The Blue Taxi Page 5

  Majid Ghulam squinted. He looked down at Agatha and nodded slightly, not unkind. “Ah, yes.” His mind was coming clear. He’d heard about her, too. “Thank you. Yes.” And, “Good,” he said. Then, “Grateful.”

  He shuffled to the parlor. With a sense that things were moving to some second stage, Sarie followed him. Agatha came, too. Ismail and Ali hovered in the hallway. They eyed each other, shrugged, and, quiet, leaned against the wall to watch. Majid Ghulam asked Sarie to sit. He took the chair across from her, on the other side of a long, low, broken table. Sarie noted its carved feet, the nice curve of the legs. A coffee table, Sarie thought. Antique. As pictured in old magazines. As Sultans must have had. Agatha settled on the floor.

  Elbows planted on his thighs, clasped hands hanging in between two bony, trousered knees, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee looked at her and waited. Tense but almost beaming, tight, like a man unused to company but eager to behave. His scrutiny made her shy. She squirmed. Her legs were too long for the space between the blue settee and table. She twisted her big hips, now this way and then that, trying to get comfortable. Agatha looked up at her and Sarie had the feeling that her daughter thought her too big and ungraceful. She frowned and rearranged her hair.

  Awkwardness. It is through just such times, of course, that certain seeds are sown: without intending to, Sarie showed Mr. Jeevanjee her upper thigh, doughy, muscular, dimpled at the flank. Did he notice it for what it was? Was he alert enough by then, awake enough to see (A thigh!)? Or did it simply seep into his consciousness somewhere and shift a shadow in his head, as weighty flesh can do?

  His head. Above it, brassy pendulum at work, an old wall clock from America or Switzerland glinted in the light. Sarie by and by stopped twisting. She sat instead sidesaddle, her knees high and together. She watched him. Yes, the man looked tired and unkempt. Perhaps even dirty. But there was something fine about him, too. With the clock atick behind him, just above his head, she thought that Mr. Jeevanjee, in slightly different light, might look particularly important. A man with things to do. A man who thinks of time. It struck her that she would not have been surprised to see a man like him—shaved and better dressed, of course—managing a railway station or a restaurant or working at a desk. And while her husband had once had a rather large desk of his own, it occurred to her to ask herself, Ces jours-ci, does Gilbert have a watch? Sarie didn’t think so. She sucked idly at her cheek. There passed between Majid Ghulam and his guest a solid silence, heightened by the parrot’s intermittent squawks.

  Majid Ghulam leaned back a bit. His fingers loosened. Perhaps because in this half-waking state he was not quite himself, or perhaps because he found her height, her freckles, and her forthrightness refreshing, Majid Ghulam—who was unkind when the right opportunity arose—felt that he had been presented with a rare occasion to which he should rise, sensed that something different had come. “Well. You are Mrs. Turner.” Sarie answered, “Yes.”

  When faced with an odd happening, still moving in a funk, one can sometimes resort to ritual and rules. Drawing on the manners he had witnessed in his father and his wife, this Majid Ghulam did. As though expecting waiters or the members of a staff, he looked briefly away. He then turned back to her and said, “Maria will bring tea.” Sarie nodded, was impressed. Ils ont une servante, she thought. Her voice a little like the voices of British ladies she had known once and not liked very much, Sarie said, “Oh, tea. Yes, I am sure that will be nice. Yes. Thank you.” She plucked at her gray hem and noticed gratefully in passing that Agatha was sitting well and looked appropriately polite.

  Next there appeared Maria, plump and sturdy, thick-ankled and dour, bringing tea in a red thermos that entirely by accident matched the color of her headscarf. Because the Jeevanjees never had real guests—or hadn’t, once Hayaam was gone—and the few relations who still came knew to bring refreshments of their own, Maria, understanding that this was an Occasion, had also brought up seven rare kaimati balls she had acquired the day before and had been saving for herself; though once she’d set them down, she had a second thought. While Sarie didn’t notice, Maria (who was not an ordinary Christian, who had recently been saved) looked her down and up, lingered on that leg, and made up her own mind. She set the dumplings on the table with a clatter, wished she hadn’t brought them, gave Agatha a warning look as if to say, And these are not for you, then pounded down the stairs.

