Sugra shrugged and smiled. “Well, now, that no one can say. Today Majid has surprised us. Who knows when he will come? But, look. Why don’t we have tea? I will call down for Maria.”
That she was on the verge of reenacting with his cousin what she had done with Majid Jeevanjee on that first day gave Sarie a chill. And thinking of Maria made her angry—elle m’a joué un tour! she thought. No, she did not want to stay. And was furthermore surprised by what she did want: to be safe at home again. With Agatha in bed and Gilbert reading in the parlor. With the things she understood, and no strangers to see her. She could not have tea with Sugra, wished she’d never come. “No. No, thank you. Please,” she said. “I can’t.” Sarie got up roughly, feeling as she pushed the table back that a skin was falling from her. She called loudly out for Agatha and, without waiting for her, hurried down the stairs.
Around the corner, deeply satisfied, Maria turned the taps and slapped at soaking things. Sugra leaned out of the window, looking sweetly down: “It was good to meet you, Mrs. Turner! Welcome, welcome. When will you come back?”
For Majid, the day Sarie met Sugra was the day he fell out of the past, through the unexpected now (which had never been as still for him as it had been for his lover), and into something that, while not quite yet a future, was absolutely new. It was the day, he would later recall, that he’d come back to life. That morning, Majid had woken early, bathed, and, for the first time in many years, since not long after Tahir’s birth, which was also Hayaam’s death, said prayers at a mosque. He did not choose the grandiose masjid he had frequented in the past, the towered place beyond Mbuyu Mmoja Park, where he could count on seeing people he’d once known and been close to, people who had grown up with Hayaam or loved her. That, he was not certain he could bear. Majid had started small. He walked out to the mosque that gave the name to Mosque Street, the high, white, crenellated thing around the corner from his house, the mosque whose prayer call had taught the parrot almost all the words it knew.
Majid understood the value of small signs, the first slow, tender steps. It doesn’t matter where I go, he thought. It’s the going-out at all. Any mosque, any mosque, would do—and better, really, not to go to the old place, the real place, right away. Wouldn’t it be easier, if this was really a fresh start, to go first to a little world where he was not well known? He entered the gates bravely, gave each mendicant a coin.
At the white-tiled water tanks just inside the walls, Majid washed his hands and feet with other city men, exchanging simple greetings, acknowledging their presence, nodding as he should. Majid didn’t know it, but the first to say hello was the very coffee salesman whose coals had toppled when the Al-Fadhil-bearing bus had borne down on his son. The coffee salesman, to whom most men of Majid’s age and pedigree looked very much alike, didn’t know it, either, though something in Majid made the man feel kind. They asked after each other’s families and smiled afterwards, sincerely. Whatever happened outside of the gates, however split up and on-what-side-of-what-fence, it was good to be together.
In the cool, high, vaulted space, Majid prayed with thirty sleepy men, standing, bowing, touching his bare forehead to the floor mat, where, with a little wave of pleasure, he noted the bare toes of the men ahead of him. How soft and silly men’s feet were when seen from underneath. How every man’s were different! Knobby, slender, stunted, bruised, fine, long, or very small. But also, yes, how very much the same. Just toes on sleepy feet. The synchronic standing, bowing, rising, the way he felt alone and not alone, all of that joint motion and joint stillness, soothed him. Amin, amin. His own worship ended, Majid walked out slowly to the steps. Before he left, he turned towards the mirhab. Other men were still arriving. Some sat down and stretched their legs along the thick layers of palm mats, opened books and read. Still others curled up in the corners, thinking they might sleep. Majid, who had stayed inside the rooms of Kudra House for so many private years, felt shy. At last, he found his shoes among the dozens at the door. Pausing at the steps, he straightened up his cap as men continued milling, washing, entering and going on their way. Of course such things went on! But how he had forgotten.
