The Blue Taxi Page 3
Here’s what was at work: while dutiful Nisreen most often did exactly what was asked of her without skipping a beat, she was also sometimes moved by a desire to step in, to let on what she knew. And Nisreen, on second thought, was not convinced that visiting the boy would be a good idea. But what was she to say? She gave Sarie a look designed to make her pause. Just as, in Northern lands, many Europeans do when speaking to a foreigner, Nisreen enunciated clearly: “You are sure you want to visit? You are certain you’re quite sure?” Nisreen’s voice was gentle; she felt torn. Visits to the sick were right, of course. Nisreen conducted many on her own. But this! A European with a child, and the Majid Ghulam Jeevanjees. Well, this was something different. Should she say? Should she not? If she did, how would she? Fingering the glossy desk, Nisreen hesitated, almost spoke, then gulped. Expectant, Sarie frowned.
Nisreen tapped the counter twice with her long thumbs. She thought: An Englishwoman, after all. I shouldn’t even care. English-women were well known for doing as they pleased. But Nisreen also thought: A woman, with a child. Nisreen cared for children. She leaned away from Sarie, put weight on her good leg, and touched her stomach briefly. What if something happened to the girl? She looked back up at Sarie. “Well.” Nisreen pressed her lips together. “What if Well.” Shyness was a struggle. Nisreen took a breath. “Perhaps the boy needs rest.”
Nisreen’s soft suggestion, coming after such a pause, caused Sarie to stiffen. Gilbert’s croons came crouching in her ear. Perhaps she shouldn’t go. What if Gilbert was correct? Perhaps she would, as he had said, be well out of her depth. Perhaps this girl was thinking, just as Gilbert had, about the Muslim boy, the father, these very Jeevanjees, the mistakes Sarie might make. Something like No good can come of it, my dear. Off keel and embarrassed, Sarie stepped away. She thought of sleeping dogs, and blankets, almost said, “Yes, let the sick child rest. You’re right. I will not go today.” But she also thought of Agatha. They, not Gilbert, and not this narrow girl, had been witness to a thing far greater than themselves. They, not she, had recovered gracefully at Hisham’s Food and Drink. Sarie turned around. Agatha, enthralled by the framed pictures and the cool clinic’s smooth walls, as usual seemed calm. Her dangling feet were still. Agatha, Sarie told herself, would not be swayed by doubt. She was too intent on that boy’s missing leg. And, thought Sarie, imperial in her way, Who’s this bony girl to intervene in our own affairs?
No. Sarie stretched her neck and described a circle in the air with her substantial chin. She brought a finger to her ear, pried Gilbert’s warnings out, and flicked them to the floor. She would not go back to the old flat to admit she had been bested, would not leave this clinic in defeat. On y va, she thought. We go, no matter what there is. Had she not felt required by the boy, the road, the world, that day on the corner? Sarie squared her rugged shoulders and looked Nisreen in the eye. “I am sure that we must visit.” She turned to Agatha and said, “Or not?” And though her daughter hadn’t stirred, Sarie felt confirmed. She looked back at Nisreen. “We have to go, you see.”
As if in response to Sarie’s declaration, the electric current dawdled and the fans failed with a thunk. In unison, Sarie and Nisreen turned their faces to the ceiling. The skin on Sarie’s bare arms puckered and unpuckered. In the corner on her chair, Agatha looked up but did not cease to scratch a bug bite at her knee. In the stillness, Nisreen thought about the Jeevanjees. Oh, she was not at all concerned that this ungainly woman would not know where to store her shoes, or that she might reach out for a biscuit with an unsuitable left hand. That such things might occur, she didn’t even think. Yellow hair and naked arms aside, Nisreen was definitely not protecting Jeevanjees from Sarie.
In Kikanga, the busy heart of downtown Vunjamguu (mixed and thumping: shops and homes and buses, restaurants and bedrooms, an office here and there) people know each other. It’s a bustling place, for sure, and Vunjamguu keeps growing. But contrary to what some social thinkers claim, cities don’t split people up so much as they mix them all together—indeed, until some of them fall sick from so much neighbors’ news and dream of building for themselves a refuge in the country, to which acquaintances will travel only if they must. People here hear things. And Kikanga in those days was even more like a big village than now: all kinds of people in close quarters, blood relations and the rest, generous and not, eavesdroppers on every single side as well as up and down.
