The Blue Taxi (22 page)

Ten

A
t Kudra House, Tahir, assisted by the science book, explained to Agatha that planets moved around the sun, and the moon around
the earth. “Equinox,” he said. She brought a chair into the center of the room and helped him out of bed. “You sit down right
here,” she said. “I’m going to be the planets.”

In the parlor, Majid and his guest had forgone tea. They were shyly sipping water from matching metal cups. Each of them felt
hot. Majid Ghulam began to look at her and then away, and then at his own hands. Sarie felt her heart shake. Something had
to happen. She couldn’t bear staying like this. Taking, perhaps for the first time, her destiny in hand, she touched him on
the arm. And next she asked her host if she could look into his bedroom. “I have seen your pleasing balcony,” she said. “And
also your nice parlor. But
Majid,
” she said, turning her big head slightly towards the hall, “could I—do you think?”

Majid, as if making certain he was where he thought he was, touched his mustache, then his hair. It was happening at last!
What movies did not show. What he’d asked dead Hayaam to sanction. He breathed in from his toes up to his hair and brushed
his shirtsleeve slowly. “Of course,” he said. “Yes, of course you may. Come now.” With a shining in his eyes as bright as
Sarie’s blue, he held her elbow in his palm and ferried her along. “Come
now.
” Majid Ghulam pushed open the door and let Sarie cross the threshold. As shameless as the siren Gilbert had dreamed up for
his uncle, she turned down the bent nail on the door frame and enfolded Mad
Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee decidedly into her broad but very tender arms. The pressure was returned, and something in her sang.

The contract, wet, sincere, and cold, was sealed between them quickly, each one crying “Oh!” and “Oh!” as though continually
surprised by their joint presence on the bed. Oh! They did it sitting up, not even hidden by a blanket, not even shielded
from the green eyes of the room by a drawn mosquito net. The two took on their coupling as if, sitting close together, they
had discovered four trapped birds among their clothes and, in a rising frenzy, tried to set them free. Oh! Happy, ragged exhalations!
And then, the final ohs, much softer, quiet, still. A fattened, final silence and a series of small shudders, each gentler
than the last, a look right in the eyes, no shyness. They rolled quietly apart.

They didn’t speak of it. Did not dissect the thing. Sarie’s enervated skin gradually grew chill, as damp ground does when
the red sun sinks at last. Majid sat beside her. For a long, slow moment, he did not open his eyes. He felt: emptied at the
core, as though a cleaning crew had come, removed everything he knew, and hosed his insides down. Sarie felt a tenderness
consume her. She waited. At last, Majid Ghulam reached out and gave her thigh an earnest squeeze. Eyelashes aflutter, a bit
more formal than Sarie had expected—though she didn’t, really, know what to expect at all—Majid Ghulam said, “Thank you.”
Sarie ran her hand across her forehead from the left side to the right, as though combing back the skin. She smiled at him
and tried, as Majid rose, to pull him close to her. She would have liked for him to rest a moment, head upon her shoulder.
But Majid squeezed her thigh again and got up from the bed. She watched him fasten his old trousers. At her frown, “I’ll come
back,” he said.

Sarie remained still. Majid gathered up a hair comb and a towel (threadbare, with a faded rosy print), and slipped out of
the room.
At first, with Majid gone, Sarie felt alone. She wrapped her arms around herself. Such closeness in a coupling! Such loneliness
just after! It was like being given, without notice, extra body parts to manage; growing speedily accustomed from desire to
their weight and warmth and style; and next, just when it feels right, suffering a graceless amputation that excises much
more than was brought. She heard water tumbling, splashing, from the bathroom, wished that she could see him as he bathed.
She wondered, as she would for a long time, what his limbs looked like unclothed.

In the small bedroom’s green light, she felt the air around her as a substance. She became aware of dust motes, the wrinkled
look of things. She heard the rumble of the street as one hears a distant river, and was glad for the room’s height. She thought
how far away it seemed—all this—from her own apartment, with its books, Gilbert’s favorite chair, his pictures, and the broken,
dead piano that took up so much space. Prepared, almost, to see things from it that she had not seen before, she rose to look
out of the window into Majid’s street.

Out there, three men ferried lengths of wire down the road: road, men, wire, all aglint in the ebbing afternoon. In a shady
place along the sidewalk, below a scarlet awning, the man with the potbelly and slim ankles turned the crank of his cane press
and sold a frothy glass to a woman dressed in black who had just come from the market. A boy wove down the street, hawking
colored images of Jesus, Parvathi, and the Kabbah tied together with white string. High above the fray, Majid Ghulam’s new
lover wiped her face and cupped her rugged chin. She stretched her mouth and cheeks, felt her skin go taut.
Majid Ghulam looks from this window every day
. She yawned and reached out for her dress.

Once Majid was fresh again and Sarie’s top was buttoned, she called into Tahir’s room for Agatha. “Tahir’s sitting up now,”
Agatha
announced. He was sitting on the chair still, had liked playing the part of the hot sun while Agatha, now Jupiter, now Mars,
revolved. Sarie smiled at them. “Very good,” she said. “Come on.” Agatha helped him back over to the bed. Majid found a basket,
into which he placed four bunches of bananas. “You like these, I think,” he said to Sarie’s little girl. She did. She thanked
him, and Sarie, looking down at her, felt proud. Agatha took charge of the basket. Neck tight with the effort, arms long and
stretched against her chest, she held it with both hands and struggled to make sure her feet could move beneath it. Sarie
thanked him, too, and said she would be back—then, wondering if she shouldn’t have (being clothed again, having been bare
only once, brings a special kind of doubt), she added, almost sadly, “If that will be all right.” Majid Ghulam smiled, nodded
with his eyes, then looked quietly away.

