The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  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

  Kudra 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.

  Thirty years of heavy rains had soured that first green, and now that Kudra House was owned no longer by the Jeevanjees but rather by the State, no funds were left for painting. As if a gigantic woman’s eye had with its weeping bled mascara down the walls, the outer face was streaked with sooty black. The few remaining patches of a sweet, inviolate color battled now with water stains and diesel grime and dust. From gouges in the house-face strange tufted grasses grew. Here and there, the shutters had come loose and, gone to kindling for clever passersby, could not be retrieved. At this window dingy curtains hung, in that, a homely gloom. The wooden balcony had lost many of its slats. If a woman were to sit there, Bibi had once said, a bad-news boy
, if he was smart, could look up from the sidewalk and right into her skirt.

  But still. As Nisreen had promised, Kudra House was not far from the clinic. Beyond the bus stand’s clang and rattle, past the sweet smell of a table where a bearded man made cane juice at a creaking metal press, Agatha and Sarie crossed a narrow alley littered with old things and reached their destination. Sarie coaxed the slip of paper from her purse. At the foot of that once-glowing house, she and Agatha looked up towards the roof and saw the name embossed, which they both read aloud: Kudra House, 1932. Squinting at her mother’s note, Agatha said, “It’s on the second floor.” They found the chipped black doors ajar, and, Sarie, nervous but determined, and Agatha, exceptionally calm, stepped carefully between them.

  They found themselves in a neatly private place. The courtyard was so quiet, the air in it so fresh, that indeed it seemed to Sarie as if the busy streets outside, with Hisham’s Food and Drink, with cool Kikanga Clinic and the dusty ashok trees—with Bibi at her balcony, though Sarie didn’t know it—and even with their own dim flat on Mchanganyiko Street, were very far away. Another world entirely. And although Sarie was accustomed in the courtyard of their building to seeing unknown neighbors’ clothing dangle in the wind, and chickens, and an ancient taxicab that never moved and maybe never had, and wire coils that vanished and appeared, this, a house meant for a single family (a dynasty, in fact, and Sarie, to her credit, vaguely knew that this was so), was something rather different. Closed.

  As in most Kikanga courtyards, there was washing and the waxy, yellow smell of soap. Somewhere, water dripped. Nothing special, then. But perhaps because it served few people, these details seemed to Sarie evidence of comfort and a privacy she could only envy. On a sagging length of twine, two undershirts, bright white, surrendered to the breeze. An orange gown with ruffled sleeves swung lightly to and fro. A violet skirt, with pleats. There were also modest signs of care: flowers growing out of tins; ten o’clock roses, crimson, that had already closed; violet brinjal blooms; a slender pepper plant. In the gutter just along the wall, a breadfruit seedling toiled, twin leaves, new and languid, just starting to unfurl.

  A white cat with a tufted coat and several bald spots stepped into the courtyard from the street, which Sarie had already forgotten. Attracted by its sores, Agatha bent to touch it and it fled, a wary glow in its pale eye. From up above, in the still and quiet air, a parrot hollered, “Who’s there, who’s there, who?” Agatha, with her sharp ears, imagined that she heard a scurrying of feet. In her mind’s unformed eye, she saw girls with blue-black braids move swiftly to a kitchen where they would ably squeeze up juice. She thought she heard the soft, seductive scrape of a brand-new biscuit tin being taken from a shelf. But Agatha, unlike Bibi, was not yet on the verge of discovering a gift. She was wrong about the girls. As Nisreen could have told her, Kudra House had none.

  Sarie, stepping backwards, caught her flip-flop on a stone. She stumbled, tilted her strong chin towards the roof The parrot cried again. “It is Mrs. Turner here!” Sarie called, long neck arched, and waited. At first more swollen silence and a thickness in the air. Then came a response. A lean boy, bright-eyed and bare-shouldered, hair ashine with dressing even in that dusty light, leaned out over the windowsill and grinned. He spoke quickly, brightly. Sarie did not understand. The ground uneven at her feet, she almost fell again. She swooped both hands towards her hips and up, found her balance for a moment. “We’ve come to—“ she began. But when Sarie had stood tall, smoothed her dress, and looked up to him again, the boy had disappeared.

  There was a scuffling in the stairwell, one soft thud then another—the hot sound (Agatha imagined) of a boy pulling on a cotton shirt and buttoning it up as he moved down the steps. And then, beaming, smelling of fresh aftershave (lemons, pepper, glue), Ismail Majid Jeevanjee—the oldest of the sons whose birth had caused no grief—stood expectantly before them. Sarie thought to introduce herself again, but with a graceful sweep of a long arm, the boy showed them up the stairs as if he already knew exactly who she was. (He did. Words travel, after all. This must be the woman who had braved the road in her cheap shoes and whispered spells into his brother’s ear while that little girl of hers sat fooling on the sidewalk with the sorry, severed limb.)