Afterwards, he was glad that no one knew him. That no one there was close enough to what he had once been to say, to themselves or to another, “Look, it’s Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, crazy Mad Majid, who couldn’t grieve his wife and go on with his life. A-laa? I thought he was dead.” Because just then Majid felt anything but dead, and not entirely crazy. As he’d walked out into the morning, the air had seemed particularly fresh. He’d looked up Mosque Street and then down, and thought: I know each end of this. To Libya. And beyond that to the park. On the other side, the sea. A litter woman passed him and he smiled, not at her, exactly—in fact, she didn’t see him, bent over as she was, seeking husks and crumpled bits of tin—but at the thought of her. At the thought of people who rose before the dawn and did things. He’d once risen early, too, each day; had had a sense of duty, worked at things. Looking at Kikanga, Majid felt ashamed and proud at the same time. Ashamed at how hard other people worked, and proud, proud that he had come. The feeling made him think about the Bata shoe that Tahir had never gotten back, the shoe whose loss he’d felt so keenly, and the doctor who had said, “What’s a shoe, yakhe, in the face of life and death?” He wondered where it was, but this wondering did not, he found, upset him as it had. Perhaps the doctor had a point. What if life was bigger? Those doctors, Majid thought. Maybe they work hard.
He’d been about to turn up Mosque Street, heading home because he didn’t know what else to do, when something oddly reminiscent of Hayaam made him stop and stand still at the corner. Not a vision, not Hayaam herself nor the woman-like-and-not-like-her who had sat beside him in the bedroom and looked at those old clothes on that painful, painful day. Nothing so outlined or so firm, but a soft sensation in the corner of his eyes, at the edges of his skin. Out of reach, but there. As if in this great world he was not really alone. The impression that he was accompanied by something other than himself brought into relief, and altered, how the shuffling of feet and sandals sounded on the street, a bit of how the light looked. Just behind his shoulder, he thought that he heard Hayaam laugh—that good laugh, the one he had remembered right—and the laughter in his ears commingled with a shiver at his skin, a freshness in his sight. He saw a pinkness in the air and in the sky, a gildedness to things; felt buoyed by the shapes that moved around him. Blessed. And so, shy and new, loose and fine from his ankles to his elbows, from his neck to the skin of his wide brow, Majid turned away from home and headed towards the sea.
Not thinking anymore about whom he might see on his way, who might see him or might whisper, say, “There goes Mad Majid,” he had walked down India Street in the direction of the sea. And he had stopped at the corner of Mahaba, Where, he thought, it happened. Where Tahir lost his leg. The aunts had done this. Come to look. Yasmina had gone back to Kudra House after her first pilgrimage in elaborate hysteria, describing the great puddles of blood—their little Tahir’s!—that must have dyed the road. How a person could still tell that an accident had happened, even once the rain had washed that blood away; how that road gave her the shakes every time she passed, made her angel-hairs perk up. Even Sugra said she’d stopped there, looking into the store windows of Hisham’s Food and Drink, and wondered, thought about, how little Tahir must have felt, what he had been doing when the rattling bus came down. Majid had not done it. Just a road, he’d thought. Another road where somebody has suffered. He hadn’t gone so far as to say what he did feel: So what, so what? Nothing for us but sorrow. Why go seek it out?
But the intersection jarred him. He felt a little bus-crash in his gut, a pulling in his arms as if the very air itself were urging him to stand where his own Tahir had. To cross the road and pause, tilt his head and close his eyes, think of shooting at a crow. Imagine. What had Tahir been thinking? But Majid went no further. Awakening, Majid might be, but he was not like the aunts. Let the inside stay ins
ide, he thought. The knife of life is sharp; we take the blade but must not ever flinch. And while his chest and belly quivered at the thought of little Tahir being crushed by a big bus, Majid’s two legs held him steady, and he swallowed. Did not look away. That’s where it all happened, Majid thought. And this is where I am. All right. The most important thing, he thought, was walking, without muttering or shouting, without glaring meanly at any passersby, without feeling that at any moment he might weep. The most important thing was being equal to it all.
He’d thought to pause at Hisham’s Food and Drink, where the aunts had gone to get the news from Iqbal when Tahir’s leg first fell, and where, long ago, Hayaam had liked the ices. That would itself be a poem, no? Going to the very place where so much news—about his little son and even, surely, in the past, about his own craziness and grief—had been made up and tossed into the world. But he was not quite ready for all that. One day, yes, sometime, but not yet. Hisham’s was too bright.
