The Blue Taxi Page 6

  Hunger? Hunger and not grief? He was alert enough by now to be taken quite firmly aback. Was it Tahir’s missing leg that made him hungry, suddenly, for filling empty space? Did his hunger stand for wishing old things to come back? Or for—this he could not think too clearly then, not with Mrs. Turner polka-dotted and life-sized on his very own blue settee—new things to replace the older ones that kept being subtracted, shoring up the gloom?

  Sarie Turner said, “I’m sorry,” pushed the dish towards her host, crossed her easy legs, and elaborately adjusted the collar of her dress. Majid Ghulam said, “Thank you.” Looking for a moment all the world like a person plucking a soft flower, he took another Nanji.

  At their father’s nod, the boys took Sarie Turner’s daughter, who had been patient all this time, who had been waiting just for this, to see their little brother. One and one-half legs covered by a patterned cotton sheet in the room he shared with Ismail, Ali, and Habib, Tahir Majid Jeevanjee was sleeping. Ali, like a dart, poked at the boy’s pillow, shook him by the shoulder. “Here,” he said, “is the last living person in the world to have seen your missing leg.” Clever and impious, Ali had turned it all into a game, pretending from the day Tahir came home that the missing limb would be returned to him as soon as it was found. Ismail and Habib were grateful. “Dad’s a paper man, remember. They’ll put ads out every day. Full page. Wanted: Leg! Last seen on India Street.” Ismail rolled his eyes. There was only one newspaper in those days, and on its rather military board no Jeevanjee had allies. Tahir knew full well it wouldn’t happen, but he let Ali have his way. Tolerant, he blinked.

  Agatha, though she’d had visions of the leg sewn back on herself could tell Ali was lying. The older boys did not impress her. She thought his brother’s teasing might make Tahir cry—a prospect that neither pleased nor troubled her but of which she took note. What did happen surprised her. Tahir Majid, undeterred by the guest’s newness, reached out for her arm and pulled her in towards him. Agatha allowed it. Like her mother, in a way, Agatha was curious and could also be impassive. Tahir took up the border of the sheet with his left hand and whispered, “Do you want to see?” He gestured with his pointed chin towards the odd place on the bed where the soft sheet simply sank, just below his knee. Tahir was a wounded boy, for sure, but he also had good sense. Displaying his own stump with pride was better, after all, than moping or pretending he was whole.

  Agatha did not need to be asked twice. She wanted very much to see. She clambered up beside him, and Tahir raised the heavy sheet, invited her to peer into the cotton-flowered gloom. The brothers’ silence was complete, and Agatha forgot them. In each room of the house, it seemed—down the hallway in the parlor, and here in their own bedroom—female shapes were ushering new times. Agatha, more brazen in some ways even than her mother, having seen what she had come for, pulled her head out from the tunnel Tahir Majid had devised, and tugged a pillow from behind him. “I need this,” she said. She sat beside him firmly. Tahir, wincing but hospitable, gave his guest more room.

  She’d surprised him, too. Propped up on one elbow, she asked him if it hurt. His brothers didn’t like to ask, even soft Habib; they already knew the answer, didn’t like to hear it. With Agatha so close to him and stark, Tahir almost said that yes, it did, it did, and not a little, either. That he felt the absent calf and foot as keenly as if they were still there. He might have added that having lost a leg had brought him new embarrassments, that the clever brothers had to bear him to the toilet if he needed to expel a poop (though this they did with a solemnity and tenderness that they had never shown him in his fully four-limbed days). He might have told her that when the distant aunts came (bringing their own juice, and nuts, and sweet, dry, yellow cake), he knew they came because they had to, because what had befallen Majid’s little boy was too-too-terrible, they said. That he could tell from how they passed the cashews, chomping, busy lips asmack, that they did not hold out much hope. “Two cripples in the house! Mad Majid whose mind should have a walking stick, and this! Now this! What else should we now fear?”

  They spoke their thoughts out loud when they believed he was asleep, more softly when they thought he was awake. Suddenly the crafty brothers—clever, yes, but unreliable, indeed—appeared more viable to the big aunts than he did. Even his Aunt Sugra, who people said was good, whispering to Tahir (was it just a month ago?) that he was the only hope, the only boy whose head for numbers might not put him in jail—Sugra had turned to leggy Ismail and Ali, and even stout Habib, the slowest of them all, and, holding out her hands, told them they were all their poor baba had left. That it was up to them now. Sugra! The only one who gave them money, came to visit; who could manage Tahir’s father when nobody else would. Sugra, who still loved them! A sore betrayal, it had been. But Tahir didn’t say these things to Mrs. Turner’s daughter. He waited for her lead.

