The Last Taxi Ride

by A. X. Ahmad

  “Take the jacket. Give him some money.”

  The bodyguard pulled the jacket off the man, then threw two five-hundred-rupee notes onto the sand. “Keep your mouth, shut, samjhe?” Understand?

  Holding Shabana’s elbow, the bodyguard pulled her away. Clutching the jacket, she allowed herself to be led to the waiting car, which was now right by the beach.

  When they were safely inside, the bodyguard turned to Shabana while massaging his right hand. “Madam? When did that man steal your jacket?”

  “Shut up. And if you say anything about this to anyone, I’ll have you fired.”

  The bodyguard turned red and looked straight ahead.

  Chor Bazaar? Why would Sanjeev have sold his jacket at the thieves’ market? Was he on the run? Did he need money?

  Shabana looked at the jacket on the seat next to her, still warm from the man’s body. She felt its elbow, its collar, like a blind man trying to recognize a face. The more she looked at it, the less sure she felt that this was Sanjeev’s jacket.

  They headed down Marine Drive, and she stared out of the window, feeling confused and wretched.

  They drove past a television showroom, and she saw a crowd of people peering through its plate glass window, transfixed by the wall of television sets. The same image was being played on all the screens: a plane flying into a tall building, which burst into flames. No doubt it was some new Hollywood movie.

  Shabana picked up the jacket and pressed her nose into the leather, inhaling deeply, searching for any trace of Sanjeev. All she could smell was sour, unfamiliar sweat.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Standing down the street from Nataraj Imports, Ranjit watches Ali’s yellow cab vanish into the distance. He knows that Ali is right, that taking on Jay Patel single-handed is crazy. The smart thing would be to jump bail and get the hell out of the country. So why is he doing this?

  Leela had asked him, What do you believe in? and he couldn’t answer her question.

  He is still a Sikh, yes, but after Anna’s death, he has not practiced his faith. Even his memories of the past are no longer a haven. For two long years driving a cab here, he has lost more of his sense of self, till he was all but erased.

  Now he has been pushed, and to his surprise, he has pushed back. He is shocked to find his core intact, a stubborn, blind, animal resistance to the larger forces that are trying to manipulate him. I may not be a captain, he thinks, but I’m not just a fucking cabdriver. They messed with the wrong man.

  He walks down Twenty-ninth Street, past tall Africans who have set up folding tables and sell knockoff Louis Vuitton handbags and straw fedoras. He passes small shops selling fake flowers—bright yellow daisies, chromatic gerberas, white lilies. The shopkeepers stand in their doorways with the expression of shopkeepers everywhere, arms crossed, brows creased faintly with worry.

  The bright blue sign of Nataraj Imports is dead ahead, the god Shiva dancing his dance of destruction and renewal. The last time Ranjit had seen it, it seemed like a promise of change. Now it looks like a warning.

  It is just past one, and he knows that Kikiben works all weekend. She brings a tall tiffin box of food from home and eats a full Indian meal while reading her film magazines. Most likely, she will be alone: the deliveries only arrive in the evenings.

  Walking up the stairs to the thick metal door, he presses the buzzer and says his name, and Kikiben’s voice crackles instantly through the speaker.

  “Ranjit. What happened to you?”

  “Broke my arm.” He raises his sling to the snout of the camera. “Can’t really work.”

  There is a pause. “Patel Sahib said not to let you in. He said that you’re not welcome here anymore.”

  “Okay, no problem. I was just in the neighborhood and wanted to say hello. Actually, I had some ulterior motives…” He smiles up at the camera. “You wouldn’t have some extra rotis in your lunchbox, would you? I’m pretty hungry, and you make the best rotis.”

  There is a pause. “Of course I have some extra. Patel is just being silly. I’m going to buzz you in, okay?”

  The outer door opens, and then the inner one, and Kikiben motions him inside. She seems tinier than ever, almost disappearing within her baggy T-shirt and dark pants. It is as though all her energy has gone into her hair, her long gray plait hanging all the way to her waist.

  He steps in, smelling the familiar cloying scent of hair, and Kikiben stares at him.

