The Blue Taxi (48 page)

Sugra looked up from her book and welcomed him. “And so? You’re never home these days! I’ll have to stop my visits. There’s
no one here to see. Your boy is always walking. One day I’ll come up and even Tahir will be gone.” Majid thought how pleasant
it was to be teased like that, in a gentle woman’s voice. And how sly and brave she was to think ahead, of Tahir in the world.
“Come on, come on, Ghuji-with-the-secret. Where is it you’ve been?” Teasing, Majid thought, was a central part of love. He
thought about how Sarie Turner had done many things for him, had seen him at his barest. She’d petted him and smiled at him
and held his hands in hers. But had she ever teased him?

He went to sit beside her. “I’ve been to a tea.”

Sugra closed the book and set it on the table. She looked at him
with interest. A tea! She liked the thought of that. Her father, in his day, accompanied by Majid’s, had gone to one or two;
and so had even, at least once, her mother. Not much good for ladies, it was said, white women with their arms as bare as
day but with their hands in gloves the way a doctor’s were, and all that mixing with the bachelors. Oh, but for the men! In
other days, an invitation to a tea might have portended, yes, inestimable things. The Aga Khan, Sugra was sure, had also been
to many. Had even drunk champagne and chatted with great men. So had the brilliant Topans and some dozen Jeevanjees. Was a
tea what it once was? “Ghuji, how exciting! With your English woman-friend? Tell me all about it.” Oh, Majid
was
getting better, surely.

Majid set her straight. It mattered to him suddenly that he be precise. Belgian Sarie was not English. Mrs. Turner’s husband
was. “Gilbert Turner,” Majid said. “He’s the English one.”

A husband!
Sugra thought. Dismissing the announcement of the woman’s nationality, Sugra paused. Sarie Turner, not a widow? Had she misunderstood
the Englishwoman’s trembling on the settee? Had she conjured up a love affair where there wasn’t one? Or… did the husband
not matter at all? A husband! Sugra wasn’t sure she liked such complicated things. All for love, she was, legitimized or no.
But she had standards, too. She frowned a little at her cousin. She’d get details from him later. But, still, she thought.
Nevermind for now. There had been a tea. “Tell me who was there.” And so Majid told her.

Mrs. Turner and her husband. “Yes, only just the two.” In a reconditioned flat on Mchanganyiko Street, in a building that
had lots and lots of tenants. Fine, just fine, it was. A home. Not as nice as Kudra House once was, but, still, a piano in
the parlor, a picture, he had thought, of the British queen.

While Sarie—
Sarie
, Majid thought—gloomed and loomed
about in shadows, almost like a ghost, a shade, not quite as he remembered (this he did not say), Mr. Turner had, he said,
shown off all his books. Sugra liked the thought of books and she asked Majid about them. She tucked her legs beneath her
on her seat. Leaned in. Lots of them, he told her. Coastal history, Indian Ocean fish, agricultural statistics, and even one,
a pamphlet, all about Bohoras, which he had found amusing. And they had talked about… He mumbled, paused, was not sure where
to start.

Sugra interrupted. Surely at a tea there would be at least a small variety of cakes, a splendid table done up on a lawn. “What
was there to eat?” Sugra cared for sweets as much as she did news and books, as much as she did for Majid and the boys. And
she ate them so rarely. “The food?” Yes, Majid told her, there had been a cake. But not a very sweet one (something, he’d
been told, Sarie had picked up from a certain nurse). An American treat, Gilbert had said. “Banana bread,” Sarie had explained,
voice almost too steady, looking at her husband. Not a cake, but bread. Sarie had not eaten any. From her seat at the piano,
she had not looked at him at all. Had treated him, in fact, like an acquaintance of her husband’s. And it had made him, oddly,
free to be there, in a way he had not quite expected. This Majid did not say.

Still thinking of the cake, Sugra cocked her head. “Just one? Your friend made it herself?” She wanted to know this, had long
been under the impression that British women did not learn how to cook. Therefore there were Chinese restaurants with linen
cloths and waiters, clubhouses, marinas, men and girls employed to stew and fry, make tea.

Majid sighed, and told her that the cake was not important. He had been sensitive enough to see that Sarie or her husband
had gone to the expense of flour and some (too little) sugar and had hoped that he would find it tasty. He had saved a lump
of it for
Tahir, and as Sugra, looking sour, spoke, he felt aware of it, wrapped in ancient news, heavy, dampening his pocket. He rearranged
his bony hips so as not to crush it, would keep it in his trousers until Sugra had gone home. No lemon loaf, no cupcakes,
no Scottish shortbread from a tin.