Nisreen, because she’d married Issa, and because they lived in Mansour House, where secret-monger Bibi hummed and surveyed all day long, had heard more things than most. Though Bibi hadn’t left the house in several years, she had once done the rounds, and she had heard enough at weddings and at funerals to last ten gossips’ lives. And since she now lived on the balcony, almost, waiting for that feeling and scouring the faces of the houses on India and Mahaba streets for happenings in windows, she was also up-to-date. Bibi noticed things, and, to top it off, had a good imagination. If there was a tale to tell (and sometimes when there wasn’t), Bibi could produce it. About the slingshot-aiming boy’s sad dad, the Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee whose name Sarie had set down, there was plenty to be said.
Here’s what Bibi told Nisreen: Majid Jeevanjee, known once to two or three as Ghuji, had long been widely called Mad Majid Ghulam. The glum events that had earned him that sharp name were proof beyond a doubt that people do not always match up to a type. Jeevanjees, case one. Mad Majid Ghulam did not resemble in the least what anyone with ordinary feeling about Jeevanjees might think. Oh, yes, he was somehow a cousin to the famous family’s coastal island branch. And was related also to the kingpins who had so stevedored, dubashed, and even, frankly, built great cities to the north. A Jeevanjee he was, by birth and blood and flesh. But he was nevertheless not what people in Kikanga expected Jeevanjees to be. Here’s the very thing: he was not, as his older brothers were, as his parents and their parents had once been, and as so many other Jeevanjees were, too, a thundering success.
Hard jaw working fast, arms spread apart before her, palms turned slightly up, pleased that Nisreen had for once taken time to sit and appeared prepared to listen, Bibi had begun: “I know exactly what you’re thinking. ‘Those Jeevanjees have got it made. Money in their veins. Jubilees and Garden Parks, import-export, cloves, and newspapers, to boot.’ Oh, and how can I forget? You are also thinking, to be sure,‘Railroads in the brain.’ But sometimes”—Bibi leaned a little in and made her voice important—“accidents and luck, my dear, are a stronger thing than blood. Oh, yes, little Nisreen.” Here Bibi had smiled especially for her, a crow-smile that had made her eyes glint. “Can change destiny… Pahp! Pahp!” Bibi snapped her lips apart, releasing puffs of air. “Right before your eyes.”
Here’s how. Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee had begun his grown-up-journey in the world with a well-stocked wholesale shop and a respectable inheritance from profits made in cloves. Later on, he had run a paper. So far, so good, you say. But no. The businesses, one-two, like dominoes, had failed. First: a storm with thunderous fists sent forty kapok mattresses and six new sofa sets (love seat, ottoman, and couch) floating down the streets. The wholesale shop was ruined, soaked, then washed thoroughly away. Not one wall left standing, not one wet thing returned. Majid Ghulam’s older brothers, who had given him the shop because (they’d said) little can go wrong with a Jeevanjee in charge, thought twice. Ghuji had not brought the rain himself, of course, but he must have—mustn’t he—done one thing or another to have his shop disappear while others stood up tall. Perhaps they’d understood already that he wasn’t made for things like that; perhaps the shop was proof Knowing themselves able, the brothers had with considerable daring turned to the illegal acquisition of stereos from abroad and to the smuggling of rice. They did not take Ghuji on. But, still, a brother is a brother and so on, a load that can’t be shed. They gave him something else. “Stick fast to the paper,” his two brothers said. Hadn’t certain Jeevanjees elsewhere done well in publications? “Words can’t float away.”
Second: the Kikanga Flash and Times had seemed a better proposition. Majid Ghulam might not have luck with shops, but he had, as everybody knew, been capable in school. Had won some prizes, even, been praised by British masters (kneesocked men and hatted ladies all who, so they said themselves, “could spot artistic temperaments even in this dark”). Here, Bibi had reminded Nisreen and the pillows that, though some years before Majid, she had been to the same school as he, you see, had grown up on those islands, too, come to Vunjamguu at the same time, and her memory was sharp. She relied on evidence; she didn’t make things up. And so. And so Majid Ghulam, who liked words a fair sight better than mattresses and chairs, had taken up the newspaper with a sense of, shall we say, adventure. Those who watched him had felt hope: he’d lost the stuff for sure, but here, if anywhere, a poet might make good. Words are better for a reader than kapok beds and fans.