However, thinking about Hisham’s—cutlass patties, ices, eggs embedded in potatoes, almond sweets—decided him to eat. He passed A. Tea Shop and Tea Shop J., named for Alibhai and Jaffar, and chose not to go in. He crossed the street away from Habib’s Restaurant, where the bajia mix was sweet. All of them too known, he thought. Majid, who had hurled himself so firmly into the broad, consuming jaws of sadness for so long, was now, instead, emerging, and willing to be tender with, at last, himself. He’d stick to places in which he would not elicit any detailed memory, friendly or unkind, where he would not have a presence. He turned along Mahaba Street and settled on the New Purnima Snack, where, in the long shade of the flame trees, three ancient island men sold cinnamon and cloves.
The Purnima was just right. There was old Vijay Mehta—whom he’d only known by sight and to whom he had, as fir as he recalled, not done grievous harm: black hair dyed as ever, mustache as trim and neat, bent over the fryers. There was the bright calendar, the plastic flowers poking from the cracks—pink and yellow, tangerine. There was the blue table, the old sink by the mirrored wall. Majid sat far in the corner, by the window near the taps. A gloomy waiter came to him, and Majid, smoothly, in one phrase, ordered up a large plate of jalebis and a cup of milky tea.
What, he wondered, had come over him? How tasty the air smelled! How fine the Mehta elders looked, smoking narrow cigarettes and waiting for the peppers and the chutneys to be brought for their kachori! How charming Mrs. M. looked, chatting at the till in her workaday brown sari! For just a moment—the space of a long swallow or a restful closing of the eyes—Majid felt as happy as he had when Ismail was born and as light as he had been when Sarie Turner (so he remembered it just then) bared her breasts for him so suddenly and willingly in the blue, surprising hall and reached out for his arms. Sarie, Majid thought, guiltily at first. What if she’d expected him? What if she has come? The Mehtas’ ageless man shuffled over in a white coat like a doctor’s and set down Majid’s tea. The jalebis would be right along, he said. Majid thought: Jalebis. Fryers all asteam. Old men who make certain there issugar to be had. Something in him swelled, and Majid forgot Sarie. He could just then not bear to feel himself in any way relied upon, by anyone. Did not want to feel responsible at all. Well. If I have missed her, Majid thought, she is sure to come again.
Bibi had been trying to perceive for several minutes exactly what Salma Hafiz and her husband—or another man, yes, wouldn’t that be better?—were doing in the bedroom she could just vaguely make out between the curtains that hung across the way (light green, were they, with a rice or barley print?). Had Salma’s husband’s trip into the highlands really been so smooth, successful, quick? Has he come back so soon? Bibi’s neck was strained, her head pushed forward from her chest. If she could, she would have sent her head all the way across the street, like a telescope or wire. Her neck, she thought, amused, would have been just like a bridge from her balcony to Salma’s. She could look under the bed, check the cups for dirt. Identify that print. She wished her body were as large as any building, so she could twist and turn and reach and witness everything that happened. Her eyes would be like windows. I’d be Big Kikanga Bibi! Bibi laughed, felt light.
The pale curtain whisked and dangled, and Bibi couldn’t tell if that dark square was emptiness beyond, or Salma’s dress, or the turned head of a man, moving in the room. But she didn’t mind so much just then. Sometimes it was the seeking, and also the not knowing, that gave her the most pleasure. She finally gave up. It didn’t matter, in the end, what Salma Hafiz really did. Because Bibi was working out the envelope, and remembering the Ladies’ Sewing Club, where blue was meant for boys. And because the night before, as she’d gone up to bed, had she or had she not heard some loving laughter and a thump from Nisreen and Issa’s room?
She’d been about to turn back to the envelope, which was coming along nicely, when she caught sight of Mad Majid Ghulam. When Bibi spotted Majid stepping out alone, and not simply stepping down from Libya, but coming up from India Street, as though he’d been on a trip into the city—perhaps down to the docks! or to see about a permit!—she sat up with a gasp and let her stitching fall. There he was. Crazed old bad-luck Jeevanjee, alive as Mama Moto or Nisreen. And whereas she could crane her neck and peer and squint and didn’t care if people saw when she was spying on poor Salma or on Mama Ndiambongo, upon seeing Mad Majid, Bibi felt that she should make herself as small as she could be. She blushed. She felt a swelling in her skin. She felt, indeed, as if she were seeing with her own very naked eyes a man about whose heft she’d had a pulsing, sexy dream. Or a long-admired movie star appearing from the blue. Unprepared, caught out and excited. There is old Majid! Bibi clutched the stitching to her chest and pressed her face against the grate. She placed her round chin carefully between the panels of a heart. Where had Majid been? And where could he be going?
