The Blue Taxi Read online

  Her bread-roll belly rose softly and then fell and rose again while she waited for a pattern to make its outlines known. She kept her eyes as wide as they could be without reaching up with her own hands to peel her eyelids back. Her fingers trailed along the faded cotton sheet, tapping, thrumming, seeking something. Outside, the clever house crows shuttled and convened along the wires in the courtyard.

  Eventually, if what she thought was true, when she had tired of the waiting or grown dizzy from the whirl of that inscrutable potential, something, a real thing that had meaning, would have to slip out from the mass. Colors formed and spilled away. She wondered. For example, what was that pink orb? Was it just a speck of light, the kind that plays behind an eyelid in the sun? Or was it something else? A flower bud? Should she stitch a rose? Oh, no, she thought, definitely not. A rose! What could a rose portend that a peacock hadn’t done? Weren’t roses too predictable, like ylang-ylang blooms and jasmine? She was, she realized, slowly losing faith in flowers of all kinds. Flowers called up the hot scent of opened petals, the enticing tightness of closed things, strokes and love and kisses, and Bibi did not want to dwell too long on memories of those.

  Love hurt, see? She’d been talking about love with Issa and Nisreen for months now, how love makes homes fill up, how they ought to make a baby, how she wasn’t getting any younger and could they please see their way clear? But where had all that gotten her? Nisreen’s stomach flat and humpless as a brand-new Danish road, and Issa cringing, banging books, if Bibi brought it up. And tears, she thought, at night. It wasn’t really pleasant, making Nisreen cry.

  And there was, too, the other, older thing, which she didn’t like to think of but which, in such a childless house, she found herself confronting more often these days. She herself had nobody to squeeze or even think of kissing. Her husband, unlike Sarie Turner’s or Nisreen’s, was buried in a plot that had long been overgrown—and though she never mentioned it (and how upset she was whenever Issa did!), there were three small ones out there, too, who hadn’t stayed for long. Shriveled little buds. Flowers, thank you, no. She’d branch out, if you please. Roses were too easy. And the peacock, which she liked, with its potential for a preening and a strut, was, perhaps, something like a has-been—was complete, had been done before.

  Now for something else. Hm. Bibi groaned and sighed. How hard it was to tell a veritable vision from a habit, from defaults that float about! What were these nice squiggles? Ah. Elaborate herufi, twined, in pleasing aqua blue. Perhaps a well-designed, inspiring “by the grace of God” to bless a new endeavor? A pretty Bismillahi. Bibi clicked her teeth and sucked air narrowly between them. Why did nothing suit? No, she’d had enough of words. The squiggles thickened, took on the look of leaves. A scroll of ivy, in memory of distant ladies who had taught her how to sew? Bibi almost giggled. She had not made leaves in years. In a way, she would have rather liked to—that rich and creamy green, so deep, the wicked points that, to a needle, were so dear! Botanical, it’s true, not so different from flowers. But ivy was a special thing, altogether other. Not to do with love. Ivy?

  No. She sighed. As Issa often hastened to remind her, and as so many other things suggested (potholes, Royal Jubilees replaced by Chinese acrobats, the sarakasi, agriculture shows, the very layout of her home), it was a different country now. She wouldn’t go for ivy. Too British, too much a sign of Empire, too foreign and too green. And alien things should not, as the radio happily announced at morning-noon-and-night, be unduly encouraged to gallivant and prosper where they did not belong. No ivy. It wouldn’t be, thought Bibi, seemly. Though she did think there was more to Empire than people these days said. Had it all been bad? Bibi mused a bit. In fact, she thought (though she couldn’t ever say such a thing to Issa), she owed Empire a lot. Her stitching gifts, for one.

  Like everybody else, of course, like Mad Majid, and Sarie, Gilbert, and also Mama Moto, Bibi had a past. As a girl in a high and creaky white-washed rag-and-mangrove house that overlooked the sea, Bibi had spent hours locating the special spots from which she could, unseen, be a silent witness. Principally called Kulthum in those days—before age gave her the titles Mama Issa, and then Bibi, shifting what had come before—she’d been, from the start, very skilled at stillness. “Born without a sound,” her mother often said. “So quiet! Never a complaint!” For this a mother should be thankful, no? But wait—surprise! A fussless girl, as it turns out, can also bring you down.