They had talked about… Majid paused. Sugra watched him like a teacher, as she’d looked at Tahir when explaining how to walk.
“Well,” said Majid, thinking that if he stated it out loud, a few times, even, perhaps it would not sound to him as peculiar
as it felt. “Here is what he said.” Mr. Turner had proposed that Majid Ghulam assist him in a business. Keep his eyes peeled,
so to speak. An ear down to the ground. Send customers his way. Advise him now and then. On commission. For, eventually, a
share. While Majid’s too-full stomach turned and rolled inside him—the anxious settling, the undoing, of a sharp excitement
he had felt when Gilbert Turner finally let him go—Sugra began, softly first, then fiercely, to twinkle in the dark. He did
not know where to look. “A business!”

“Me? Assistant to an Englishman? It’s not possible,” he said.

But Sugra set him straight. Right before his eyes, Sugra turned the tea, which had made him feel so strange, confused, elated,
frightened, shy, into a wonderful event. He was not, after all, she said, repulsing any cisternful of brothers who were eager
to help out. Not much coming from that side. Crumbs, the jetsam. As if he needed a reminder, she said to him plainly: “You’ve
lost every fine and fancy thing that anyone has ever placed into your hands.”

Majid squirmed beneath his eager cousin’s gaze. Massaging his old stomach, he wondered for a moment if Sarie Turner, too,
had once been fine, or fancy. If Tahir’s leg had been his to lose or find. Sugra’s fingers quivered as she spoke. Her voice
rose. Majid looked away, thought,
She is brighter than that lamp, and I can neither blow her
out nor turn her flickering down
. What was happening to him? In passing, he wondered if the lines might find their way into a poem, something he might title
Brightness
. How dissipated, unpredictable, he felt!

Sugra, once she’d started on a thing, was difficult to stop. “You have scared too many people. There is no one else for you,”
she said. “Why not a British man for once?” It was true. Sugra knew—in a way that Majid himself didn’t, that the boys could
not, and much more keenly than even Bibi did, because Sugra had cared for him and also for his wife—Sugra knew exactly how
those long nine years had been. Even Sugra’s husband, who was very soft on her despite all of his rules, who helped all kinds
of people, had drawn the line at Majid. And all those talky aunts, he thought again, had come to visit Tahir and his missing-leg-below-the-knee
because they liked tragic news the best. The brothers, who should have minded him the most, those who could say “no matter
what,” with feeling, had one by one, too long ago, made their way abroad. More quietly, more seriously, Sugra said to him,
“There’s no one else, Ghuji. You must give this some thought.”

Sugra had to go. She gathered up her handbag (vinyl, not unlike Mrs. Turner’s) and the paperback she’d brought to read if
Tahir fell asleep. She left him with a warning that Majid took to heart, though he would ever be uncertain as to which Turner
it applied: “You never know,” said Sugra, “just who might be an angel in disguise.”

Had it not been for Sugra, he might have let the whole thing go. He might have urged Sarie to come back to him, to what had
been before. That evening he missed Sarie with his loins but also with his heart. This, he thought, he could not, could not,
do. He would ask her to return, forget her awful plan. The peculiar afternoon at Mchanganyiko Street would become no more
than
something awkward to recall. Something they might laugh at or, even better, never talk about again. He’d felt a bit of guilt,
of course, at talking with her husband. But what was most awkward for Majid, and he knew it, was principally this: he had
experienced pleasure, too—pleasure at her Gilbert, Mr. Turner, treating him so nicely.

At first Majid had been nervous. Gilbert opened the discussion with: “My wife has told me much about you.” Majid wondered
what, and felt his skin go cold. For a moment he had asked himself if Sarie had not trapped him into something else, a weird
uxorial play. Had brought him there to trick and to expose him. But, no, of course she wouldn’t. Had he not pressed himself
inside that very woman and felt her teeth graze his? Did he not know her ribs and spine and the diameter, the rubbery weight,
of Sarie’s open thighs? She wouldn’t trick him so. She couldn’t.

Sarie, for once, had been wearing a long skirt, a gray thing topped by a blue blouse with sleeves that came right down to
her wrists. The color made Sarie’s eyes very light and clear, like sea-water in shallow places where the sand is clean and
white. From the doorway of the kitchen, she stole a glance at Majid. Her mouth moved. She looked fragile, glassy. As though
she might at any moment throw herself at someone—Gilbert? Majid?—and shatter or collapse. He had looked at her and had attempted
by his looking to make Sarie a bit stronger.
It’s going to be all right
, he thought.
It must
.