He looked, thought Bibi, much, much younger than she had been thinking he would look. Had her eyes gone bad? Could she trust what they were seeing? Look how his hips swaggered, just a little, how his head was high and undisturbed in the busy morning air! He was a little gray around the ears, it’s true, but that was not important. Who was not, these days? He looked, she thought, Attractive. Not poorly preserved. He’s left his crumbling house! she thought. And then: Where is Mama Moto? This I’ll tell Nisreen. She watched Majid look about, a little like a cat deciding whether it should cross, or leap, or sit, and fastened her eyes to him as he moved, finally, with a confidence she would never have surmised, into the New Purnima Snack. There she saw, she thought, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee say something to handsome Mr. Mehta, greet the busy Mrs., and take a table by the sink. Her old fingers twitched. A thing like a trapped bird went wild behind her eyes. Change quivered all around. At last, she thought, new times bring new things. But, oh, how hard it was to know exactly when, or what, and what it meant, if one was stuck at home and on a balcony, no less. What was Majid doing?
The unfinished envelope felt hot beneath her hands. Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee has stepped from Kudra House. He is ordering kachori. Well, she was wrong about what Majid had gone to eat. At the New Purnima Snack the jalebis arrived, and Majid thought he’d not tasted anything so sweet in a hundred million years. Not since Independence. But she was right that things were moving, new things, shaking in the air. She was so excited about having witnessed unhinged, widowed, short-circuited, and wicked Mad Sad Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee walk into the Purnima that when Sarie passed with Agatha ahead of her, Bibi didn’t see.
Nineteen
Sarie’s visit to Majid’s, the strange meeting with Sugra, left her troubled and bewildered. Sarie was upset—in part about Maria, about Sugra, and the possibility that Majid lived a wider life—but also in a comprehensive way that placed many things in doubt. Unsettling: for the first time in her life, Sarie felt consciously uncertain of her judgment. Accustomed to assuming, as many of the Sisters had about themselves, and as Gilbert always did, that what she believed she saw was the same as what there was, Sarie had
never thought herself a person who was sometimes right and sometimes wrong about the layout of the world. But now she was confused. She was sure Maria meant to harm her. But she wondered about Sugra. Was Sugra just a cousin? Was she Majid’s lover? If she wasn’t, had she been—before, or after his wife died? What were cousins, in the end? Didn’t Jeevanjees and many others in these parts go with cousins above all? Had the late, unnamed Mrs. Majid not in all likelihood been a father’s brother’s child or another close relation? Was Sugra really married to a man who was not Majid Ghulam, and did she only come, as she had said, “to bring our Tahir legs”?
How kind Sugra had been, how it had seemed that Sugra wanted most of all for Sarie to be welcome. Could one trust in kindness, really? Or was kindness nothing more than the greatest trick of all? Hovering by the windows at Mchanganyiko Street, Sarie rubbed her lips and face and wondered what was true. Maria was a thorn. And Sugra, well… Sugra, no matter how she’d twisted Sarie’s heart, wasn’t the worst thing. This was: where had Majid gone? Had he not thought that Sarie might visit him that day, as she often did? Did she not occur to him? Had he not hoped she’d come? Had he—and here the little verses did not seem as lovely as they had, contained in Majid’s rooms—gone out to write a poem? Did Sarie not matter at all?
She didn’t go again for quite some days, though Agatha—loyal, Sarie thought, to Tahir in a way she was not to her mother—cried and stamped her feet. She would miss the changes in his walk, she said; she wouldn’t see him win. Sarie remained firm. “No, no, no,” she said, though Agatha did threaten, said she’d throw herself under the cars her mother warned about each day, that she’d run into the street. “I’ll go lie under that taxi! I’ll look for a big bus!” But Sarie was entrenched. “Then go,” she said. “See if you can move me!”
The Blue Taxi Page 29