From his bedroom window, he watched Sarie and Agatha make their way down Libya Street. Agatha was tired. She did battle with
the basket but refused, with quick shakes of her head, Sarie’s efforts to assist her. As Majid trembled at the window, a pair
of yellow fruit, plump and bright, no longer than a thumb, spilled out from the basket to wobble in the road. Sarie didn’t
notice. A bit farther down, she tried to help again, but this time Agatha turned sharply from her and made an ugly face. Sarie,
tired, too, made a show of looking up, at anything but Agatha. She meaningfully stared, instead, at the awnings of the hardware
stores and tea shops. Agatha continued to make faces, and Sarie, well aware of it, ignored her. Surprised, a little pleased,
Majid thought,
Mrs. Turner is still young
.

He felt oddly bereft—not as he had for Hayaam, of course. Death, true love, was something else. A mistress is no wife. But,
still, he surely felt relieved of something he had not had time to savor, felt
a sweetness-sadness, something like regret.
There
they were, there, the girlish two, receding. There
she
was, the woman who had stroked and pulled at his most private skin. They moved past the white-tiled doorway of R. Tea Shop,
became too small for him to see.

From the boys’ room he heard Tahir call. He went to him, peeled the sheet back carefully, and lifted him over his shoulder
like a carpet. Aware of his son’s lightness, he wondered how much the missing length of leg, from calf to toes, might measure
on a scale.
Much less than a sack of flour
, Majid thought.
Less than a half-used bolt of cloth
. And yet what a difference it made. How cold his son’s skin was. He took him to the bathroom, where, holding his boy by the
shoulders, he looked carefully away. As Tahir did his business, Majid thought of Sugra, hoped she’d come back in the morning.
Hoped that she would help.

Just before the mosque, Agatha refused once more to be assisted with the basket. Sarie lost her temper. She was feeling late,
exposed.
I have done it now
, she thought.
It. La chose. The thing
. The private glow she’d felt had changed, had settled, was now more like a stain. She wondered if Gilbert would look at her
and know. To Agatha she said, “Why are you so difficult!” She squeezed her daughter’s shoulder with a vigorous hand, to stop
her, take the basket from her arms. Agatha wriggled free. “Give me those bananas,” Sarie said (did she also, missing his light
hands, wish herself to hold what
he
had given, things that came from Majid’s house?). She tried again to pull the handles from Agatha’s tight grasp and this
time gained some ground.

Before the mendicants, Agatha had stopped. Three of them, the regulars, whom they both knew by sight: a tiny woman, head tucked
under her arm, sleeping, drooling silver; a man with one
eye missing and one blind was propped precariously against the wall like an unrepaired umbrella. His unseeing eye was blue.
A second woman, weaving palm fronds on the ground, made snapping sounds with her wet mouth.

Agatha did
not
have a well-developed moral sense. That is, she didn’t think, We
have a basket of bananas and
these
people are hungry
. She was no gracious child. But she had a sense of shame and knew for certain that to refuse her mother’s predatory fingers
there, right there in front of the three beggars, would cause her some embarrassment. The sleeping woman might awake; the
blind-eyed man might stare, and the sucking woman with the palm frond in her lap might stick her sharp tongue out. All at
once, she gave up the bananas so easily and unexpectedly that Sarie lost her balance, flailed to keep herself and the basket
from falling to the ground. “Well!” she said. And watched, abandoned, as Agatha raced ahead to make her own way home.

When Sarie came into the apartment, Agatha sat at the piano, thumping softly at the untuned keys with her left hand, right
arm stretched above her like a swaying water plant. Unkindly, without looking up, Agatha asked her mother if she’d dropped
any bananas. Sarie grunted. She was sweating. She wished there were a looking glass in that front room, or a window lit up
with a darkness that could show her her own face. She smoothed her hair, felt her nose and brow for shine. She held her chin
a moment. Then she took a breath, on the airy heels of which there came a Majid-Ghulam-Jeevanjee-shaped pang.
Do I look like a woman who has just been with a lover? Do I smell like love?
She thought for a moment of what love smelled like, sniffed lightly at herself, and hoped instead that she gave off a smell
of street and city sweat. She remembered the bananas.
These fruits have a scent
. She filled her fists with them before stepping down the hall.

As she crossed into the bedroom, Gilbert’s body jerked. Lying on the bed, socks off, hands over his eyes, Sarie’s husband
bleated. He was suffering from hiccups. The spasms, having grabbed him by the collar as he left the Palm with Uncle James’s
letter weighing down his heart, had not yet let him go. Sarie gave her crumpled husband the heavy kind of frown that results
from a desire to conceal the tender thing. “What is wrong with you? Gilbert. What is it you have?” Gilbert only moaned.

Sarie said, “What’s that silly noise?” Gilbert peered at her between two parted fingers. A cruel hiccup shook him. “Oh, Sarie,”
Gilbert said, “an awful thing—has happened.” He covered both eyes with one hand and with the other searched beneath the pillow
for the aerogramme, which he found and held out to his wife. “Read this.”

Sarie was suspicious.
He’s acting. He wants me to find him sympathetic
. How like her husband to demand all of her attention when she, instead, was the one who needed love. In defense, she set
her eyes and cheeks as solidly against her skull as she could manage, made all of herself flat. She could not bear, just then,
to find an ailing Gilbert worthy of her kindness. “I do not mean the letter,” Sarie said, sitting far away from Gilbert on
a stool before the dressing table. She tossed four bright bananas lightly on the bed as if Gilbert were a monkey she was hoping
to distract. “
Tiens
. Take these.” Gilbert, still covering his face, did not look out to see what she had offered. Sarie sniffed and took up a
banana. Mouth full and damp with fruit, she said, “I mean the noise. What is wrong with you?”