  “How did you break your arm? You look pale. You’ve lost weight. Are you taking care of yourself?”

  “I fell down. It was pretty stupid. The cast should be off in a few weeks.”

  “Good.” Kiki regards him with her head cocked to one side, looking more birdlike than ever. “I want you to come back here. These two men who do the security now, they’re real twits. They show up in jackets, both of them, like peas in a pod. And they treat me as though I’m a stupid old woman.”

  He feels a chill. “Dark jackets? Cowboy boots? Always looking bored, yawn a lot?”

  “That’s them. You know them?”

  “Not really. I saw them at another job … So, are you sure you have enough food? I should warn you, I’m very hungry.”

  “Hanh, hanh. Plenty of food.” She smiles, and her plain, lined face looks girlish.

  She bounds up the stairs to the second floor, and he follows. A new shipment must have just come in, because glossy packets of hair are piled up against one wall of the small room. Some of it has been acid-stripped and re-dyed blond and reddish brown. He looks at the price tags and whistles.

  “Up to sixteen hundred now? This must be some good stuff.”

  “New supplier. Very fine hair, extra-virgin. Never cut, never permed, never dyed. I don’t know where Patel finds it. The last few shipments we had from India weren’t this good…” Kikiben undoes the clasp of her tiffin carrier and unstacks the round metal boxes. Using one of the round covers as a plate, she heaps it with food. “Is this enough for you?”

  She has piled up small round rotis, yellow daal, okra saabzi, and even added some cut, salted cucumbers and a heap of spiced yogurt. It should be delicious, but Kikiben is a terrible cook: the rotis are blackened and hard, and all the vegetables have been fried to a crisp.

  “It looks fantastic,” he lies. They both sit cross-legged on the green linoleum floor, and he begins to eat with his fingers, the tough roti crackling under his teeth.

  “Patel says I shouldn’t eat in here. Says that the smell of food gets into the hair. But he’s not here, is he.” She giggles. “Eat more, Ranjit, there is plenty.”

  “How is Patel these days?”

  “You know … he does all that yoga-shoga, standing on his head, all that nonsense, but it’s not working. He’s so grumpy. He doesn’t like the new security guys. If you just stood around, like they do, he’d bite your head off. These two boys, he lets them be. Maybe he’s getting old.”

  Well, those men are working for Lateef, Ranjit thinks. Patel seems to have no control over them, and obviously he doesn’t trust them. If he did, he wouldn’t have secretly hired me to look for Mohan. Praying to the Guru that the boxes are still in Patel’s office, he tries to eat some more of the burned, over-spiced food. As soon as he is finished, he can make an excuse to go upstairs and check out the office.

  But Kiki is toying with her food, clearly in the mood to talk. “Ranjit, what a tragedy, no? Shabana Shah being killed? And wasn’t she in your cab the day before?”

  “Yes, it’s terrible. She was so nice. Gave me a huge tip.”

  “Hanh? Really? And how did she seem?” Kiki’s eyes glisten, and her mouth is open as she waits for all the juicy details.

  “Well, she went shopping at Prada, bought leopard-skin-patterned heels, and a dress with sequins on it. She showed them to me. She seemed…” He thinks of Shabana in his cab, chewing on her plump lower lip as she gazed out of the window. “… I don’t know, a little lost. And she looked different from the movies. Not older, just dif
ferent.”

  “They always do, don’t they? How? Was she trying to hide? You know, dark glasses, baseball cap?”

  “Nothing like that. She seemed pleased to be recognized, even said she would sign an autograph. She was wearing a lot of makeup, maybe that was it, or her hair was longer. Halfway down her back—”

  Kikiben leans forward. “I shouldn’t tell you this … Patel said not to tell anyone, but what the hell, it’s you, right, and she was in your cab. That’s not her real hair.” She giggles when he frowns in confusion. “Shabana’s a customer of ours. I mean, was a customer. I know all the movie stars who buy their hair from us—but I didn’t realize she was one of ours.”

  “Are you sure?” He thinks of Shabana’s mane of thick, blue-black hair. “It looked real—”

  “I’m sure. Four packets of extra-thick, silky, delivered every three weeks.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “She was having the hair delivered to her sister’s place. Clearly, she didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Wait. Shabana has a sister? Here?”

