The Blue Taxi (5 page)

Oh, magical Hayaam, reverser of ill fate! For several years, Majid and Hayaam appeared—though no one knew quite how—to prosper,
and those who’d made pronouncements wondered if they had been wrong. Narrow Majid plumpened up and went about with smiles
on. Hayaam glowed and glowed so brightly that in her parents’ eyes her shine made up for what Majid lacked in gold. And the
real shape of success? Proud, dutiful Hayaam fashioned for her dreamy poet-husband three good-sized, noisy kids, all of them
strong boys. “Like you’ll make for my Issa.” Bibi
tapped Nisreen’s long leg with a hand like a warm claw. And Nisreen had giggled, said, “Go on!”

News of Majid’s offspring at first seemed rather fine: from the moment each could move, the boy-children gave signs, as all
Jeevanjees should, of mathematical prowess. They counted everything—toes and beans and stones, and parents—noted down their
totals (30, 3,064, then 8, and a lovely, lovely 2), then counted up again. Plus-plus! Things looked, at last, to be turning
to the good. Had everyone been a bit too quick to speak? Could Majid have some Jeevanjee in him? A slow, small kernel, but
a true one nonetheless, that had simply taken its own time to pop beneath the concentrated sunshine of a brave, sweet-tempered
girl?

Well, no. Alas. Bad-luck men do not turn good-luck just like that. And misfortune leaves a mark that is often hard to separate
from the thing that left it there. The bad luck some thought might have gone away came back to him eightfold or even ten.
Before the tide of talk had turned, before people could too thoroughly forget how they had sworn that to dumb Ghuji nothing
good could ever come, Hayaam and Majid’s boys were forced to learn the sad art of subtraction. When love-of-Majid’s-life Hayaam
set out to get her Ghuji their fourth child, well, just like that, proving now to one and all that M. G. Jeevanjee was nuksi,
kisirani, failure through-and-through, darling Hayaam died. It’s true the fourth boy lived, he did, he was the very one who’d
had four limbs until the week before, so Hayaam’s death was not a thorough minus. But what a loss, indeed. Nisreen gasped,
and Bibi squeezed her hand.

People went right back to naming what was what. Majid Ghulam was not destined to prosper. See how he ruined what he touched.
“Clear as water, don’t you see? The man is not good news.” Bibi then went on to say that Majid’s weak heart had gone sour
and that his mind had suffered, too. “What else could we expect?”
She stretched her neck and brought her hands together. Majid Ghulam went mad. “Crazy, don’t you know? Shouts. Sees things
that aren’t there! The man,” she said, “has had a
short.
” Bibi showed Nisreen exactly what she meant: she slapped her temples with her palms, rolled her eyes back, growled, pointed
in the air at something neither she nor Nisreen saw, and shook her little knees. “Short circuit!” Almond crumbs went flying.
Nisreen had laughed and laughed, then all at once felt tears in her eyes. She’d looked away from Bibi.

Nisreen was not unsusceptible to bad-luck explanations; she knew that misfortunes added up can make a person like a dog, fit
only to be shot. And surely little Tahir Majid’s fall the week before on India Street was not good luck at all. But on some
days, Nisreen turned away from neighbors’ talk of destiny, mixed romance with science. She had read about psychology at school,
and she had private doubts about whether Mr. M. G. Jeevanjee, or anyone, was bad-luck through and through. She wasn’t sure—not
knowing him herself—if he had really lost his mind. Perhaps, she thought, Majid Ghulam’s reported habits (his wandering outside
in the night in nothing but a singlet, his sleeping in all day, his browbeating of passersby, the shouting out of windows,
all since Hayaam’s death) were not the bad luck coming back.
No
, thought generous Nisreen,
they’re signs of love and grief. Majid Ghulam’s depressed
. Nisreen thought that if her man died one day like that, without warning in advance (she thought of Issa and her heart hurt),
she might act strangely, too. Deaths were planned by God and only God, she thought, not by stars or sticky hands, and grief
could bring on madness. If Issa died, would people say that Bibi’s gummy hands had lingered on the food? Nasty mother snuffs
her only son? Worse yet, that poor Nisreen herself, with her froglike, failing eyes, that limp she tried to hide, and, most
telling of all, her
neither-round-nor-swelling stomach, had caused her husband’s doom? Been a bad-luck girl herself?