  Sarie, who didn’t get enough sweet things at home, though she loved them so, was agreeably surprised. “What sweets!” she thought, and said aloud. She did enjoy kaimati! Majid Ghulam blinked. He gestured towards the plate, and Sarie, who had wished to be good-mannered, had wanted to act right, forgot herself a bit. It was good to be polite, but Sarie’s mouth was singing: Sugar! Oil! She ate four in quick succession. Majid Ghulam was not upset. He’d forgotten what guests should be. His own mouth moved a bit as Sarie chewed and chewed. He felt that he should speak.

  Unused to teatime’s polished back-and-forth, he felt something in himself come loose, a pain that had been sticking in his heart. He’d tell her. She’d listen, yes she might. It was something he’d been longing to announce, an indignation for which the aunts (who’d come to visit little Tahir out of duty and because their greatest pleasures sometimes lay in other people’s grief) had chastised him. “So petty!” they had said. “Think of what’s important! Don’t dawdle on what’s done! Do something instead!” He had been, without knowing it, perhaps, longing for an audience. Tasteless, possibly, too soon? But how often was he faced with someone who had come explicitly to sympathize with him? Why accept a guest at all if doing so did not bring the host relief? What Majid Ghulam told Sarie was a story that, had the Kikanga Flash still lived, would have taken the front page. Gesturing to the calamity that had brought her to the house without naming it directly, Majid Ghulam talked about the shoe, the very shoe that Agatha had loosened and laced up, and which had, in the end, been lost.

  He leaned forward, placed one hand on the table and one on his own knee. “Do you know what? Do you know what, Mrs. Turner?” Sarie made a listening sound, a hm? Like this, Majid Ghulam explained: while he had gotten most of his son back from the doctor, he had not retrieved the second Bata shoe. “They kept the shoe!” he said. He paused. Sarie, eating, nodded, and Majid Ghulam went on, surprised at his own speech, the active, busy sound of it, pouring from his throat into his ears and hers and the front room. Sure, the doctor was embarrassed. But Majid felt that he was being had, was hurt. “They were lying, I believe, you see. How could a shoe be lost?” While Sarie chewed and swallowed, careful, Majid Ghulam puffed out his meager chest and gestured with his hands. Above his head the ticking clock approved. “Right in front of me, he called up all the nurses for a scene.” Majid Ghulam pressed his lips together and worked his aching jaw. Sarie wiped her fingertips, leaned forward.

  She could picture hospitals, of course, could muster up enthusiasm for talk about their failings, and she felt reassured. He is telling me a story. Things are going well. She smiled at Mr. Jeevanjee, and, bolstered by her silence and the kind look on her face, he spilled out the rest: how the nurses quaked and trembled in the hallway, bit their lips in sorrow, shook their practiced heads. And how, despite the for-show-finger-wagging and one or two quick winks, the doctor was unable to extract from them an answer. “Nobody would say, Madam!” Majid Ghulam told her. His voice suddenly grew soft then, no longer quite a storyteller’s voice but rather like the voice of someone who has been telling a tall tale and all at once recalls that it is not tall, but true. He looked away from her. “None of them spoke up. Told me best I should forget.” Sarie made a pleasant listener’s noise. He raised his head again and fixed her in his sights, as though she alone could help him. “They said, ‘What is it with the shoe?’”

  Sarie thought how long it was since anyone had thought of her as “Madam.” It made her sweet and calm. She looked down at Agatha and wondered if she’d noticed, but Agatha, who was looking at the plate, hadn’t heard a
word. Sarie turned back to her host. Aware of Mr. Jeevanjee’s bright eyes, she told herself I must be sympathetic. She redoubled her support. “It’s terrible!” she said. “So sorry!” She could see the man had suffered. She did think (ever practical), What is a boy without a leg to need a second shoe? But she was wise enough just then to keep that to herself Bata shoes were fine. She said, “Terrible,” again.

  An aside. What several people at the clinic knew but had not said was this: a mild but inexperienced orderly whose own father’s leg had been devoured by gangrene had slipped that Bata shoe from Tahir’s dead leg in the night. The dead leg was a right leg, after all, as his father’s at home was. Perhaps that little shoe could fit his barefoot dad! But he’d miscalculated things. His father’s foot was small, it’s true, but not that small, and the shoe now like a rotted fruit or secret sat smelly and accusing beneath the worker’s bed. Absconding with a dead man’s hat or coat might be one thing, but this! Stealing from the dead leg of a little boy whose other parts were very much alive! Well, that was harder to admit to; he was too ashamed to bring the item back.