  “Yes. The name on the address was Ruksana Shah. I looked her up on the Internet, but I couldn’t find anything. Nothing written about her in Filmfare, or Stardust, either, or else I would have read it. So I called this friend of mine in Mumbai. She said there are rumors that there is something wrong with Shabana’s sister. She’s horribly disfigured, her face was burned in a fire or something. Shabana never allows her to be photographed.”

  Do the cops know about Ruksana Shah? Mohan hadn’t said anything, and the papers hadn’t mentioned her at all. Would Ruksana know anything about what really happened?

  “Really, Kikiben, you know everything. What else have you found out about this mysterious sister?”

  “Nothing more.”

  Ranjit pauses. “Is it … common to have these, what do you call it, extensions?”

  “Oh yes. It’s not just the black and Hispanic women, you know. White women are getting extensions, too. Half the city has Indian hair on their heads.” Kikiben smiles, and her small eyes twinkle. “You know the worst part about working here? I see fake hair everywhere. I’ll walk to the train, look at the women on the platform, and think, That’s a weave, she has extensions, that one’s tracks are showing.

  “There’s just not enough supply, though. The prices are going to go up, up, but people will still pay for it. Once you have fake hair on your head, you just can’t go back to your natural. You know how black people call hair straightener ‘creamy crack’? Well, this is worse. This is like injecting heroin straight into your veins. Shabana was paying five thousand a month, just for her hair.”

  Ranjit looks furtively at his watch, but Kikiben is in mid-flow now, and cannot be stopped.

  “Can you imagine it? Poor Shabana. I saw this program about her, on Zee TV last night, a three-hour retrospective, and I cried. Poor thing, you know what she was doing in New York? Came here to shoot a movie, it was supposed to be her comeback. They say she sank all her money into it, all her personal money, and then that fool Brad Dunn—he was supposed to be the male lead—he backed out at the last minute, made some stupid action movie instead. He was on the television program too, saying that Shabana’s death was A great loss to Indian cinema. I felt like slapping him.”

  “Yes, sad, sad.” Ranjit covers his uneaten vegetables with the remaining roti. There is an hour to go before meeting the cops, and he has to get moving. “Kikiben, that was delicious. You put cumin in the potatoes, yes? I thought so … I’ll just go and wash my fingers. Okay if I use the upstairs bathroom? The first-floor one is always backing up.”

  Kiki nods, all Patel’s warnings forgotten in the flood of emotion she feels for the dead Shabana.

  As Kiki clears up the various boxes of food, Ranjit takes the stairs up to the third floor, the wood creaking under his feet. He turns on the light in the small bathroom and an exhaust fan clatters into life, loud enough to mask his footsteps. He walks quickly to Patel’s office, his heart beating faster.

  The small room is exactly as he remembered it, and smells of stale incense. The scarred wooden desk is in the same place, the calendar of Ganesh stares down at him, and along the opposite wall are the cardboard boxes, the neat stacks grown to twenty or thirty boxes. Picking one up—it is surprisingly light—he examines it, seeing the red stamp in the shape of a house. He turns the box over and, using the teeth of his house keys, he slits open the black packing tape on the bottom.

  Inside, there is only a packet of raw, undyed hair. He opens it and holds in his hand a thick plait, almost a foot long, the hair amazingly lustrous and soft as silk. The hair seems to be alive; for a second he thinks of the Indian woman it must have belonged to, and imagines her with a shaved head, walking the streets in some small village.

  There is nothing else in the box.

  Damn it. He peers into the corners of the box, shakes it, runs his hand over the corrugated cardboard, but there is no place to hide anything else. He holds up the hair to the light to see if there is something woven into it, then smells it, inhaling only its musky sweetness.

  Nothing here. He opens up another box at random, but there is only another long skein of blue-black hair, its edges sheared off roughly. Whatever was in here has been taken out, but how? The original packing tape on all the boxes hasn’t been disturbed.

  Over the clattering of the bathroom fan he hears Kikiben moving around, and knows that he’s running out of time. He finds a roll of clear packing tape in Patel’s desk and tapes the bottom of both boxes shut. With any luck, whoever unpacks the boxes won’t notice the different tape.