  Pushing at her bottom lip with a sharp but creamy tooth, Agatha considered him. She asked again: “Really, does it hurt?” Tahir felt exposed. The skin around his eyes went tight; he sniffed, and looked away. But he remembered what the aunts had said (they had gotten it from Iqbal, at Hisham’s Food and Drink). This was the girl who had unlaced and laced his shoe, done something to his limb while the firmer parts of him lay well across the road. Aunt Yasmina had told Sugra that this girl had not flinched. That she had sat there on the sidewalk (panties showing, nevermind!) and watched over Tahir’s fallen leg as though it were a baby goat or doll. Had spoken to it, even. Agatha was perhaps not, thought Tahir, a guest into whose shoulder he could cry.

  With a valiant shove of lashes, he swept his tears back. “It doesn’t hurt. It itches.” He pushed his thin chest out and pressed his lips together. “It doesn’t hurt at all.” If Agatha could push, insist, then he could do it, too. She closed one eye; he could see the wet pink point of the girl’s tongue. He exhaled, and said, again, “It itches. Didn’t you hear right?” He pulled the sheet above their heads and motioned down beyond the bandaged absence to make sure she could see. If Tahir’s leg could be put back, thought Agatha, the foot would reach just there, to a swirl of printed leaves. Tahir loosed his fingers from the sheet and let it flap down very gently over Agatha’s bent head. She pulled it back to show him she was frowning. “The bad thing,” Tahir said—Agatha felt here that she ought to pay attention—“is that now I’ve lost my slingshot.”

  Sarie came to call her. Agatha slid gently off the bed and faced him. She noticed how his eyebrows slanted towards each other, pointing to his nose. She returned the pillow to him, then reached out and pinched his face. “I don’t think it’s true,” she said. Her words were like a hiss. Tahir felt the tautness at his eyes return. He blinked. She whispered: “I think it hurts a lot.” Then, as grown men dismiss matches, she flicked the soft part of his cheek with a rapid parting of her forefinger and thumb, and skipped towards her mother. Leg and cheek both smarting, Tahir took his pillow back and held it, not sure what had happened, or if he should be glad.

  Sarie hesitated before stepping towards the bed. They’d come for his sake, after all. And yet now that she was in his room, she faltered. Out on India Street, she had stroked this child as intimately as she (sometimes) stroked her own. As we touch, strangers though they be, those whose pain is great enough to warrant unabashed care: one dispenses with formality. Yet now she felt that he was owned, by that nice Mr. Jeevanjee, even by the house, by the long-dead mother whose name she had not learned, and by the empty chairs between the beds, meant for visitors whose vigils were expected. She felt that touching Tahir Jeevanjee might require a permission from his father that she had not obtained. He never knew his mother. It occurred to her that in this way she and Tahir Jeevanjee were very nearly linked, but she was not one to stop for long on sad and tender things. She focused on the boy.

  Other women come to sit themselves down here. They touch him. She saw an army of them, heavy, scented ladies dressed in pinks and blues—colors the Kikanga mansions had once been—women meant to be th
ere, petting the sick boy and speaking very softly. Comfortable and right. She knit her light eyebrows together. Thinking—of the once-bright wife and visitors (whose absences had weight), the height and girth of Kudra House, the parrot squawking in the gloom—made a heavy knot in her. She wanted to behave in such a way that if Mr. Jeevanjee had been a witness (he was not; subject to an unknown lightness in the other room, he was eating biscuits, still) he would find her actions irreproachable and right. So she leaned in above the boy and tugged softly at the covers. “I am sure that everything,” she said, “will soon be going well.”