He had turned back to Mr. Turner, squared his torso—and although Sarie hadn’t told him very much at all, although wives and
husbands had been left out of the thing, been pushed into the corner by the thrashing of their limbs, he had answered, fearless,
“She has said good things about you, too.” At this, Gilbert had smiled.

After letting Sarie pour for him another cup of tea, Majid had felt better, told himself that there was something reassuring
in
being made so welcome not only by Sarie Turner but her husband—balding, pink-faced, chatty (
Gentle
, Majid thought) Gilbert Turner. He discovered that he felt no jealousy for Gilbert. He did not begrudge this man any rights
to Sarie’s body—he didn’t wish to take her from him. Watching Gilbert as he now and then looked at his wife, attempting to
see Sarie through her husband’s eyes, Majid wondered, without any unkindness, without any sense of triumph, whether, had he
seen Sarie Turner on the street, without the accident, without her coming up the stairs on her own steam, he would have sought
her out. Majid wasn’t sure. When he looked up at her again, the woman he had fondled only days before in his own house had
disappeared into her kitchen, and bit by bit a strange thing happened. Majid became so comfortable in that front room with
the piano and the bookshelves and the droning sound of Sarie pacing in the kitchen that he eventually felt at ease.

Gilbert was both formal, and giddy like a boy. His flattery did Majid good.
She’s married a kind man
, thought Majid, and, oddly, he approved. As though he himself had given her away. When Gilbert said, “Sarie lets me understand
that you are not presently engaged, am I correct in thinking this?” Majid didn’t, out of meanness or for pleasure, say (and
he could have, his English was as good as Gilbert’s, better even, yes), “No, no! We aren’t engaged, dear sir, we are not
that
far along,” though this was the kind of sarcasm he might not so long ago have turned against his kin. No, he didn’t dare.
In fact, he had no wish to.

When Gilbert bravely, clearly, said, “I have been thinking for some time now of going into business,” Majid didn’t even say,
“In these times? A business?” In fact, a lot of people
were
in business; they just didn’t let it show. He simply said, “A-laa.” And “Oh.” In the kitchen, Sarie’s pacing sounded now
like the tattoo of an army on the march.

Gilbert heard her pacing, too; he was buoyed by Sarie’s feet. She was, he thought, keeping time with him, pacing out their
future. He recalled how still she’d been all week, and he was glad to hear there was some motion left in her.
She’s come to terms with this
, he thought.
She’ll buck up any day
. When Gilbert said, a little coy, “I am thinking of spare parts. You know, for the cars,” Majid said, “I see.” In the kitchen,
Sarie’s eyes went blank. She listened, leaning in the doorway, where the thick vanilla-colored paint against her arm and cheek
was unyielding and cold. She spread her toes along the flat, smooth tile to keep herself in check.

In a voice so sure that Sarie wondered briefly what third man had slipped into the room, Gilbert Turner said, sounding for
a moment exactly like his wife, “I have always dreamed of doing something for the motors.” And Majid said, “I see,” again.
Sarie let them talk for as long as she could stand it, then came back into the room and sat at the piano, where she played
with her own hands, with the long drape of her skirt, and tried not to look up.

Majid could not remember clearly how the afternoon had ended, what Gilbert had explained, or how he had responded. He did
recall that when it was time for him to go, Sarie had stood at a respectful distance from him in the doorway and offered him
her hand. “Thank you very much for coming, Mr. Jeevanjee,” she said. And softly, “Do consider Gilbert’s proposition.” He had
felt his lover’s eyes burning on his cheeks but was not at all disturbed to hear Sarie speak her husband’s name.
Gilbert
, he thought. Not an awful sound, though he would have been hard-pressed to place it in a poem.

As Gilbert moved into the hallway to accompany him a bit, Sarie, still holding to the door, called out, “Give Agatha’s regards
to your youngest boy. To Tahir.” He could see how difficult it was for her. He had almost reached out for her shoulder, thought
to rest his
fingers on her cheek, but didn’t. That wouldn’t do at all. Gilbert stood, excited, at his side and said he would accompany
him part of the way home. On that first walk with Gilbert, down Mchanganyiko and Mahaba, up to Mosque Street, not certain
why it should surprise him, Majid sensed, of all unexpected things, a generosity in Gilbert. Sarie’s husband: a nice man.
He had walked home in a daze.