Authors: N. S. Köenings
Majid Ghulam leaned back a bit. His fingers loosened. Perhaps because in this half-waking state he was not quite himself,
or perhaps because he found her height, her freckles, and her forthrightness refreshing, Majid Ghulam—who
was
unkind when the right opportunity arose—felt that he had been presented with a rare occasion to which he should rise, sensed
that something different had come. “Well. You are Mrs. Turner.” Sarie answered, “Yes.”
When faced with an odd happening, still moving in a funk, one can sometimes resort to ritual and rules. Drawing on the manners
he had witnessed in his father and his wife, this Majid Ghulam did. As though expecting waiters or the members of a staff,
he looked briefly away. He then turned back to her and said, “Maria will bring tea.” Sarie nodded, was impressed.
Ils ont une servante
, she thought. Her voice a little like the voices of British ladies she had known once and not liked very much, Sarie said,
“Oh, tea. Yes, I am sure that will be nice. Yes. Thank you.” She plucked at her gray hem and noticed gratefully in passing
that Agatha was sitting well and looked appropriately polite.
Next there appeared Maria, plump and sturdy, thick-ankled and dour, bringing tea in a red thermos that entirely by accident
matched the color of her headscarf. Because the Jeevanjees never had real guests—or hadn’t, once Hayaam was gone—and the few
relations who still came knew to bring refreshments of their own, Maria, understanding that this was an Occasion, had also
brought up seven rare kaimati balls she had acquired the day before and had been saving for herself; though once she’d set
them down, she had a second thought. While Sarie didn’t notice, Maria (who was not an ordinary Christian, who had recently
been
saved
) looked her down and up, lingered on
that leg
, and made up her own mind. She set the dumplings on the table with a clatter, wished she hadn’t brought them, gave Agatha
a warning look as if to say,
And these are not for you
, then pounded down the stairs.
Sarie, who didn’t get enough sweet things at home, though she loved them so, was agreeably surprised. “What sweets!” she thought,
and said aloud. She did enjoy kaimati! Majid Ghulam blinked. He gestured towards the plate, and Sarie, who had wished to be
good-mannered, had wanted to act right, forgot herself a bit. It was good to be polite, but Sarie’s mouth was singing:
Sugar! Oil!
She ate four in quick succession. Majid Ghulam was not upset. He’d forgotten what guests should be. His own mouth moved a
bit as Sarie chewed and chewed. He felt that he should speak.
Unused to teatime’s polished back-and-forth, he felt something in himself come loose, a pain that had been sticking in his
heart. He’d tell
her
. She’d listen, yes she might. It was something he’d been longing to announce, an indignation for which the aunts (who’d come
to visit little Tahir out of duty and because their greatest pleasures sometimes lay in other people’s grief) had chastised
him. “So petty!” they had said. “Think of what’s important! Don’t dawdle on what’s done!
Do
something instead!” He had been, without
knowing it, perhaps, longing for an audience. Tasteless, possibly, too soon? But how often was he faced with someone who had
come explicitly to sympathize with him? Why accept a guest at all if doing so did not bring the host relief? What Majid Ghulam
told Sarie was a story that, had the
Kikanga Flash
still lived, would have taken the front page. Gesturing to the calamity that had brought her to the house without naming
it directly, Majid Ghulam talked about the shoe, the very shoe that Agatha had loosened and laced up, and which had, in the
end, been lost.
He leaned forward, placed one hand on the table and one on his own knee. “Do you know what? Do you know what, Mrs. Turner?”
Sarie made a listening sound, a
hm?
Like this, Majid Ghulam explained: while he had gotten most of his son back from the doctor, he had not retrieved the second
Bata shoe. “They kept the shoe!” he said. He paused. Sarie, eating, nodded, and Majid Ghulam went on, surprised at his own
speech, the active, busy sound of it, pouring from his throat into his ears and hers and the front room. Sure, the doctor
was embarrassed. But Majid felt that he was being had, was hurt. “They were lying, I believe, you see. How could a shoe be
lost?” While Sarie chewed and swallowed, careful, Majid Ghulam puffed out his meager chest and gestured with his hands. Above
his head the ticking clock approved. “Right in front of me, he called up all the nurses for a scene.” Majid Ghulam pressed
his lips together and worked his aching jaw. Sarie wiped her fingertips, leaned forward.
She could picture hospitals, of course, could muster up enthusiasm for talk about their failings, and she felt reassured.