  Tahir could not make out the features of her face. He noted only that Mrs. Turner’s hands were freckled and that she smelled faintly of talcum—not the kind Aunt Sugra wore, which smelled of wood and roses, but like what mothers patted on their babies’ chests and rumps after they’d been oiled. Agatha, also tugging on cool cloth, pulled her mother’s dress. Sarie, used to Agatha’s imperium, sighed, and gave her the five pineapple sweets. Agatha eyed the brothers for a moment; then she made her choice. Firm, she took smart-mouthed Ali’s bony hand and opened it with hers. She liked a challenge, too, and she could see that he was sly. Too surprised to pull away, he trembled nonetheless. She slipped the sweets into his palm then closed her fingers tightly over his, pressing to make certain they would stick. She had made him nervous. “No telling what girls like that will do!” he later told his friends, who, though they’d seen the smuggled magazines in the corners of the paan shops, had never spoken to a white child, let alone had one pull open their hands. Agatha released his shivering fist and pointed at the patient in the bed. “They’re for him,” she said. She was looking at Habib, sensing even then that Habib was the softest, could be counted on to make sure that kindnesses were done. “All five of them. For him.”

  As the Turners left, Majid Ghulam walked down the stairs behind them. He was barefoot, still, and Sarie was aware of the light shuffling sound his flesh made on the steps, something like a whisper. She thought she felt his eyes fixed on the middle of her back. At the bottom, in the doorway, Majid Ghulam behaved like a good host, as a decent person should. He even said to Mrs. Turner that he hoped she would return. That she and her small girl could visit any time. Agatha—he smiled at her so that the corners of his eyes curved down like two arrows—Agatha, he added, hadn’t seen the parrot.

  Outside it was cool, still light, but promising a heavy evening blue. On the balcony at Mansour House, Bibi craned her neck and thought she saw a heavy figure in a dress stumble in the alley. “Orange, yes, I think,” she would later say. “A trampy little rag, too short to be believed.”

  Four

  At the Turners’ own Kikanga building (Mchanganyiko Street, number 698, concrete, pale, and gray), Gilbert was ready to go out. He considered waiting until Sarie had come home. He liked to say good-bye to her from the doorway while she sat in the kitchen. If Agatha was in, he also liked, sometimes, to pat her on the head and feel for a quick moment the gloss of her dark hair, though it was always, he thought, cold, not quite as heads should be. He wondered what had kept them. But waiting—that was silly. Approximating a harrumph of the sort Colonial types had often given out, Gilbert sniffed. Narrowing his eyes, he looked once more into the kitchen, shrugged, stretched the muscles in his neck, and stepped out of the flat.

  As was Gilbert’s custom, he wandered by the seafront at the ragged edge of town. Ahead of him, thick, high jacarandas and flame trees in full bloom made the avenue a tunnel. Between their arching trunks, the water, a hard metallic blue inlaid with seaweed black, extended flat and low towards a yellowing sky; farther out, unpeopled islands shimmered, mangroves silver-green and creamy in the tricky ocean light.

  Up the road, the city’s forced activity was ending. Families from nicer places like Uzuri and Matumbo would arrive in pickup trucks (old and rusted, sure, but given what those days were like, impressive, the best that could be had). In chatty well-dressed groups, they’d head out for a treat: the Old Empire Cinema, or the Frosty for a cone. Tired paperboys would make a final round before climbing into buses; custodians and the tea-ladies would be packing up their things; the High Court’s final case would close, and the wide brass-studded doors would part to spill the witnesses and others gently down the steps. Gilbert, at his best when things were slow, enjoyed this time of day. And, while not, as others were, seeking easy times to cap a taxing day at work, he was also hoping to relax. He was headed for the Palm.

  The Victorian Palm Hotel, in the sense of beds and baths and rooms for strangers’ sleep, was not really a hotel. Though some gentlemen did spend days and nights there doing various things, it was for throats and stomachs only. Gilbert went in the afternoons and on some evenings to this waterfront establishment because, following Independence, the Yacht Club had been moved to the far side of Scallop Bay and, with all the new-found freedom, he could not afford a taxi. The old Yacht Club had sat just above the harbor and, affording its fine patrons a wide view of the sea and of the hulking ships that ferried wood, cement, and cashews up and down the coast, had once been painted white with lyme, so white it hurt the eyes. Oh, it had been frequented by awesome men who did things: men who went into the interior and emerged with tales about the natives and their ways; Service men who smelled of wind, faintly of tobacco, and of an enviable, complicated sweat. Men who—Gilbert often thought, with a tingling in his chest—men who’d smelled of History.