  Beneath her mother’s precious Zurich clock, Kulthum practiced hush. Tamped her breath, stiffened and grew fallow. Motionless as water in a mtungi water-jar, tensed for movement as a scorpion. One-minute-two-minute-three-and-very-nearly-four. Exhale! Even when there was nobody to hide from, Kulthum hid and held her breath. Now and then she fainted and would come to in the dark. It happened frequently that nobody could find her. She acquired a reputation for being absent when there was hard work to be done. “Lazy! Disappeared again! Never home just when we need her.” But, almost always, watching and immobile, or knocked out from the looking, Kulthum was precisely there—only not quite in the way her tired parents wished.

  She practiced under high besera beds, curled up with her toes against the stepladders that led up to the mattress. She peered from low space through the watery light of rooms. She practiced between gunnysacks that smelled sharply of cloves, dozing now and then, sometimes staying for so long that her tender skin turned red from the dried-up buds’ sharp heat. She hid along the wall beneath her mother’s clothes rack, buried in the hanging pants and cloaks that smelled of basil and wood smoke. Do we need to say it? She laid her eyes on certain things that she ought not have seen.

  She saw, for instance, from underneath the bed, her middle sister Nasra weep, two stiff kilua flowers milky in her hands. Kulthum, in whom, even then, facts led to surmise, dreamed up a Busaidy boy whose parents would-not-never have Nasra for a wife. Tragic. Awful. So terrible that Kulthum also wished to cry. Kulthum also saw her father beat the boy who helped them load the cloves into the shop, imagined him a thief And other things: the kitchen girls skimmed palm-sized heaps of rice from Kulthum’s parents’ stores; her father counted money in the nighttime and listened to the radio; her mother liked to play before her mirror, moving like a star. For many years Kulthum went unnoticed. She saw but did not say, saw and did not move, almost twitched and didn’t. But her own secret was let out one monsoon day when, hiding in her sisters’ clothes, pressed tight against the wall, she was bested by her gut.

  What little Kulthum saw? A form of human congress. She saw nice Uncle Amal and her oldest sister Zainab gnash and flutter at each other, then fall softly on the bed after clear-thinking Amal had ascertained—mouth pressed to Zainab’s outstretched throat, one eye zooming to the latch, free hand flapping at the lintel—that the door was safely closed. Next, Amal covered Zainab’s mouth with the hot cup of his palm, and Zainab closed her eyes. They shuddered on the bed so much the glass panes rattled in the frame. Kulthum held her breath for one-two-three-and-almost-four. She tried. But she was stricken not with tears, in the end, and not either with fear, but by a wave of laughter that came up from her stomach and clattered up her throat, then burst out into the room despite the fact that Kulthum—who had felt it coming, who had tried valiantly to stop!—had pressed both hands over her mouth to push the thing back down into the privatest of gullies where it properly belonged.

  So this is what they did! And this is why Amal, who already had a wife (a headstrong, jealous wife whom he kept at Fumaniwa, facing the Seychelles in a great house so she would look the other way), came to visit them so often! And this is why her parents had been scrambling to get Zainab a man. As Kulthum laughed and laughed, Amal bounded off the bed, pulled his trousers up, unlatched the door he had so carefully kept shut, fled down-the-hallway-through-the-courtyard-the-back-alley-in-the-rain, not to be seen for months. Not knowing what had happened, Zainab pulled the sheet over her head and shook there for a while; Kulthum crept up to her and peeked under th
e sheet and tickled Zainab on her breasts and sticky bottom until the two of them were howling on the bed and their mother strode inside to see exactly what was up.

  It was thus Zainab and Amal, unwittingly, and the complexities of love, that set Kulthum on a course towards hooks and cloths and thimbles; it was after that, after they had found Zainab a man who could take her far away, that Kulthum’s parents ordered their last child to make something of herself. They had decided what. It would get the secretmonger well away, and keep her fingers busy. Even better, it would work the bad girl’s brain and keep those greedy eyes of hers fastened to her lap. If she could learn to thread a needle, Kulthum’s mother said, their lives would be improved.

  And so to the Ladies’ Sewing Club—where, on weekday afternoons, qualified white ladies supplemented the daily training in Domestic Arts the girls received in school with additional, decorative instruction—little Kulthum went. The Sewing Club, however, while intended as a punishment, was not entirely so. The stitching did keep Kulthum out of private rooms and kept her eyes in place. But, to everyone’s surprise, it also brought her pleasure: she had a talent for it. There was, in Kulthum’s sharp and sharper eyes, a roiling swell of patterns that spilled right out of her digits into colored thread and cloth. Things she’d seen before, and things she’d never seen. Flowers, deer (poised, at the white ladies’ suggestion, in pale blue fields of snow), peacocks, stippled pheasants, guinea fowl (called kanga, because they liked to talk), trumpet flowers, fanlike kadi buds, palm trees (which the tourists liked so much), roses, which were to be expected, daisies now and then, and ivy, ivy, ivy, which the British bought in piles.

