The air seemed regular again. But he also felt another thing. Was it a kind of ache? Was she leaving him behind? What lay in wait for him, if Sarie became wealthy, Once, he thought, once all of this ends? He hadn’t thought of ends before, not clearly. He’d been caught up in beginnings. But what would happen when she went back to her husband, Mr. Turner, Gilbert? It struck Majid that Sarie must, sometime. He felt kindly, sweetly sad. Yes, even wistful, though she wasn’t gone. What would he do then?
When she told him about Gilbert and the spare-parts business plan, that Gilbert wished to meet him, Majid was, at first, incredulous. He didn’t want to hear it. But Sarie, head still hurting, digging at her palms with her fingernails again, would not be deterred. She talked and talked and talked until Majid felt—just as he had felt her push him down onto the bed, just as he had felt her bite him—an awful logic taking hold. A force swelling from her eyes, her arms, and even from that boiling place between her legs, to settle on his shoulders like a coat, transform him. He touched her as she spoke, as if he could find the source of Sarie’s talking with his hands and stop it, gently roll and tamp it down with a forefinger and thumb. She let him press himself around and into and all over her while she repeated like a little song that there was no other way. That it was the best thing, for him, and for herself That the accident had brought them all together so a new thing could be formed.
“You shouldn’t do this,” Majid said, “not for me.”
But Sarie shook her head even as she finally responded to his hands and wrapped her arms around him, very tenderly this time. “We need you, Majid. It is not all for you.”
He stopped saying no, and Sarie, for a moment, felt a bit like her old self again. She giggled in relief
Majid held her, stroked her hair, and she kissed him as she had when the thing between them had just got off the ground, as though approaching from a distance. Majid held her elbows lightly with his hands, as if he did not know them. But in the midst of their leave-taking, Sarie left a mark on Majid’s throat with her strong teeth. Darker than the stain she’d left upon his cheek, it was a bruise that would turn black. She hoped that mark would stay. That when Majid came to tea and met her husband in her home, she could look at it and not feel so afraid.
Majid did not get up to bathe, did not get up to see her hurry down the alleyway and out into the street. Feeling that the world had given a great lurch and stopped, was hovering midspin, he closed his eyes and slept. Maria, stripping coconuts of hair on a straw mat while Tahir, worn from his exertions, dozed and stretched beside her, watched Sarie Turner leaving from a corner in the courtyard. Sarie didn’t greet her, and Maria didn’t speak.
Outside in the sun, Sarie nodded at the thoroughfares: Libya, Mosque, Mahaba. And just there, off towards the seafront, a short and narrow thing, was India Street, by Hisham’s Food and Drink, where it had all begun. She said this to herself: Nothing, nothing, nothing, there’s nothing here at all. She didn’t go straight home. No. She walked along the harbor, passing the Victorian Palm, the Court House, and the Gymkhana. She went up a little farther and turned to look just once at the Mountain Top Hotel. Farther down, where a low, neat fence held a rich and well-cut froth of fine white bougainvillea, Sarie strode into an office. At the British Council, she wrote a number down and left behind a letter.
Twenty-four
When Majid came back from that first tea with Sarie Turner and her husband, the neighborhood was dark. The electricity was gone. In the steady light of a Dietz lamp, he found Sugra in the parlor reading an old novel. His walk home had made him lonely. Slipping off his shoes, he thought, How faithful Sugra is.
The air smelled very slightly of rose powder. Majid sighed. Sugra’s smell made him think of plenty, the possibility of which he’d glimpsed that very afternoon. He thought again about what he would do if he had any funds: books for his last son, a pigeon coop, some good trees for the courtyard, perhaps eventually a paper once again. And other things besides.
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 herout 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.
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