  But the fact of this small sin—if sin it was at all—neither Sarie nor her host could know. And it really didn’t matter. What Majid Ghulam remembered most, what rankled—he was in the corners of his mind aware that showing too much feeling to a stranger can turn them speedily against you, and tried to tell this part without being too serious—was how the doctor left things, how unhelpful he had been. He’d offered Majid Jeevanjee a decorative apology, then moved quickly away from talk of search and compensation to the future, which, if Majid played his cards right, the doctor thought—of all affronts!—was really rather bright. “Two arms and one leg! I know some with less! You must be looking now to what he does have left, I say.” He’d laid a fawning hand on Majid’s heavy arm (just a little anxious, knowing very well, of course, that this was Mad Majid). “Come now, my dear sir.” Then, far more intimate, too much, and steering Majid towards the door: “What’s a shoe, yakhe, in the face of life and death?” Majid Ghulam shook his head at Sarie, sighed. “‘What’s a shoe,’ indeed!”

  A shoe is nothing, in the face of life and death, it’s true. Even Sarie would have said so. But she liked to feel indignant, and it pleased her that her host was so visibly upset. He is opening himself, she thought. Were not Mr. Jeevanjee’s dark eyes undeniably aglisten? Did his voice not seem particularly warm? “Indeed,” she said. The lost shoe was an insult, yes, it was. A sign of bad times in the land, if people who are meant to heal a child can’t care for his possessions. And Sarie also felt superior: where she had been a nurse, nothing, not a thing, had ever disappeared. (Well, a person had, just once, but that story is for later, in a little while.) The lost shoe was an abomination, and she said so. The mean echo of a loss that was already too much to be borne. She shook her head and looked at Mr. Jeevanjee with both her blue eyes wide. “I can’t believe it,” Sarie said. “I have never heard, exactly, anything like this.”

  The shoe theft was thus not, in each and every sphere, an unproductive thing: it joined Sarie to her host. Majid Ghulam was unaccustomed to arousing tenderness in strangers. What a long time it had been! When Sarie Turner said, “It is truly a surprise what happens in the world,” he found himself feeling rather soft, and bare. “Yes, indeed, it is,” he said, repeating Sarie’s words as though they had been issued in a difficult new tongue. “What happens in the world can be truly a surprise.”

  While her mother and the father of the boy she’d come to see sat commiserating in their very grown-up way, Agatha, who could not wait any longer, crept up to the table and took two kaimati for herself, leaving only one behind. Her movement brought the sugared balls to Majid Ghulam’s attention. And, without knowing what he did—though his late wife would have stopped him—he plucked the last one up.

  What else took place in Kudra House that, though she squinted on the balcony and willed her eyes to grow, Bibi didn’t see? Not much. A lot. The boys stayed watching in the hallway, whispering through cupped hands. Dutiful Habib had come back from the shops with biscuits and, holding these, not wanting to interrupt his father, joined Ismail and Ali. As their daring father placed a sweet ball in his mouth, Ali, the quickest and most wicked, said a racy thing about Sarie Turner’s legs, and Ismail gave out a long and knowing laugh. Habib, embarrassed, good at seeming even slower than he was, pretended he’d heard nothing. But Majid Ghulam, aware of rustles in the hall, dusted off the crumbs that had fallen to his lap, cleared the sugar from his lip with a quick pass of his knuckles, and called out for the Nanjis.

  Later, he pulled out an old exemplar of the paper he’d once owned. Sarie was relieved. Despite her bravery with Gilbert, her insistence that she was more than equal to all things, that she had dealt with many kinds of people in her interesting life, she did feel out of practice. The newspaper was perfect. It was something she could read, in English. It also gave Majid Ghulam a simple space on which to focus his bright eyes. He hadn’t meant to ogle Sarie Turner’s legs. In fact, he had not been aware of doing so until he picked up the last sweet. He didn’t think he had such looking in him—not with Hayaam dead and Tahir broken practically in two. He was therefore also glad about the paper, which (like many other things) he had not shown anyone in years. Bringing out from underneath the chair a favorite issue of the old Kikanga Times, he thought how proud of it he’d been. “My specialty was poetry,” he said. He tapped the yellowed pages, closed one eye and pursed his nose and lips to show how seriously he took it. He wished that he owned glasses. “I increased the room for verse.” Sarie nodded in encouragement, and Majid Ghulam, taken by her kindness, admitted that he had, in long-gone days, written poems of his own.