  Mrs. Harries, with her white, round pillbox hat (like a guy dressed for Ashura, or so some people said), and Mrs. Livery-Jones, plump and always damp, who together manned the thing, approved. Their love of stitchery ran deep, was nationalist, in fact. Both were firm in the conviction that girls who sewed were doing honor to the Queen, communicating with her spirit in some way, mysteriously but certainly acquiring rectitude and rigor. Let men speak of guns and laws! Embroidery, they knew, would lift the natives up. They dreamed a great expansion. Not simply city girls above the Egan Smythe Madrassa, but a huge network of rural Sewing Clubs: country girls in hundreds stitching daisies and cat faces and green leaves into handkerchiefs and shams. African and Asian girls versed in the Domestic Arts, they knew, could turn the world around.

  Hands clasped to their pale bosoms, Mesdames Livery-Jones and Harries praised little Kulthum. She was a bright example of precisely what they meant. Oh, they were impressed. She might even go beyond the ideal marriage that was every young girl’s hope and attain her Independence. “With your quick hands and skills, little Miss Kulthum, you could start a business.” Kulthum, unused to kind attention, stitched her thumbs and heart out. What an easy thing of push and pull, pressures that with their rhythm and the way they took possession of her hands made patterns grow along the surface of the cloth so easily she was surprised by hours passing, until Mrs. Harries clapped her hands and led them all in calisthenics to get the blood in motion, turn those narrow girls into the good Imperial subjects they were really meant to be.

  At the Ladies’ Sewing Club, Kulthum learned to focus her attention on her lap. She made very pretty things. But all that silence, all that focus, had a separate effect: the more she pressed her eyes into her lap, the more the skin behind her neck grew soft and fine-tuned to the world. The more Kulthum performed the thing intended to divert her attention from other people’s secrets, the more she sensed with all her other parts when she might catch a scandal at the corner of her eyes or in the tensed skin of her wrist. Out the window once, alerted by a twitching in her knee that coincided with the movement of a bicycle, she saw a stately man, respected for his learning, ease three fingers down a coffee vendor’s tin and make off with five slabs of groundnut brittle while the owner looked away. From a shiver at her nape that matched a shift in light, she looked over her shoulder and saw Mrs. Harries dab an unembroidered handkerchief at the corners of her eyes, a letter open in her lap. Later, a tightening beneath the weight of her long braid caused her to see her very own Mrs. Livery-Jones’s husband (whose short pants brought his scarlet shins into relief) dart nervous down a certain passage, followed seven minutes later by a slim boy Kulthum knew.

  The hours spent attuned to thread and thimbles, intended by her mother as a diet, thus nonetheless made Kulthum far more able than she’d been. When she was done with all the jumping jacks and twists, had packed her tools into a leather satchel that she had won at school (‘Made in England’—“Madein,” the groundskeeper would say, like a single German word), and had politely said goodbye to Livery-Jones and Harries, Kulthum skipped out of the Egan Smythe Madrassa into the chalky streets, where she filled the stomachs of her eyes with the things that other people did. The Sewing Club kept Kulthum’s family safe somehow, but out there in the world, it made her a new force. From the Ladies’ Sewing Club, Kulthum-Bibi learned the lesson that presaged her watching in Kikanga and gave her future shape: the best secrets of all, those that you can share, that thrill and bring least harm, belong to people who are not a part of your immediate family. These you can discuss.

  Older now, in-lawed, widowed, nieced and nephewed to children far inland and one-two in Dubai whom she never saw, Bibi had a lot of time for the things that she was good at. Of the boxy clock that let loose Alpine phrases now and then, and the fans that spun unevenly and did not bring much air, she was often unaware. The only sounds she really heard, clearly and unfailingly (because she loved them both so well, would have traded all the gossiping in China for a grandbaby or two!), were Nisreen’s and Issa’s voices. Sometimes, too, the clash of pans downstairs and Mama Moto’s heavy feet—because Bibi liked to eat, and these sounds signaled meals—and—perhaps because she, too, liked to be alert to glittering things that can be plucked from thickets with an eye, a needle, beak—the hot sound of the house crows flapping in the air. But not very much else.