Nonetheless. It was one thing to look upon M. G. Jeevanjee from safely far away and treat him kindly in her thoughts, another
to agree that he should be sought out. Bad-luck man or no, Majid
was
peculiar. And peculiar men should be kept at one arm’s length, at least. Especially the long and naked arms of Englishwomen
who were not at all informed. For what did Europeans know about the right sort of protection? And, further, like dust fevers
and syphilis, infidelity and hatred, bad-luck-grief-or-madness, or whatever the thing was—would it not be contagious?

At Kikanga Clinic, the high fan twitched, then started up again. Sarie fiddled with the long strap of her purse. Agatha slid
down from her chair and came to stand beside her. While Nisreen considered Sarie and the child, Bibi’s voice resounded in
her ears, with headlines from the
Flash and Times of Sad Majid Ghulam
. Nisreen saw them in her mind. In longhand, teasing script: “Incorrigible!” In bold:“Unpredictable, What’s More!”

Nisreen drummed her fingers on the counter. One last time, should she speak, or not? She couldn’t. She decided to keep quiet.
Sarie Turner, biting at her lip, waiting for a sign, clearly wished very much to go.
Maybe
, thought Nisreen,
maybe fate is hard at work. Who am I to intervene? Let the woman go
. “Well, you’re right. It is very good to go.” Nisreen felt an urge to make the visitors feel especially at ease, tell them
something that they might not know. “He lost that piece of leg, but he will walk again,” she said, nodding at the child. “We
are waiting for his crutches.”

Sarie shivered in the ceiling fan’s new wind. She didn’t like to think it, but she knew that it was true: she
had
wished for encouragement.
She was relieved to get it now. She felt that she had won a battle, small, but nonetheless, with Gilbert and even with this
girl. Sarie stood up straight and laughed, happy, loud. “All right, then.
Merci bien!
” Sarie waved her fingers at Nisreen. “That means ‘thank you,’ “ she explained. “Thank you very much.” Ready to go, too, Agatha
gave each Aga Khan a wink. Nisreen—because what else can be done when a thing has been decided but help destiny along—said,
“You will find it, then. Kudra House. It isn’t very far.”

As Sarie and her daughter stepped out of the cool clinic back into the glare, Nisreen remembered something else. She rose
on her bare toes to see if what they’d told her—what Bibi had repeated all week long, since the crash that
she herself had seen
and her triumph at the phone, what the orderlies had said—was true. It was. Sarie Turner, though decked out in what might
have passed for some people’s best dress, was wearing rubber thongs: worn out at the heel, cracked around the rim, and orange,
exactly as they’d said. For shame! Amazing. Nisreen, more to please her Issa’s mother than from any love of telling tales
herself, made certain no one saw her; then she made a call.

“You’re sure?” Bibi wished to know. “You’re not mistaking one white woman for another? It’s the very same?” Nisreen reassured
her. “She’s left here just now.” Nisreen could tell Bibi was grateful, this a bright spot in her day. “I’m not going to move,
my dear little Nisreen,” she said. Indeed, she was going to settle on the balcony so she could keep her eyes fixed on the
back of Kudra House—which she could see, just there, just a sliver of an alley and a little dab of green, could see as plain
as day—until the sun went down.

Even if she didn’t quite believe everything she heard, Nisreen did like a story. And though she didn’t do it by herself, when
Bibi talked and talked, Nisreen sometimes let her mind play, too, come up with things to wonder. What was going to
happen? She pressed her chin against the handset, smiled into it, and sighed. “She’s going there on foot,” she said. Bibi
was a little disappointed that Sarie Turner did not have a car. “Walking, did you say?” But a walk would let her see the pair,
and it made her think of something. Might not so much sunlight spoil a foreign woman’s brain? Sunstroke was an issue, yes?
Nisreen concurred that Sarie Turner should have worn a hat. What if
she
went mad as well? If Mad Majid harangued her, would she call in the police? Bibi laughed into the telephone (which was not
so strange now, not such a bad thing) and asked, would Sarie Turner—because Englishwomen were often mannish, after all—slap
his face and kick his groins herself?