But just because a newspaper is rife with little fictions doesn’t mean that dreams can make it run. A paper is a business. This Majid was a poet. A verse, the man could read; a market, he could not. The Kikanga Flash and Times, once abrim with hot, delicious news, became the New Kikanga Times: For Vunja’s Thinking Folk. Tripling the section kept for poems (a modest dose of which did reassure the readers that they were people of good fiber and also guardians of tradition), highlighting the student essays, he squeezed the starlets and the football players out. Driven, Majid was. The failure of the mattress shop had brought about in him a fierceness of ideas. As others put it: it was not just sofa sets and mattresses that softened in the rain. Even as the customers complained and the brothers looked up from their radios long enough to shake their rice-filled fists, Majid Ghulam persisted with the poetry, and essays on “What Every Man Should Read.” The poems! He did not even stick to only local kinds—which rhymed! Which thrummed with meter that could hit you in the face! Or the local epics, serialized, with morals that should make a person think!—which could have, maybe, with the giving out of prizes, caught on in the end. Instead, Majid Ghulam, a man who’d read books printed in England, who now and then wore neckties, whose father and his father before him had played billiards, and bridge, too, with probity and glee, was sometimes Modern like a donkey. Majid chose free verse; the papers stayed unsold. Oh, one-two years on dwindling funds. A weekly, then a monthly, and then finally, bitterly defunct. The Kikanga Times were up.
Some did think this failure simply a mistake. Other Jeevanjees had failed at various things. Some businesses just didn’t work; it happened. Yes, all right. But they’d always come back shining, wait and see. That’s what Jeevanjees are made of, or? Resilience. A no-man-or-state-shall-bring-me-down demeanor. But with no sign of revival, with no help from the brothers, what had at first seemed a series of forgivable miscalculations here, and here, and there, became something else instead. The busy talkers and rethinkers of Kikanga identified the root of Majid’s trouble, and suddenly those losses were not flukes. Pedigree aside, this Jeevanjee, this aberration, was not a man for business. Moreover: he was stuffed full of bad luck and had perhaps been made that way. Ill-starred from the first. Not just vague, eccentric, which some successful men can be, but a business-curse and poison: “Not just ‘so strange I-will-wear-a-hat or learn-to-play-a-trumpet,’ no, but bad. Bad luck,” said Bibi. “A bad-luck man, indeed.”
How could it have happened, to a very Jeevanjee? In Kikanga, where people make pronouncements, the new belief was this: either from a holy place, or from somewhere, someone, else, there had come an interference. Either God (Who cannot be second-guessed) had made it thus, or someone—this was Bibi’s leaning—had slipped a sticky finger in his food when he was just a boy. “You know.” She gestured to her skirts, slipped a finger in her mouth. “Like so.” Nisreen laughed, then blushed. Bibi was insistent: Majid was fated to disaster. “Look now,” Bibi said, replacing her wet digit with a chunk of almond burfi, “what happened to his wife.”
To his own shock and pleasure, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, as men and women do, fell in heady love. He even managed to get married to the darling of his choice, who had, as luck (it seemed) would have it, fallen for him, too. Hayaam, a distant cousin, a round-faced, pleasant girl with great dark eyes and slow, thick hands, was smitten by the narrow man. Because she had not excelled in school, was not as light-complected as good parents might hope, and showed no sign of having either special skills or embarrassing desires, she was not unsuitable for sad Majid Ghulam, either. And he was, after all, a Jeevanjee. Quite so. A catch, if only for his name. Members of her family convinced themselves that all the talk of bad luck in Majid was nonsense, and, gladly, proudly, even, let their young girl go. Majid and his new bride fell into the happy tick and sway of married love, with eyes and hands for none but one another. They did not even mind when Majid’s older brothers, who could spot a deal from very far away, sold up all their radios, accepted final payment for a ton of Thailand rice that they had not yet received, and skipped Vunjamguu for England, promising them money but abandoning them all.
Oh, magical Hayaam, reverser of ill fate! For several years, Majid and Hayaam appeared—though no one knew quite how—to prosper, and those who’d made pronouncements wondered if they had been wrong. Narrow Majid plumpened up and went about with smiles on. Hayaam glowed and glowed so brightly that in her parents’ eyes her shine made up for what Majid lacked in gold. And the real shape of success? Proud, dutiful Hayaam fashioned for her dreamy poet-husband three good-sized, noisy kids, all of them strong boys. “Like you’ll make for my Issa.” Bibi tapped Nisreen’s long leg with a hand like a warm claw. And Nisreen had giggled, said, “Go on!”