  They did have biscuits, in the end. Majid’s big boy number three—heavy, slow Habib, with great sad eyes and a soft gut—was sent out to the shops to fetch a roll of Nanjis. The downstairs neighbor (Maria, loyal, Christian, sour, owner of the vivid orange gown) was dispatched to make tea by Majid’s second son: thin, sharp-tongued Ali, who called down to Maria from the balcony (“Oh! Maria, weh!”) without so much as a please. Smooth Ismail, who as number one was wiser if not better than the rest, dutifully took charge and went to rouse his father. Next, yawning in a singlet, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee emerged to greet his guests.

  Mad Majid in the flesh. How would Bibi have reacted, presented with this body? This waker did not look emphatically unhinged. Not quite the debauched crazy. Rather, he looked tired. Majid Ghulam, or Mr. Jeevanjee, as Sarie called him for a time, was not as mad, not anymore, at least, as Bibi had made him out to be and not as helpless as Nisreen had thought. Their theories, founded principally in any case on hearsay, had not kept up with the times. Oh, he had grief and fury in him, yes, in pounds, in pishis and frasilas, many hundredweight. Majid had not been lucky. But, while the first few years of widowhood had certainly entailed the ravages that Bibi could recall—Rahman, the insults, the wild waving of arms, the giving-up-on-bathing, the shouting in the street, and other things, and more—long grief had also, finally, brought a quietness in him, something like a dullness, which neighbors with a taste for stories full of action did not think to bring up (quiet, after all, was not much good discussing). This Jeevanjee was tired. Widowhood and failure had snuffed the brightest of the glow he’d had as a poem-peddling youth, as the owner of a rag; and the loss of little Tahir’s leg-below-the-knee had been a wild and unexpected blow, smarted every time he passed the bedroom where the recovering boy still slept, every time he woke. How could such a thing not further test a hopeless, brooding pa? Even Sarie noticed that the man seemed pretty glum.

  He’d just risen from a nap, and, scratching dumbly at his chest, Mad Majid was just then neither dangerous nor mad, but a tired picture of great sorrow. He came out from his bedroom slowly, an old and rumpled dress shirt trailing in his hand. He stood bleary in the hallway for a moment, pulled one sleeve up clean, and struggled with the other. His long, bare arms were bony. He did not quite understand who the woman was, not yet, and he did not look Sarie fully in the face until he had buttoned up his shirt (not well, not ably: second button at first hole). Before raising his head, he rubbed his stubbled chin and cracked his square, hard jaw, eyeing the chipped floor with a dazed air, as if remembering a stain.

  Sarie briefly felt that they should not have come. The strange man had been sleeping, after all, and deeply, so it seemed from how his eyes looked narrow and his mouth a little caked. And surely he was worried for his youngest son. Sarie swallowed lightly, dryly, and her lips twitched taut and back a moment, like a person who has privately become aware of making a mistake and hopes no one will see. Perhaps the boy was worse, not as well as the receptionist had promised.

  In another room, the unseen parrot squawked. Majid Ghulam, looking up at last, could not suppress a yawn. In bed, he had been dreaming a sharp dream—a dream with a blue rainstorm, a brass coffee set with cups, a fountain pen. A doctor without arms had been hopping over puddles. In sleep he had acquired the impression of himself in a costume, in a cumbrous, feathery suit, trying something, trying. Ankle-deep in water, he’d felt tiny creatures slither round his feet. A sucking at his knees. Watching the pale woman in his hallway (a nervous presence, polka-dotted, pearly in the frowsy light), Majid Ghulam, not yet abandoned by the dream, felt confronted by a beast. Part giraffe, part camel. How single-toned this woman was, and tall! A foot taller than he was, at least. Was the woman real? He
had to tilt his head. A view: Sarie’s dappled skin brought him closer to the world; he was startled by her freckles. Majid Ghulam passed a wrist bone hard against his mouth, then, unexpectedly, gave Sarie a smile.

  It might have been a grimace, but it made Sarie feel more confident, and hardy. She plucked once at the fabric of her dress to right the narrow skirt. She took a preparatory breath of chalky, windless air and leaned in towards the man, ardently extending her right hand, which Majid Ghulam took and then, dismayed by its heat, perhaps, by the fact that it was real, let go rather quickly. She thought: I am intended to be here! I will make this a success!

  They spoke at the same time. Sarie’s voice was earnest, loud. “We came—”

  Majid Ghulam, remembering as though from another long-gone dream the gestures of respect, placed two hands flat against his breast and bowed his head politely. “Welcome—”

  Sarie, unsettled by the elegance of Mr. Jeevanjee’s address, lost her train of thought. She shifted all her weight from side to side and back. She said, “I am Mrs. Turner.” And then, “Your son.” She was glad she’d written the names down. “Tahir.” She did not know what to say next.

  “Mrs. Turner. Ah,” Majid Ghulam said. Sarie said, “The clinic.” Majid Ghulam now understood that she had come about the boy. His heart rose for a moment—had she come about the crutches? Was it still too soon for that? But Sarie said, “The accident.” Behind her, she felt Agatha’s cool shape atwitch. She gestured to her child. “My daughter.” Agatha frowned up at him, then bit her lip and smiled. Sarie’s big eyes widened. “We were there, you understand?”