Bibi had a little more to say before Nisreen hung up. With rapid breath: “That man. Do you know how mad he is?” There it was,
the same old story, what had happened when somebody named Alibhai Mustafa died, trampled by an ox. How a person named Rahman
had asked Majid for a funeral donation and had been kicked out of the house. Bibi told this one a lot. She imitated Mad Majid
Ghulam. “‘Burials are a good-for-nothing waste, Rahman! Death a cruel joke!’” And how the three big sons tipped a bucket down
into the courtyard when their father told them to. “Not human boys, they are! No, devils! I can see him now, can you? Rahman!
And nicely dressed, he was. Wetter than the sea.” Bibi purred, and Nisreen wondered if this poor Rahman—so frequently, so
excitingly, wet through—was really a relation or if Bibi’d made him up. She could almost hear the creaking of excitement in
Bibi’s little neck. “Mad Majid Ghulam,” said Bibi, “is capable of anything. Anything at all.”

Energized, Bibi told Nisreen to please now let her go. She had a balcony to guard.
Let fools reap their foolishness
, she thought,
while others sit and watch
. She stood up from her seat. Before taking
Nisreen’s call, Bibi, having finished the
Al-Fadhil
stitchery and moved on to something else, had been fashioning the bright tail of a peacock at the heart of an old sheet.
As she replaced the telephone and straightened up the doily, Bibi took a hard, long look at that stitched bird. Yes, those
feathers looked quite nice. She paused. She put a hand up to her mouth and tapped her bottom lip.
What if? Perhaps. Just think!

Ever since the miserable boy had been hit by that big and holy bus, Bibi’s pins-and-thread box had taken on a tantalizing
shine. What if in her old age she
were
developing a gift? Granted a reward for having caught so many secrets on her own, unaided by foretelling? Hadn’t she woken
just the day before with a peacock on the brain? A feathered dream with cries that woke her in a sweat? Had she not seen the
bird again on the back wall of her mind when she rolled her soft msala carpet after prayers and pulled on her old dress?

Could it be?
The peacock?
No. Not really. Could it? Bibi pressed a tooth into her lip and moved her mouth around.
Can Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee have any preening left?
Thinking of her balcony and how from it she could now and then distinguish exactly what was what, she stood.
Perhaps, perhaps!
She gave the bird a final squint, a haughty, knowing sniff “Well,” she said into the room. “Anything could happen.” Anything,
indeed.

Three

K
udra House was one of many pastel-colored multistory mansions that had sprung up in Kikanga at the century’s broad middle,
dreams aboil, hopes high. Built by eager and determined people whose grandmothers and -fathers had finally arrived, they had
been proof of joy. Ashok Building, 1931. Hormuz Villa, 1936. Premji Mansion, 1947. Honesty House, 1954. Some mansions bore
the names of sons whose star charts had foretold skill in family trades, or, as with Hormuz Villa, the names of bobbing boys
procured after a gaunt parade of girls. Others were a comment: Honesty House a fearless declaration, Happy House a dare. Others,
like Tanga House, and Kudra House as well, were named after the places whence initial riches came, in sisal or in cloves.

In the days before bad luck grew to be, for some, another name for Independence (and the snatching-up of homes), the houses
in Kikanga had been beautifully kept up. Rich in windows (in some a dozen on each floor), with finely painted shutters and
impeccable facades, some reached out into turrets or bulged roundly at the sides. Many boasted high box balconies made of
well-placed wooden slats, so that prosperous ladies could peep inquisitively out and never once be seen.

In Majid’s father’s time, the houses had been flowers for the city’s thrumming heart, each a light and lovely color set off
by the sun. Hormuz Villa had started out a buttery yellow, Premji Mansion a blue more tender than the sky, the Happy House
a mild
rose-apple pink. Kudra House, a fine example of this earnest building style, had once been painted green—a powdery, smooth
color, like pale pistachio ice cream or a newborn’s knitted socks. But by the time Majid Ghulam’s boy had lost his leg and
Sarie went with Agatha to see him, Kudra House had long been on its way down: it looked more like a ruin.