her fingernails into the pillows of her palms to make sure her blood was moving. She willed her headache to grow stronger,
to keep her heart in line.

In the courtyard, she saw Tahir with his crutches, an entirely strange boy, showing off his moves to a giggling, encouraging
Maria, who did not even look up when the alley doors came open and Sarie passed them by. They both glowed, she thought: Tahir
nothing like the fallen child she’d spoken to while life poured out of him, but thicker, more substantial, than she’d known,
and Maria’s skin was sugary and shiny, like a date’s. The bald cat stepped towards her. Shyly, briefly, it touched its round
head to her feet. She did not bend to pet it. Without announcing her arrival or waiting to be called, she walked right up
the steps.

The three big boys were out. Majid, as she’d hoped, was up there by himself, in the bedroom working on a verse. She didn’t
knock. The door fell open silently. She sat down on the bed, where she could face the mirror. In the watery, browning glass,
she watched him. Majid at first did not see her, and Sarie—who was finding that premature nostalgia could serve well as a
defense—thought, dramatically,
So a poet looks at work!

Hidden by a shadow from the open window’s shutters, Majid’s
face was undefined and dark. The skin of Majid’s neck and back and the slope of his thin shoulder, in contrast, seemed to
Sarie unusually pale. He held the pencil to his mouth, pressing with a knuckle at his lips.
M. G.
, she thought. The name was uttered at the surface of her mind, not in any secret place. Did not cause her any pain she could
distinguish from the pounding at her brow. She felt removed from him and also from herself. As though what would happen in
this room would happen elsewhere, not to her, and not to him. To others—
Mrs. Gilbert Turner and Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, a businessman
—whom she might recall someday. She felt cold a moment, rubbed her arms with heavy hands. She concentrated on Majid Ghulam,
M.G., the brand-new Mr. J. She watched him shake his head over a word he had just written. His tongue slipped out, slipped
back. She thought, unmoved,
I have licked that tongue. That tongue has licked me
. Majid looked at Sarie once, then twice, then put the pencil down. He turned happily around. “You’re here!” he said.

“A poem?” Sarie asked. Majid didn’t answer right away. He said instead that he was very glad to see her. She’d stayed away
so long! Dear Sarie. He had missed her. When she did not come back after the day that he’d gone out, he’d thought that she
was angry with him, that she wouldn’t come again. “I’m so glad you have come,” he said, and he stretched his arms towards
her. There was a lilting in his voice. He
had
thought about her, her presence and her body. His limbs had missed her, missed how willingly and seriously she gave herself
missed that eager drowning look. He came to sit beside her.

Sarie, focused on her mission, didn’t say,
I miss you all the time
. She said again, “You are working on a poem?”

Majid smiled, wiped his hands against his shirt as if he had been working on a car, on a mechanical endeavor instead of on
a verse.
“Yes.” His voice was shy and proud. Sarie asked if he would read it. “Later,” he told her, “when it’s really done.” They sat
silent for a moment, until Majid pressed his side against her shoulder and slipped a hand between her legs. “Why have you
stayed away so long?”

Sarie didn’t move away. Like a person taking up a favored sweet before starting a diet,
I’ll enjoy this now
, she thought. He kissed her neck and bit it, laughed. Sarie let him move her limbs, let him spread her thighs and lift one
knee up above his own. She let him take hold of one breast through her gown; palping, rubbing, at her chest. He even tried
to tickle her. But he could see Sarie was cool. “What is it?” Did she seem a little thinner, this big woman who had become
almost like a fixture in his mind and house? Were her freckles brighter? Thinking she was playing, he slipped two fingers
down into the collar of her dress, palm cupped as if he hoped to scoop a wriggling thing from water. He stroked her, but she
didn’t move towards him. “Come, come, Mrs. Turner”—he sometimes called her that, in play—“tell me what it is. What is happening
with you?”

Sarie had not known how she would feel upon being close to him again. She had tried to steel herself along the way, had imagined
simply sitting in the parlor with him, legs pushed up against the coffee table, explaining how things were. Making her proposal.
Not once taking off her clothes or leaning in to kiss him. But she had bypassed the parlor; here she was in Majid’s bedroom,
and there he was, asking rather kindly what had kept her from him and could he come in please. She didn’t feel relaxed by
it. But there
was
, she realized, something she did want, that she could take from him.

Let the business wait
. With a hooked forefinger and thumb, she
grasped Majid Ghulam’s chin, and with her other fingers pulled his lower lip down before crushing, with a ferocity Majid had
never felt in her, her great teeth against his. He let her. Sarie trembled everywhere. She panted, grunted at him. She kissed
him. She wiped the inside of Majid’s open mouth with the breadth of her wet tongue. She licked his skin below his nose and
sucked hard at his chin.

Majid struggled with her.
What is this?
He wanted at the very least, as Sarie had insisted that she liked, to stop and take her clothes off, give her time to fold
her panties in a square and lay them on the floor before he rubbed himself against her. But Sarie didn’t let him. She pinned
his arms behind him, forced him backwards on the bed.
Much too fast! Not like this!
He yelped. But in this he had no say. She rose up mightily and straddled him, knees tight at his small waist. Majid Ghulam
was trapped. He watched her in amazement. She pulled his trousers off completely and tore open his shirt. His hands rose up
to touch her—
soothe her slow her down
—but she batted at them, fought them off He protested, and she pushed him down again. Baffled, cold, he watched. She was terrible,
a storm. How heavy, long, she was, how very tall and white. She smelled like city dust, like oil, the peels of unfamiliar
fruit.