  That old clubhouse was now crumbling, and no human had reclaimed it. Gilbert once—and it had made his neck hurt, his hands go soft and slack—had even seen a cow there, grazing at the tufted grass that had come up in the doorway, and, blade by shiny blade, was cutting up the floor. People who made History, thought Gilbert, have now been replaced by. Would you look at that. Nothing more than. Livestock. Considering the old clubhouse too much could bring a twitching to his eyes.

  Having receded from the city center just as the real colonials had (ousted from imperial bomas and barred holdouts on the sea), the current club was now simply out of reach. The moneyed ones who chose to stay and who, destined for abundance, had had better jobs and pedigrees than Gilbert, Empire-or-no, armed with fat bankrolls and blueprints, Embassies behind them, resided now, as the relocated Yacht Club did, in the resplendent northern suburbs’ luxuriant repose. Slowly but encroaching surely on the bush, villas lolled out there—gracious, boxy things, floored with speckled tiles and also rich in windows, surrounded by walled lots where hardy seedlings grew: hibiscus, jasmine on the breeze, drapes of bougainvillea; somberly patrolled by braided watchmen, sharp spears in their hands.

  Gilbert’s feelings about Independence and the Empire it appeared to have outdone were not particularly straightforward. Like many small-time men, he desired and did not desire wealth. He thought equality was good, in right measure for himself and, ostensibly, for others; but, ambivalent, he also felt that there was something indiscriminate about the rattling new times. His loyalties were scattered. He was given to emotive declarations and to surges of resentment, now aimed here, or there. When the remaining ex-colonials had picked up and settled out of town, and the local powers with them, Gilbert felt at once superior and defeated. Bright enough to see he’d never make a mark, he did not try to catch up. So he gathered what he’d saved, and moved not out but in.

  He took Sarie and Agatha to the small streets of Kikanga, where they would be, he’d said, “in the thick of things.” That he did not wish to be, exactly, in the thick of anything was well beside the point. Gilbert, reader that he was, could talk. It was a Gesture for the People, he had told his family. Not for rich ones or for white ones. At the time inspired by the banners that promoted national love, he had felt that in committing to Kikanga and its throbbing streets and shops, he might stake a small claim of his own on how things would develop. He would turn his back on those who’d moved to Scallop Bay, on the hierarchies of Empire, and would, he said, declare himself a local. As the new government advised, he would be self-reliant; he woul
d make himself belong. One result of this move inward (which was also, though he didn’t like to say it, all he could afford) was that when the Yacht Club snuck away from the main harbor, it also snuck from him. And so he justified the Victorian Palm Hotel, where lesser men would gather. And though it was not what he’d been used to, and not really first-class, Gilbert had, in time, come to love the place.

  There by the seafront, those who lived in town, those who still had aspirations but didn’t have a car (or did but could not find or pay for petrol or for parts), came to consume beer, a variety of spirits, pallid chicken stews, and, now and then, kebabs. Office men from Vunjamguu came, fountain pens like flowers at their pockets, brassy watches on their wrists; others, stiff in new Kaunda suits, flanked by women in bright gowns like those of Jackie O. and the soon-to-be Queen Noor. City men whose lives unfolded in the heart of Vunjamguu, who ran shops or managed buses, came now and then in pressed white shirts and achingly creased pants. Russians came, with sad light eyes and purple faces; clusters of gray-suited men from China, shiny pins on their lapels.

  Because Gilbert knew most of them by sight, he was convinced that they must know him, too. Indeed, at the Victorian Palm Hotel, Gilbert felt, almost, that if he could only cut a figure, he might someday fit in. Someone there—he smiled shyly at himself, smoothed his hair and checked the buckle of his belt—someone there, one day, might see him for what he really was and offer him a drink.

  Sometimes he would find another man who, like him, had not gone after the end came, a man whose fortunes, modest all in all but better than his own, might be a source of hope: Rathke, for example, who with a little capital would any day now fund a passion for rapid photo printing, or Göethe Bienheureux, who dreamed of raising pigs along the seashore and of producing delicate spiced sausages he would call Bienheureux Coast Joy. But Gilbert’s favorite, the only one he would have called a friend, was Mr. Kazansthakis. Kazansthakis, known also as the Frosty King, ran the Frosty-Kreem, which his father and his father had made and run before him. It was Vunjamguu’s oldest and most famous ice-cream shop, where developments were sweet and romance filled the air.