The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  Spare parts. Majid thought about it in the nighttime, after Sugra had gone home. People needed spare parts then, of course, for all the things that plied the streets and groaned and shuddered and clack-clacked along the dusty roads, for all the things that broke or died and had to be revived. But wasn’t that the problem? Everybody needed them. People paid large sums to smuggle needed things into the country. Where did Mr. Turner hope to get them? Did he have a link, a friendship of some kind, with an amenable official? Surely, Majid thought, the man must have a plan. He’d dealt with many people in his time at the High Court, no doubt. Had surely traveled both sides of the law. Gilbert Turner must have made connections. He had, after all, held a respectable position.

  Clearly Mr. Turner also hoped that Majid would know something, too, about how spare parts could be gotten, handled, moved, dispensed. Whom did Majid know with an interest in cars? Connections? Rahman, if he could be convinced to speak with him again. Or that clever young man Issa, who, so he’d heard from Sugra, seemed to know a lot of men who worked with engineers (and weren’t they building roads?). Even Sugra’s husband, who had a car himself. There were others, too, if only he could let himself think back into the past, if only he could bear it. Hadn’t one of his own teachers—a man who had approved of Majid’s poems—also driven taxis? Wasn’t he alive somewhere? Didn’t all those fleet young boys just outside his house fix buses all the time? Did they not know him by sight? Yes, there might be others, too.

  Cars. He tried to think of all the cars he’d been in in his life. He himself had never owned one. Before their emigration, his older brothers had—a shiny Benz that had taken him and his once-wife to parties, weddings, birthdays, to the clinic now and then if another boy was on his way. It was in that fine Mercedes, Majid thought, that he had come back from the clinic that sad day without Hayaam. The brothers in Nairobi certainly had cars, and in Mombasa several younger in-laws, too, zipped around with radios blaring, tops rolled down, in Peugeot 504s. Fiats, Majid thought. My sons think those are grand. Others. The Citroëns that made him think of lemons, low and growling, sleek. The Austins and the Morrises, older, some with cloud-white bonnets, with steering wheels as large as any tire. He thought about the buses and the trucks, their dips and shining curves, the long, enormous bodies of the dog-rib trucks bearing their wood boards. The Leylands, heavy, iron scaffolding on top, fitted with a canvas sheet, some rolling down the roads diagonally, no longer shooting straight. The DAFs, with colored aprons.

  Later, Majid dreamed of chrome and squeals and smoke. And of Tahir’s metal crutches, crumpling. He got up in the dark and, night-eyes full of diesel fumes, ears sore from hard dream-sounds of metal, he went into the bathroom. As his urine streamed onto the floor, a quiet little spill, he squinted up into the square that had been cut out of the wall, showing him the sky. He thought he saw the stars. His own small boy had been knocked down and split in two by a big bus. A Tata, made in his own India. His grandfather’s, more like. A mystery-country far away. Buses. Back in the dim hallway, hands damp against his naked chest, he leaned against the wall. Weren’t Hungarians bringing in a bus, these days? That’s right, he thought. The Icarus, boxy, hopeful, painted red and white. As he fell into his bed, Majid laid an arm down fast across his eyes. He knew all about that story. Icarus, he thought. Sure. Too close to the sun.

  Twenty-five

  In the breeze at the Victorian Palm, Majid was introduced to Kazansthakis, who, he learned with interest, was Greek. Gilbert introduced Majid as M.G. and Kazansthakis as the Frosty King. Majid listened while Gilbert and the Frosty King told him what they thought. Majid, telling what, if he had not believed it in the depths of his new heart, would have been a lie, assured the Frosty King and Mr. Turner that he had in his day managed more than one successful business. That he had deftly managed them to death, he wisely did not say. He would do his best. He also said—and this was true—that he remembered having seen once with a man he knew (that Mr. Essajee, who could bring dead appliances to life, who’d been so kind to the boys) a clever youth named Idi Moto, who could, it was softly said, pull a radio from a pebble, then make it disappear.

  Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee’s fine name—for Jeevanjees had managed many places in the world, made them what they are, and also fought for very honorable things—left a great impression on the Frosty King. Kazansthakis also wished to be impressive, and while he had resisted telling Gilbert exactly how much he could help, he found himself declaring rather recklessly that he could easily procure for them some European brake shoes, screens, and the necessary pumps. The excitement made him jumpy, restless. He left the Palm before them, saluting as he went. “We’ll meet again, my man,” he said, to neither one, to both. “I go to Mrs. Frosty.” And Gilbert raised his glass.