  Sarie reached out for the paper. She liked a man who made things. Disheveled, this man was, she thought, but, still. He has a clock that marches! And he writes! He has a girl to bring him up the tea! Writing, really writing, things that no one else has said, was something to admire, wasn’t it? (Nevermind that Gilbert now and then submitted ramblings to the Historical Society or threatened to write books. This was something else.) And poetry! She liked the thought of that. Her freckled face lit up. How well this outing had turned out! She’d not only been consorting with the Muslims (for Gilbert had been right, she thought; Those names!) but meeting with, imagine, a thinking, writing man. An intellectual, indeed. “You write verse!” she said, knocking one of her big knees against the coffee table but not feeling any pain. “Mr. Jeevanjee, you mean you are a poet.”

  Majid Ghulam raised a hand up to his breast, suddenly embarrassed. “No,” he said, “I am an amateur, that’s all.” But part of him was pleased. “You are generous,” he said. Ali elbowed Ismail and pointed with his chin. Habib looked away. Their father the poet! Ali laughed and Ismail shoved him, told him to be still. The grown-ups carried on. Sarie folded up the paper and handed it to Mr. Jeevanjee. Majid Ghulam urged Nanjis on his guest. Though the kaimati balls had filled her, she took two to be polite. She twitched a little on the settee, moving her cramped legs.

  At last, Majid Ghulam understood. He pulled the coffee table to the side so that Mrs. Turner could stretch her limbs and sit with greater ease. Sarie sighed. Her big thighs disappeared beneath a dotted hem. She felt seen, and cared for. It was all right for Mr. Jeevanjee to have been looking at her legs, she thought, if this was how it ended. Perhaps he had been noticing her thighs so frequently in order to determine how to give her room. What a grand outing, indeed! Sarie, who could pick a side and stick with it awhile when it occurred to her to do so, decided then and there that not only was her visit so far a success, but that she liked this Mr. Jeevanjee and was having a good time. She felt she should repay him, that it was her turn now to find something to say. An offering. “I grew up in Jilima,” Sarie said. “The mountains.”

  Majid Ghulam was genuinely surprised. “Here?” he said. He cocked his head and looked sideways at her. “Mrs. Turner, you are local!” Sarie did not smile. “I lived with nur
ses there,” she said. “The Sisters.” Majid Ghulam did not know what to make of that. “Your mother and your father?” Sarie shook her head and pressed her knees together. She looked up at the clock and told her host she’d lost them very early. Majid Ghulam expressed sympathy, shook his tilted head. Sarie said—a little loudly, as though his sorrow were misplaced—“But I do not remember them!” She sat up in her seat. She hadn’t come to talk about herself “I’m used to it,” she said. And, as if in explanation, as if husbands could eclipse the value of one’s past, she tugged lightly at her earlobe, cleared her throat, and said: “My husband was attached to the Vunjamguu High Court. He was in the Service.”

  Majid Ghulam did not wish to pry. He did not press her further. Sarie had the fleeting thought that this was a relief. Taking charge again, she asked about his wife. A poet with three sons must have somewhere a Mrs. Perhaps she had gone out and would come back at any moment with shopping bags or news. But, no. Majid Ghulam looked behind him for a moment as though making certain that he would not be overheard. “Oh, Madam,” Majid Ghulam said. “My only wife is dead.”

  It was thus for Majid Jeevanjee an afternoon of firsts. Everyone he knew already knew about Hayaam. And because they thought of him as mad, they rarely came to see him; and if they did come close and speak, they didn’t dare say anything that might provoke his madness. But there it was. He’d said it, and saying it was strange. “What can anybody do? She died many years ago, may she be in peace.” At the fresh announcement of something so familiar and so old, Majid was disconcerted by a feeling: a little pang rose up just below his ribs and something in him flinched. Yes, he was still sad, for wasn’t he just that? Sad and Mad Majid? But when he unfurled himself again, he became aware of an even stranger thing: the pang had given way to a conviction that, despite the sweet kaimati, he might now have a biscuit.