News of Majid’s offspring at first seemed rather fine: from the moment each could move, the boy-children gave signs, as all Jeevanjees should, of mathematical prowess. They counted everything—toes and beans and stones, and parents—noted down their totals (30, 3,064, then 8, and a lovely, lovely 2), then counted up again. Plus-plus! Things looked, at last, to be turning to the good. Had everyone been a bit too quick to speak? Could Majid have some Jeevanjee in him? A slow, small kernel, but a true one nonetheless, that had simply taken its own time to pop beneath the concentrated sunshine of a brave, sweet-tempered girl?
Well, no. Alas. Bad-luck men do not turn good-luck just like that. And misfortune leaves a mark that is often hard to separate from the thing that left it there. The bad luck some thought might have gone away came back to him eightfold or even ten. Before the tide of talk had turned, before people could too thoroughly forget how they had sworn that to dumb Ghuji nothing good could ever come, Hayaam and Majid’s boys were forced to learn the sad art of subtraction. When love-of-Majid’s-life Hayaam set out to get her Ghuji their fourth child, well, just like that, proving now to one and all that M. G. Jeevanjee was nuksi, kisirani, failure through-and-through, darling Hayaam died. It’s true the fourth boy lived, he did, he was the very one who’d had four limbs until the week before, so Hayaam’s death was not a thorough minus. But what a loss, indeed. Nisreen gasped, and Bibi squeezed her hand.
People went right back to naming what was what. Majid Ghulam was not destined to prosper. See how he ruined what he touched. “Clear as water, don’t you see? The man is not good news.” Bibi then went on to say that Majid’s weak heart had gone sour and that his mind had suffered, too. “What else could we expect?” She stretched her neck and brought her hands together. Majid Ghulam went mad. “Crazy, don’t you know? Shouts. Sees things that aren’t there! The man,” she said, “has had a short.” Bibi showed Nisreen exactly what she meant: she slapped her temples with her palms, rolled her eyes back, growled, pointed in the air at something neither she nor Nisreen saw, and shook her little knees. “Short circuit!” Almond crumbs went flying. Nisreen had laughed and laughed, then all at once felt tears in her eyes. She’d looked away from Bibi.
Nisreen was not unsusceptible to bad-luck explanations; she knew that misfortunes added up can make a person like a dog, fit only to be shot. And surely little Tahir Majid’s fall t
he week before on India Street was not good luck at all. But on some days, Nisreen turned away from neighbors’ talk of destiny, mixed romance with science. She had read about psychology at school, and she had private doubts about whether Mr. M. G. Jeevanjee, or anyone, was bad-luck through and through. She wasn’t sure—not knowing him herself—if he had really lost his mind. Perhaps, she thought, Majid Ghulam’s reported habits (his wandering outside in the night in nothing but a singlet, his sleeping in all day, his browbeating of passersby, the shouting out of windows, all since Hayaam’s death) were not the bad luck coming back. No, thought generous Nisreen, they’re signs of love and grief. Majid Ghulam’s depressed. Nisreen thought that if her man died one day like that, without warning in advance (she thought of Issa and her heart hurt), she might act strangely, too. Deaths were planned by God and only God, she thought, not by stars or sticky hands, and grief could bring on madness. If Issa died, would people say that Bibi’s gummy hands had lingered on the food? Nasty mother snuffs her only son? Worse yet, that poor Nisreen herself, with her froglike, failing eyes, that limp she tried to hide, and, most telling of all, her neither-round-nor-swelling stomach, had caused her husband’s doom? Been a bad-luck girl herself?
Nonetheless. It was one thing to look upon M. G. Jeevanjee from safely far away and treat him kindly in her thoughts, another to agree that he should be sought out. Bad-luck man or no, Majid was peculiar. And peculiar men should be kept at one arm’s length, at least. Especially the long and naked arms of Englishwomen who were not at all informed. For what did Europeans know about the right sort of protection? And, further, like dust fevers and syphilis, infidelity and hatred, bad-luck-grief-or-madness, or whatever the thing was—would it not be contagious?
At Kikanga Clinic, the high fan twitched, then started up again. Sarie fiddled with the long strap of her purse. Agatha slid down from her chair and came to stand beside her. While Nisreen considered Sarie and the child, Bibi’s voice resounded in her ears, with headlines from the Flash and Times of Sad Majid Ghulam. Nisreen saw them in her mind. In longhand, teasing script: “Incorrigible!” In bold:“Unpredictable, What’s More!”