  Outside, the sun was low, and the sky over the flat white sea was fluid, turning slowly plum. A kitchen boy, dispatched to the innards of the Palm, turned the generator on. It was time for all of them to go. Gilbert and Majid rose up from their chairs and with a shake of all their legs loosed the wrinkles in their slacks. Majid pushed his chair closer to the table with the care of a new guest at a luncheon who folds a napkin formally before going on his way. He leaned forward on the backrest for a moment. In the leaking twilight, a silver ring on Majid’s smallest finger gleamed. Thinking briefly about Sarie, he felt a sharp thing in him tumble down a crevice, leave a tingle, disappear. Majid sighed, and looked for a long moment at the sea. And then he said, “Let us go together, Mr. Turner. We are almost neighbors, after all!”

  Gilbert cast a glance towards the bar, where two expatriates were hovering, each over a drink: Jan, the gloomy man from KLM, and a quiet engineer. Gilbert looked above their heads and saw himself reflected in the heavy mirror that rose up behind the bar. He puffed his chest out, just a little, and clapped Majid on the back. He cleared his throat and said, “We are neighbors, indeed!” He hoped that the expatriates would hear, and turn their heads to see. That’s right, he thought. Gilbert Turner might not be flush with funds as yet, and he might not have slapped a bright all-weather road down in any tangled wilds or by himself have conjured spark plugs from the air; but he could, at least, at last, perhaps say that he belonged.

  As they reached the steps, Gilbert, made sentimental by one too many drinks, the Frosty King’s salute, the promise of success, and the violet of the sky, shook his lowered head as though he had just found a lost thing that had been there all along. Sounding sweet, confused, as though someone were to blame, he said, “Tell me, Mr. Jeevanjee. Why have we not met before?”

  Majid gave his partner a gracious little smile. “It was not yet planned for us,” he said. “It was not meant until now.” And Gilbert, who had often read that certain peoples had a tendency to believe in things like that, that it meant some things were planned by God, felt satisfied at last. Victorious. He patted M.G.’s back. Majid felt light-headed. Tahir would be proud to know that his own dad had sat beside the famous Frosty King—didn’t Sugra take the boys for sundaes at the Kreem? They might even go again, together. Kazansthakis, he was sure, would offer little Tahir a vanilla scoop for free.

  As Gilbert made his way along the seafront, all aglow, Sarie stepped into the parlor. In the gluey light of the one bulb, she stood before her husband’s shelf. Resting horizontally across the other volumes: the dog-eared Everyman’s Car Handbook. Sarie winced and picked it up. For the cars, she thought. The motors. Why had she not seen it before? Why had she never paid attention to the things that Gilbert read? She held it for a moment but did not part the covers. Instead, she slipped it vertically between a tattered guide to the attractions of East Africa’s long coast and a book on making bricks. What was she looking for on Gilbert’s precious shelf? Where had Gilbert put them?

  She turned, and looked under the piano, below the rocky table. Not there. She looked under the pillow of Gilbert’s favorite chair and wondered, as she did so, if he had ever purchased ointment for his skin. She found a rubber band. She put the p
illow back and yawned. On her knees, she paused. Perhaps behind the settee. She crawled towards the wall. There it was: Mr. Frosty’s box.

  Not a big box, Sarie thought, but look what it has done! She’d been amazingly defeated. By the spark plugs, and the tea, her husband. But she also felt impressed and curious that she had been, at least, thwarted by an interesting, redoubtable, international opponent. Had he said Japan?

  She plucked a spark plug from the box and lifted it between two fingers to the light. What a clean, smooth middle the thing had, what weight in its small shape. Sarie sighed. With the spark plug in her hand, she went into the bedroom, where she lay down on the bed and thought about the lover she had left. “Rompu,” she said out loud. And then she wondered at the word, how “romp,” in English, meant something else entirely.

