The Blue Taxi (36 page)

In Kikanga, in the kitchen, Gilbert thought,
Well. ’Raffes
. He got the pencil back into position. Shyly, with something like a fondness, he remembered Agatha’s question, wondered where
she’d gone.
If Uncle James comes through for us, I will take my women on a trip. In time we, too, will have a car. A Land Rover, indeed.
I’ll show Agatha a dik-dik
.

Tahir had not seen giraffes, or dik-diks, either, but he was sure
that Aunt Yasmina had, that in Mombasa beasts were in attendance, mating in the trees and sometimes strolling down the street,
watching, waiting, for a weak one to split off from the herd. “If you go out to the shop just once after dark,” he said, “they’ll
eat you alive.” Agatha made a doubting face. He was sitting up. She said, “I don’t believe you.” She liked not believing Tahir.
It made him swear to things. “
Haki ya Mungu
, it’s God’s truth,” he said. Tahir flicked his wrist so that his index finger snapped along the length of the next digit,
loud and sharp and clean. “A lion will tear your legs off and get working on your arms.” He said this with such earnestness
that Agatha thought,
He knows what legs torn off are like. Maybe he means it, maybe it’s true
.

Of what went on in the other bedroom during her visits to the Jeevanjees, Agatha knew nothing. Tahir, who could feel his father
changing, something broiling in his father’s skin that was communicated through his fingers when he touched Tahir at night,
was not certain what he knew. Maria, however, thought she knew exactly, and did her best to tell him. When she came up now
and then with washing, she sat in the boys’ room awhile and told a tale or two, which she would end with prayer, kneeling
by the bed.

She’d told Tahir that not only was a serpent suckling at the breast of Kudra House itself, but that swine should be cast out.
Like lepers, demons, locusts. Like a hundred plagues. Her analogies confused him. She asked Tahir to pray with her, as always
hoping that he would but knowing he would not. He had shaken his head no and laughed and, as Ali sometimes did (
Mshenzi, weh!
), had called her a barbarian. Maria had smiled very knowingly and surely, lovingly, indeed, and risen from the floor. “You
have lots to learn, you.” Then she put on a voice the way the Elders did. “Pride comes before a fall, my child.” She kept
her eyes on him as she
folded up a bedsheet she had taken from the line. “No better than a pig. That British woman-snake.”

Tahir was not interested in either swine or locusts, very much, but he liked considering snakes. He imagined one fastened
to his chest, where there were two slowly growing nipples for a slithering beast to choose. He wondered how such a thing would
feel. He might frighten Agatha with an account of how it happened. How a snake can wrap itself around you, for example, and
make your very life come gasping from your mouth. In the end, he did tell Agatha what snakes can do, but he kept what Maria
thought about her mother wisely to himself.

Majid, though he suspected that Maria had ideas, took a special pleasure in believing that what took place on Sarie Turner’s
visits was a secret from them all. Picturing the several cousins he had left, and also old Rahman (whom he’d harmed so much
that day), and even dear Sugra, Majid thought,
What would they all say if they knew that crazy Jeevanjee has got himself a woman? Or that I’ve written some new poems? That
I need yet another notebook, as I haven’t done in years?
He wasn’t ready to find out. He liked how good he felt, and that there was no one there to see it but his mistress. Long,
pale Sarie Turner. Dear Mrs. Turner, with her own secret life. Whom could Sarie tell?

Sixteen

B
ibi, whose hurting hands were not yet loose enough to take on a new stitching, kept firm watch on Kikanga and witnessed several
things. For one, she spotted Mad Majid’s little cousin Sugra, whom she had not seen since a wedding long ago, walking down
the street.
That
Sugra, yes. The one and very same, the Sugra she had held up to her son as the real example of a fiancée when he’d proposed
Nisreen. Seeing Sugra gave Bibi a boost. Hadn’t she just thought of her the other day, when looking at her Issa? Were her
mere thoughts conjurings? Had she
predicted
Sugra?

Bibi watched her closely.
Strange
, she thought. The way a person was remembered, used as an example, was sometimes different from what that person was when
you saw them in the flesh. When Bibi was unhappy with Nisreen, she told her that she acted too much like a bush baby, too
shy, that she startled far too easily, could be frozen by a stare; and when Bibi said these things to her, she sometimes thought
of Sugra, who, surely, walked with confidence and could look trouble in the eye.