He is telling me a story. Things are going well
. She smiled at Mr. Jeevanjee, and, bolstered by her silence and the kind look on her face, he spilled out the rest: how the
nurses quaked and trembled in the hallway, bit
their lips in sorrow, shook their practiced heads. And how, despite the for-show-finger-wagging and one or two quick winks,
the doctor was unable to extract from them an answer. “Nobody would say, Madam!” Majid Ghulam told her. His voice suddenly
grew soft then, no longer quite a storyteller’s voice but rather like the voice of someone who has been telling a tall tale
and all at once recalls that it is not tall, but true. He looked away from her. “None of them spoke up. Told me best I should
forget.” Sarie made a pleasant listener’s noise. He raised his head again and fixed her in his sights, as though she alone
could help him. “They said, ‘What is it with the shoe?’”
Sarie thought how long it was since anyone had thought of her as “Madam.” It made her sweet and calm. She looked down at Agatha
and wondered if she’d noticed, but Agatha, who was looking at the plate, hadn’t heard a word. Sarie turned back to her host.
Aware of Mr. Jeevanjee’s bright eyes, she told herself
I must be sympathetic
. She redoubled her support. “It’s terrible!” she said. “So sorry!” She could see the man had suffered. She did think (ever
practical),
What is a boy without a leg to need a second shoe?
But she was wise enough just then to keep that to herself Bata shoes
were
fine. She said, “Terrible,” again.
An aside. What several people at the clinic knew but had not said was this: a mild but inexperienced orderly whose own father’s
leg had been devoured by gangrene had slipped that Bata shoe from Tahir’s dead leg in the night. The dead leg was a right
leg, after all, as his father’s at home was. Perhaps that little shoe could fit his barefoot dad! But he’d miscalculated things.
His father’s foot was small, it’s true, but not that small, and the shoe now like a rotted fruit or secret sat smelly and
accusing beneath the worker’s bed. Absconding with a dead man’s hat or coat might be one thing,
but this! Stealing from the dead leg of a little boy whose other parts were very much alive! Well, that was harder to admit
to; he was too ashamed to bring the item back.
But the fact of this small sin—if sin it was at all—neither Sarie nor her host could know. And it really didn’t matter. What
Majid Ghulam remembered most, what rankled—he was in the corners of his mind aware that showing too much feeling to a stranger
can turn them speedily against you, and tried to tell this part without being too serious—was how the doctor left things,
how unhelpful he had been. He’d offered Majid Jeevanjee a decorative apology, then moved quickly away from talk of search
and compensation to the future, which, if Majid played his cards right, the doctor thought—of all affronts!—was really rather
bright. “Two arms and one leg! I know some with less! You must be looking now to what he
does
have left, I say.” He’d laid a fawning hand on Majid’s heavy arm (just a little anxious, knowing very well, of course, that
this was Mad Majid). “Come now, my dear sir.” Then, far more intimate, too much, and steering Majid towards the door: “What’s
a shoe,
yakhe
, in the face of life and death?” Majid Ghulam shook his head at Sarie, sighed. “‘What’s a shoe,’ indeed!”
A shoe
is
nothing, in the face of life and death, it’s true. Even Sarie would have said so. But she liked to feel indignant, and it
pleased her that her host was so visibly upset.
He is opening himself
, she thought. Were not Mr. Jeevanjee’s dark eyes undeniably aglisten? Did his voice not seem particularly warm? “Indeed,”
she said. The lost shoe was an insult, yes, it was. A sign of bad times in the land, if people who are meant to heal a child
can’t care for his possessions. And Sarie also felt superior: where
she
had been a nurse, nothing, not a thing, had ever disappeared. (Well, a
person
had, just once, but
that
story is for later, in a little while.) The lost shoe was an abomination, and she said so. The mean echo of a loss that was
already too much to be borne. She shook her head and looked at Mr. Jeevanjee with both her blue eyes wide. “I can’t believe
it,” Sarie said. “I have never heard, exactly, anything like this.”
The shoe theft was thus not, in each and every sphere, an unproductive thing: it joined Sarie to her host. Majid Ghulam was
unaccustomed to arousing tenderness in strangers. What a long time it had been! When Sarie Turner said, “It is truly a surprise
what happens in the world,” he found himself feeling rather soft, and bare. “Yes, indeed, it is,” he said, repeating Sarie’s
words as though they had been issued in a difficult new tongue. “What happens in the world can be truly a surprise.”