  When she stitched her words and pictures in the mornings and in the afternoons, Bibi didn’t even hear the children in the alley or the buses, arumble and ahoot. She was utterly dependent on the shiver at her neck or the trembling of a hidden thing at the corner of her eyes—the secret-love that sometimes made her stop what she was doing and look down into the street to see what she could see. It was this kind of shivering luck that had made her look up from the hanging that was just beginning to read Al-Fadh… as the Al-Fadhil-bearing bus bore down on Mad Majid’s little boy. But now, she thought, there was something else at work, as if she herself were being pierced by a great needle, caught up in a tapestry so large and fine that she would never see it all with only her poor eyes. For it wasn’t just the bus. What about the peacock spilling from her fingers on the same day Sarie Turner trotted out her daughter in the sunshine and headed for that house?

  She would open herself up to whatever forces drummed. She would have to try. And, after four long, luckless mornings, which she considered training, Bibi saw, at last, a form emerging from the dark. Rounded, glowing. Could it be a crescent moon, with a little star before it? No. The outline of a skiff? Not either. Tsk, what was it? Could it be, she asked herself, a cow? Rounded, with a hump? No, really, not a cow. An animal, but blue, and what should she (No Banyan, I, no Hindu, Bibi thought, a little bit mixed-up) do with a blue beast? She breathed a little deeper. When the thing came fully into shape, undeniable and purring, she could see it well, but what she saw she couldn’t quite believe. A car. A light blue Morris Oxford. Just a moment, Bibi thought. A taxi?

  She saw it now as clearly as, had her eyes been focused on the world, she would have seen the soft mass of her chest, rumpled in her shift: sharply, fully, as if it had been parked right there in her bedroom, door ajar for Bibi to get in. She watched it for a moment, blinked. How brilliant the thing was—just washed! Perfectly sky blue, the way so many Morris taxis were, with a pale, pale cream-white bonnet. Yes, indeed, a car
that Bibi liked, had she been forced to say. A Morris. She had memories of these, oh, yes. Of riding on the seafront in them, of going off to picnics with Nasra and Zainab. And even of a teacher she had had who’d loved his own so much that he had put it on the boat with him when he moved to the mainland. Indeed. A blue Morris with a bonnet. For a moment, Bibi smiled into her memories and thought, Of course, that is what I will make. She lolled a moment in relief The real thing had come through. But then she frowned, and scratched her knees. What could she be foretelling? What could a taxi mean?

  Bibi stretched her toes as far as they would go, as if she’d reach a better understanding through the arches of her feet. A taxi. Was she to take a trip? Would they be having guests? She thought about it for a while, even told herself that she might mix two kinds of thread to get that gleaming blue. But something shifted in the room. While she’d started out the morning thinking of herself as famous, special in the holy scheme of things, now that she had a thing before her, Bibi faltered just enough that her enthusiasm waned. It was one thing saying bravely she would take up any vision and another to commit herself to stitching it, in full view of her own household. Of course someone would see her. Of course Nisreen would ask, “What are you stitching now, Bi?” And Mama Moto might hold it in her hands and look at it while Bibi was asleep. Foolishness, she thought. Who do you think you are? Might it not be sinful to have thought herself so special? Just an old, old woman who wants a baby in the house. It’s a cruel trick. She wiped a tear from her eye.

  A taxi! Who, she thought, would want one? Certainly she didn’t, couldn’t picture hanging up a Morris stitching on the wall. What words could accompany it? A wreck can go no farther? Broken things are sweet? Absurd. Nisreen might frown and ask her what it was about. She could hear Issa telling her, already, that she might as well have made a picture of a rickshaw, a relic of the past. He wouldn’t want a Morris, either. Oh, such modern, modern children. He’d want a Peugeot, a Land Rover, or perhaps a limousine. No, Bibi didn’t want to stitch a car. And what would the leaders of the Sewing Club have thought? They had called for birds and flowers, hadn’t they? If a person strayed from flora-fauna, they had said, then ships might be all right—for a ship’s a clever ocean plant, a bird in a wet sky. But cars? Never once had Livery-Jones or Harries pressed anyone for cars. More recently, of course, like everybody else, Bibi had seen for herself the printed cloths done up with Ferris wheels and lightbulbs, on one even an airplane. But those were all new things. New things for a bright future. A broken-down old Morris, Bibi thought, though she felt a sweetness for it. Wouldn’t that be shabby?