The Blue Taxi (4 page)

Feeling pleasantly accomplished, Nisreen closed the book and slid it gently back onto its shelf But, watching Sarie fold her
piece of paper, it occurred to her, a little late as usual, that she now felt some doubt. Should she have done what she just
had? Should she not have asked more questions? Gotten
her
address? Nisreen stood silently and wavered. Biting at the inside of her cheek, she looked across the tiles to the bright
doorway, thinking. Sarie had zipped up her yellow purse and was about to go, but, seeing the receptionist so quiet, she felt
suddenly uncertain that the interview had ended. In Nisreen’s heavy glasses, a pane of street appeared: a small transparent
man pulled a cart behind him; a gleaming Fiat swerved. Sarie wondered briefly how well Nisreen saw. Ought she call her daughter
and go on with her mission, wave thank-you from the door?

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.