Majid didn’t move, did not know what to do—did he want her? Did he not? He didn’t have the leisure to decide. Towering above
him, with one finger flexed and a challenge in her eye, Sarie moved her underclothing just slightly to the side, just enough
for what she wanted. She clamped his hips with her big knees and shoved him upwards on the mattress. His head hit the wooden
bed board, hard. “Do it,” Sarie said. She pulled his skull to hers, and when, confused, he kissed her, she bit him on the
cheek. And he
pushed himself inside of her more fiercely than he ever had into any willing woman, even his Hayaam. Groaning, Sarie clutched
the wall. She shouted. Majid Ghulam labored there until he felt his very lungs and heart would pop.

Afterwards, when he finally slipped from her, Sarie fell beside him, and he felt his limbs go free. He shuddered. Experienced
a desire both to hold and stroke his lover and to cry or shout at what she’d made them do.
What now?
She turned away from him to face the wall. Majid pressed his fingers on her spine, releasing, pressing down again, as though
patting earth around a plant or tapping on a counter. Sarie didn’t look at him. How quiet the room was. Majid sat up and she
let him. He asked her to sit, too. She didn’t. She brought one hand to his thigh and pressed her mouth into the pillow. Looking
down at her, Majid rearranged her panties. Pulled her dress over her hips. He stepped into his trousers and put them on again
without rising from the bed. He waited while she shook.

Sarie finally spoke. “My husband’s uncle has agreed to send him money, and we will begin a business.”
Her husband
. Majid bent towards her, pressed his chin against her scalp. He watched her in the mirror, petted her back slowly, until
she finally turned around. Sat up. “Oh,
Majid,
” Sarie said.

Majid watched his lover’s double in the glass rest her head against his shoulder. What was happening between them? What was
changing in this room? Was that a bruise now forming on his cheek? Had he bruised her, too? A little breeze came in; the central
page of his new notebook stood up straight, then slowly fell again.
Mrs. Turner is going into business
. He didn’t know quite what she meant, but he was glad for her, of course. “When you are in business, Sarie Turner, will your
husband need you always? Will you be too occupied to visit me instead?”

The air seemed regular again. But he also felt another thing.
Was it a kind of ache? Was she leaving him behind? What lay in wait for him, if Sarie became wealthy,
Once
, he thought,
once all of this ends?
He hadn’t thought of ends before, not clearly. He’d been caught up in beginnings. But what would happen when she went back
to her husband, Mr. Turner,
Gilbert?
It struck Majid that Sarie must, sometime. He felt kindly, sweetly sad. Yes, even wistful, though she wasn’t gone. What would
he do then?

When she told him about Gilbert and the spare-parts business plan, that Gilbert wished to meet him, Majid was, at first, incredulous.
He didn’t want to hear it. But Sarie, head still hurting, digging at her palms with her fingernails again, would not be deterred.
She talked and talked and talked until Majid felt—just as he had felt her push him down onto the bed, just as he had felt
her bite him—an awful logic taking hold. A force swelling from her eyes, her arms, and even from that boiling place between
her legs, to settle on his shoulders like a coat, transform him. He touched her as she spoke, as if he could find the source
of Sarie’s talking with his hands and stop it, gently roll and tamp it down with a forefinger and thumb. She let him press
himself around and into and all over her while she repeated like a little song that there was no other way. That it was the
best thing, for him, and for herself That the accident had brought them all together so a new thing could be formed.

“You shouldn’t do this,” Majid said, “not for me.”

But Sarie shook her head even as she finally responded to his hands and wrapped her arms around him, very tenderly this time.
“We need you, Majid. It is not all for you.”

He stopped saying no, and Sarie, for a moment, felt a bit like her old self again. She giggled in relief

Majid held her, stroked her hair, and she kissed him as she had when the thing between them had just got off the ground, as
though approaching from a distance. Majid held her elbows lightly
with his hands, as if he did not know them. But in the midst of their leave-taking, Sarie left a mark on Majid’s throat with
her strong teeth. Darker than the stain she’d left upon his cheek, it was a bruise that would turn black. She hoped that mark
would stay. That when Majid came to tea and met her husband in her home, she could look at it and not feel so afraid.

Majid did not get up to bathe, did not get up to see her hurry down the alleyway and out into the street. Feeling that the
world had given a great lurch and stopped, was hovering midspin, he closed his eyes and slept. Maria, stripping coconuts of
hair on a straw mat while Tahir, worn from his exertions, dozed and stretched beside her, watched Sarie Turner leaving from
a corner in the courtyard. Sarie didn’t greet her, and Maria didn’t speak.

Outside in the sun, Sarie nodded at the thoroughfares: Libya, Mosque, Mahaba. And just there, off towards the seafront, a
short and narrow thing, was India Street, by Hisham’s Food and Drink, where it had all begun. She said this to herself:
Nothing, nothing, nothing, there’s nothing here at all
. She didn’t go straight home. No. She walked along the harbor, passing the Victorian Palm, the Court House, and the Gymkhana.
She went up a little farther and turned to look just once at the Mountain Top Hotel. Farther down, where a low, neat fence
held a rich and well-cut froth of fine white bougainvillea, Sarie strode into an office. At the British Council, she wrote
a number down and left behind a letter.

Twenty-four

W
hen Majid came back from that first tea with Sarie Turner and her husband, the neighborhood was dark. The electricity was
gone. In the steady light of a Dietz lamp, he found Sugra in the parlor reading an old novel. His walk home had made him lonely.
Slipping off his shoes, he thought,
How faithful Sugra is
.

The air smelled very slightly of rose powder. Majid sighed. Sugra’s smell made him think of plenty, the possibility of which
he’d glimpsed that very afternoon. He thought again about what he would do if he had any funds: books for his last son, a
pigeon coop, some good trees for the courtyard, perhaps eventually a paper once again. And other things besides.