  When Gilbert returned home, he found his wife asleep. Exhausted by the nearness and the dazzle of their future, Gilbert took his shoes off, then his trousers and his shirt. He stretched out beside her. Oh, Sarie had done well! He would tell her all about his new good friend M.G. when the two of them woke up. Perhaps she’d make him breakfast. In sleep, Sarie felt the mattress shift. She clutched the spark plug tighter. She was dreaming about Mr. Jeevanjee’s high balcony, the bubbling street below. And mountains far beyond. All of Majid’s plants. Grown, and shivering with fruit, the little palm, she saw, was bursting through the slats.

  Twenty-six

  Bibi started out the week thinking happily about Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee and everybody else she’d spied on from her balcony. What great moments there had been! She’d seen them all, she thought, and she was, for once, satisfied entirely with her rather limited location. If I were following just one, she thought, I would be missing all the rest. Indeed, what if she had, like a bird, followed poor Majid Ghulam—who’d looked so fresh, so nicely bathed and wasn’t that wild mustache now neat!—into the New Purnima Snack? It’s true she would have seen that he had eaten jalebis and later had bajia mix and not, as she had so firmly told herself, kachori. But if she had been checking on whether it was chutney-yes-or-no, she would have missed Salma Hafiz sneaking from her house with her face hidden in a niqab, going who-knows-where, and also Mama Ndiambongo slipping through a doorway just three houses down and coming out again (Surreptitious! Bibi thought) holding a big basket. And if she had been able to sneak into Mrs. Turner’s house—a nice one, Bibi was quite sure—to see what things were like in the long-legged woman’s bedroom, and then, perhaps, unseen, down to the Kikanga clinic to make certain that Nisreen was not flirting with the doctors, and to all the other places for which she sometimes felt a hunger, she would not have seen the most amazing thing of all: just the other day, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee accompanied by, of all things, a British man, who talked and talked and talked while the new, presentable Majid cocked his head and listened.

  She had been amazed to see on the first day that Mad Majid Ghulam walked proudly, decently, in fact. He’d been looking sometimes straight ahead, then to the left or right, without shouting out at anyone or talking to himself. That was already, Bibi thought, a step. See what an affair can do? But seeing him a second time, so easy in the company of the almost-bald white man, listening so carefully, was something else indeed. Perhaps, thought Bibi, Jeevanjee’s setting out to trick him. Maybe-maybe, there is still a spark in him, a business-flame at last. Is he borrowing money? Will he start the paper up? Make a special deal? Is he offering a service? Something only local men can do for too-soft old white men? Here Bibi held back a hot chuckle, remembering Mrs. Livery-Jones’s red husband and the swaggering alley boys. Not that, surely. Not a grown man like Majid. She dismissed that thought with a happy sniff and raised a palm up to her face.

  She pondered. This pale man was probably, thought Bibi, not really, really rich.

  See how those long trouser cuffs had been stitched up at the hem? See the marred, worn shoes? And what would a rich white man be doing in Kikanga? But one could never tell these days, as Issa and Nisreen so very often said. Perhaps, she thought, having cut his teeth with one light person from the North—the woman with the girl—Mad Majid Ghulam had learned something important and was taking on a second. Things do change, indeed. What if—she thought, what if his fortunes rise!

  She thought about it for a while, turning over in her mind how she might coax Mama Moto into helping her a bit—to make a nice tale for Nisreen. Dear Nisreen, who was (oh, wasn’t she?) looking a bit brighter now than she had looked before. Looking almost, Bibi thought—almost but not quite, because the girl was really skinny—as well-fed as a bride. And what had gone on in the bedroom not so long ago? And again the other night? Hadn’t Mama Moto nodded, silent, yes, but nodding and not groaning at the sky when Bibi said again how nice it would be if the girl would only have a child? Dear Nisreen, she thought. Bibi wanted to give little Issa’s wife a sort of present, a new story about Mad Majid Ghulam that could have a different ending. She needed Mama Moto to help her understand what was happening out there. Then she would sit down with Nisreen and tell her what she knew. And Nisreen might even smile.

  But when Bibi called for Mama Moto to come up, Mama Moto didn’t come. She called and called: “Hebu, hebu! Hoh! Mama Moto, where are you?” All without an answer. Where was she? Where were people when you needed them? When important things were happening? She would have to go downstairs. Alone!