While her mother and the father of the boy she’d come to see sat commiserating in their very grown-up way, Agatha, who could
not wait any longer, crept up to the table and took two kaimati for herself, leaving only one behind. Her movement brought
the sugared balls to Majid Ghulam’s attention. And, without knowing what he did—though his late wife would have stopped him—he
plucked the last one up.
What else took place in Kudra House that, though she squinted on the balcony and willed her eyes to grow, Bibi didn’t see?
Not much. A lot. The boys stayed watching in the hallway, whispering through cupped hands. Dutiful Habib had come back from
the shops with biscuits and, holding these, not wanting to interrupt his father, joined Ismail and Ali. As their daring father
placed a sweet ball in his mouth, Ali, the quickest and most wicked, said a racy thing about Sarie Turner’s legs, and Ismail
gave out a long and knowing laugh. Habib, embarrassed, good at seeming even slower than he was, pretended he’d heard nothing.
But Majid Ghulam, aware of rustles in the hall, dusted off the crumbs that had fallen to
his lap, cleared the sugar from his lip with a quick pass of his knuckles, and called out for the Nanjis.
Later, he pulled out an old exemplar of the paper he’d once owned. Sarie was relieved. Despite her bravery with Gilbert, her
insistence that she was more than equal to all things, that she had dealt with many kinds of people in her interesting life,
she did feel out of practice. The newspaper was perfect. It was something she could read, in English. It also gave Majid Ghulam
a simple space on which to focus his bright eyes. He hadn’t meant to ogle Sarie Turner’s legs. In fact, he had not been aware
of doing so until he picked up the last sweet. He didn’t think he had such looking in him—not with Hayaam dead and Tahir broken
practically in two. He was therefore also glad about the paper, which (like many other things) he had not shown anyone in
years. Bringing out from underneath the chair a favorite issue of the old
Kikanga Times
, he thought how proud of it he’d been. “My specialty was poetry,” he said. He tapped the yellowed pages, closed one eye and
pursed his nose and lips to show how seriously he took it. He wished that he owned glasses. “I increased the room for verse.”
Sarie nodded in encouragement, and Majid Ghulam, taken by her kindness, admitted that he had, in long-gone days, written poems
of his own.
Sarie reached out for the paper. She liked a man who made things. Disheveled, this man was, she thought, but, still.
He has a clock that marches! And he writes! He has a girl to bring him up the tea!
Writing, really writing, things that no one else has said, was something to admire, wasn’t it? (Nevermind that Gilbert now
and then submitted ramblings to the Historical Society or threatened to write books.
This
was something else.) And
poetry!
She liked the thought of that. Her freckled face lit up. How well this outing had turned out! She’d not only been
consorting
with the Muslims (for
Gilbert had been right, she thought;
Those names!
) but meeting with, imagine, a thinking, writing man. An intellectual, indeed. “You write
verse!
” she said, knocking one of her big knees against the coffee table but not feeling any pain. “Mr. Jeevanjee, you mean you
are a poet.”
Majid Ghulam raised a hand up to his breast, suddenly embarrassed. “No,” he said, “I am an amateur, that’s all.” But part
of him was pleased. “You are generous,” he said. Ali elbowed Ismail and pointed with his chin. Habib looked away. Their father
the poet! Ali laughed and Ismail shoved him, told him to be still. The grown-ups carried on. Sarie folded up the paper and
handed it to Mr. Jeevanjee. Majid Ghulam urged Nanjis on his guest. Though the kaimati balls had filled her, she took two
to be polite. She twitched a little on the settee, moving her cramped legs.
At last, Majid Ghulam understood. He pulled the coffee table to the side so that Mrs. Turner could stretch her limbs and sit
with greater ease. Sarie sighed. Her big thighs disappeared beneath a dotted hem. She felt seen, and cared for. It was all
right for Mr. Jeevanjee to have been looking at her legs, she thought, if this was how it ended. Perhaps he had been noticing
her thighs so frequently in order to determine how to give her room. What a grand outing, indeed! Sarie, who could pick a
side and stick with it awhile when it occurred to her to do so, decided then and there that not only was her visit so far
a success, but that she
liked
this Mr. Jeevanjee and was having a good time. She felt she should repay him, that it was her turn now to find something
to say. An offering. “I grew up in Jilima,” Sarie said. “The mountains.”