  Returning to the bathroom, he washes his hands loudly, then heads down the stairs. Now he’ll have to meet the cops empty-handed, without any evidence of what Patel is smuggling in. He curses his own arrogance, his certainty that there would be contraband in these boxes.

  He reaches the middle of the stairs when he sees Kiki standing at the bottom, looking up at him anxiously, like a frightened sparrow.

  “Ranjit.” Her voice is a little shriller than usual. “I need to ask you something. Don’t get angry, okay?”

  Has she seen him going into the office? If she has, she’ll feel compelled to tell Patel … He tries to keep his voice steady. “What is it?”

  “Please don’t mind me asking this, hanh? One of my nieces just came from India. Now I know you’re a Sikh, and she’s Gujarati, but she’s an open-minded, modern girl, with traditional values. She’s come here to study computer programming, and she’s a good cook. If you like my cooking, you’ll love hers. And I thought, maybe, if you are not too busy…”

  He smiles in relief. “You want me to meet her? Sure, no problem. Maybe next week?” By then he might either be in jail, or dead, but Kiki doesn’t need to know that.

  “Thank you, thank you! I’ll call her just now and tell her, her name is Rohini, but she goes by Ro, these modern girls, you know—”

  “I’m sure she’s very nice. Kikiben, the food was delicious, I feel better already.”

  He smiles at her, feeling guilty at having abused her generosity.

  Walking through the doors, he steps into the hubbub of Twenty-ninth Street, and the smile on his face fades as he remembers the promise he made to Leela. For her sake, and his, he’s going to have to bluff his way through this meeting with Case and Rodriguez.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The N train to Canal Street is running slow, and by the time he makes his way through Chinatown he is fifteen minutes late.

  How much do the cops know? The key to surviving this meeting is to give them something new, something that will earn him points till he can find out what the hell Patel is up to.

  Stopping outside Pham’s Pho, he examines his reflection in the glass storefront—arm in a sling, wrinkled half-sleeve blue shirt, jeans, flip-flops, topknot hidden under his MIKE’S TOW baseball cap. Not exactly a look that inspires confidence.

  Straightening out the collar of his shirt, he steps into the broth-scente
d interior. Even this early, the place is filled with single Vietnamese men slurping up big bowls of soup before heading out to work the evening shift.

  Pham comes out of the kitchen holding a bowl of soup, his face flushed from the steam, and scowls when he sees Ranjit.

  “Two police waiting in the back room for you. No good.”

  “What’s the matter, you never have cops come in for some soup? You’re right next to the Tombs, for God’s sake.”

  “Back room is private.” Pham rubs his index finger and thumb together.

  “It’s okay. This is part of Thompson’s business.”

  “Lawyer Thompson will pay?” Pham’s face brightens.

  “Absolutely.” Ranjit parts the red-beaded curtain, and steps through into the back room, the strings of beads clattering behind him.

  The cops are sitting at the same table he’d occupied with Thompson. Case has her arms folded over her chest, and she glances down at a slim metallic watch on her wrist.

  “You’re fucking late.” It is Rodriguez who speaks, putting down a half-eaten banh mi sandwich, slivers of carrots falling onto his plate. He’s wearing his tan summer suit, more wrinkled now than it was three days ago. His hairstyle hasn’t received the attention it needs, and his quiff of hair falls limply onto his forehead.

  “Enjoying the sandwich?” Ranjit pulls out a chair and sits.

  Case is immaculately dressed, the gold buttons on her blue blazer shining, her crimson lipstick freshly applied. But she, too, looks tired; the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes are more pronounced, and there is a smudge of lipstick on her front teeth. Ranjit knows then that they must be under a lot of pressure to solve the case.

  “Talk. And it better be good.” Rodriguez pushes his plate away and glares sullenly.

  “Wait a minute. What happened to your arm?” Case’s voice is composed.

  “I fell.”

  “Really?”

  Ranjit sees the beginning of their good-cop, bad-cop routine, and needs to cut through it, fast. Playing by their rules is going to take too damn long.