  It was hard. She panted. Scowling, preparing insults as she went, Bibi struggled down the steps, holding to the wall. She found one of Mama Moto’s cloths in the far storeroom where she slept and wrapped it round her head and shoulders, tucking in the hairs that had sprung down over her brow. Hobbling, she groaned loudly in case Mama Moto was in fact nearby and playing her a trick. She moved unsteadily from the kitchen and the courtyard, down the hallway to the door, holding her big stomach. For the first time ever, Bibi wished that when Issa and Nisreen had offered her a cane, she had—instead of “Where would I go all alone?”—graciously accepted. A walking stick would help. She hadn’t been outside by herself in a long time. But she wasn’t planning to go far.

  When she opened the front doors just slightly and looked into the street, it struck her that the road looked rather different from ground level than it did from high above. How far up Salma’s window was! How chipped and shabby those white doors at Lydia House were from here! And to the right, how low and wide the ocean looked—how close. Bibi scratched her nose. It was early afternoon, and quiet. Who could she call over? In the alley just across the way, she caught sight of Mama Ndiambongo, old and gray, shelling groundnuts on her stoop. She would be up and out when other people are indoors, when other people nap. That was how she did it, Bibi thought. Mama Ndiambongo steals when everyone’s in bed.

  Bibi hissed to get attention. She made a long sound with her teeth. “Over here! Over here!” she said. And Mama Ndiambongo, who could not recall ever seeing Bibi Kulthum on the ground, came over with, because her back was not so good, a little leaping in her knees and her top half bent so far that it was even with her hips. If she had had a broom in hand, thought Bibi, the street would have been swept. “What? What? What?” Mama Ndiambongo said, frowning and excited.

  Bibi—who would not have known from so high up—noticed with some pleasure that Mama Ndiambongo was missing her front teeth and that her earlobes were a little more distended than she’d thought. “Mama Moto,” Bibi said. “Where is she?” Bibi, though she liked to think so, was not the only one to keep an eye out on the world; Mama Ndiambongo had a ready answer. “I’ll tell you,” she said. And Bibi, though she herself had asked, was a bit taken aback. “Idi came to take her shopping. I saw her leave just now.” Mama Ndiambongo smiled, and tilted her small head to the side. She tsked. “You must have been asleep, or what?”

  Bibi was put out. She hadn’t been asleep. She’d been upstairs on the balcony, looking at the street. How did she miss Mama Moto when she passed? Did Mama Moto know to walk especially close to Mansour House, just next to the wall and right be
neath her Bibi—Just under my feet in the one place I don’t see? How often did the woman take her leave, like that, without asking permission? And since when did Idi Moto have any cash to spare? A layabout, a small-time, no-good thief Since when did he take Mama Moto shopping?

  “I hear he has a job,” Mama Ndiambongo said.

  “A job?” Bibi almost snarled. She put her hand out for support and Mama Ndiambongo, who knew how hard age was, held on to her arm. “Since when does Idi Moto have a job he would admit to his own mother?” And since when does Mama Ndiambongo have news that I don’t know?

  “All right, all right,” Mama Ndiambongo said, pushing Bibi back towards the wall so she could let go of her arm and hold herself up, too. “Don’t go crazy, now. They haven’t gone to London.” Bibi sniffed. “Let go of me,” she said. But she was glad to know that Mama Moto would be back. When Mama Ndiambongo held her hand out for some shillings, Bibi gave her some.

  Back inside, she closed the door behind her. Her chest hurt, and her dry scalp itched with sweat. But she’d learned something on her own, in any case. Mama Ndiambongo doesn’t have her teeth! For a moment she thought she would tell Mama Moto so, but then she sighed. Surely Mama Moto, who spent her time at street level, who did go out, who could walk far on her two legs, knew this much and more.

  Bibi shuffled on into the kitchen and removed the cloth she’d worn. Getting back up the stairs would be too difficult, she thought. And so she took a rest on Mama Moto’s bed.

  Uneasy now, unkeeled, she wondered what else she might be missing. Did Salma Hafiz have crossed eyes? Was Mr. Mehta ugly? Did Kirit Tanna have a mole she hadn’t ever seen? Perhaps. She pressed her cheek against the wall and looked at a long crack in the white paint. But she could not stay disappointed in herself for long. She rolled over, righted her sore hips. She closed her eyes and turned again to more interesting questions that could, if she just waited for a while, be answered: Would Majid Jeevanjee become what everyone had hoped he would at first? Would he start a business and give himself some pride? What would Mama Moto bring back from her shopping, and, most of all, would she have witnessed in her travels anything worth mention?