But seeing Sugra now brought a little shock. Unlike poor Nisreen, Sugra barreled, strode, did not have a careful walk, looked
a little too indifferent, Bibi was surprised to think, to the others in her path. Of course, Sugra wasn’t lame, as Nisreen
was, but, still, wasn’t there, Bibi thought protectively, an
elegance
to Nisreen’s wary limp? Sugra, from this height, did look nicely round. And she was finely dressed, in lavender, in a long
loose dress that modestly
suggested but did not emphasize too much her heavy-breasted top. Yet why in such a rush? Bibi paused. Treading with such power,
marching at such speed!

The more she thought about Majid’s cousin Sugra, the more she watched her move, the more Bibi started to remember what she
had forgotten, the kinds of things one does forget about people whom one doesn’t often see.
Look at that! She’s frowning!
For all her love of drama and her skill at telling tales, at imitating keenly this person or that, Bibi liked reserve, restraint,
when a person was in public. And what could be more public than this brash Kikanga street? Little Sugra Jeevanjee, far too
grown to do so—
a proper woman now
—was striding down the road with her eyes steady on the ground and a grimace on her face. As though it didn’t matter, not
at all, what anybody thought! Bibi stretched her toes and yawned. It was pleasant to compare a person walking down the street
to someone in one’s family. Yes, she sometimes wished Nisreen would spill what news she had more quickly than she did.
But Nisreen doesn’t show the world her onions. Nisreen knows what’s private
. Bibi closed her eyes and sighed. When she looked again, Sugra had gone on, in the direction, Bibi thought, of Libya Street
or Mbuyu Mmoja Park. How nice to feel protective:
My Nisreen’s refined
.

The other thing she noticed: Sarie Turner’s visits to the Jeevanjees—unless she’d started taking other routes (
and would a British woman understand what alleys could be for?
)—were now slowing down. She didn’t pass by Hisham’s every day, and sometimes Bibi spent entire afternoons without once seeing
the woman and the girl. Twice a week or so, instead of every day. This meant, thought Bibi, that something between Majid Ghulam
Jeevanjee and that woman in the too-small dresses must have been resolved.
You don’t need panic-panic-daily-time, or even too-short skirts, if something’s been agreed
. They were settling, she supposed, into a routine.

Routines were good, she thought. Knowing just what to expect, reassured by the appearance of that thing just when you knew
that it was due, and knowing it would come again—now
that
was a real pleasure.
But
, she thought, stretching her poor hands,
there’s also need for change
. In fact, just as she was comforted by Sarie’s slowing down and by how used to Nisreen and Issa’s wakings-up and sleepings
she now was, she also wondered how, and whether, anything could change. She
did
want things to change, some of them, at least.

On the balcony, where the old rope bed had now become a fixture, Bibi closed her eyes and hoped that she might soon be up
again to stitching. Though she had rejected it so firmly, that Morris Oxford niggled at her. She’d dreamed about it twice.
How strange to have a taxi in her head. Had it really been intended? She’d been so resistant! Had she been right to let it
go? From downstairs she heard Mama Moto cooking. With a smile, the kind of smile a person has when certain that if hunger
strikes there are good things to eat, Bibi napped a little. In her drowse she turned away from the blue taxi and asked for
something new.
Tell me what to stitch once my fingers have come right
, she whispered to whatever spirits were in charge of things like this—then also, to be safe, to God, Keeper of the Cosmos.

When Bibi saw what clearly was an envelope, a pink one, fringed in dark blue stripes interlaced with red, she ground her teeth
and moaned.
See what happens when you ask? Naam, naam, naam. All right. Indeed. Succumb
. She’d go ahead, and properly. She waited for the envelope to come into clear focus. Yes, there it was. An envelope either
sent from, or going, far away. She saw the airmail motto clearly: in these parts, in the local tongue, it said, quite literally,
by bird
. She smiled, and experienced no surprise at all when, outside, house crows gave a call.

An envelope. What was it going to mean? Would a cousin write from England? Visit from Dubai? Was there going to be a death?
A marriage? Had someone she’d forgotten decided they remembered
her?
Mrs. Harries, Mrs. Livery-Jones, asking how the stitchery had fared, had little Kulthum ever started up a business of her
own? Her old teacher Mr. Suleiman, who had told her she would not amount to much but who, she knew, had been charmed by her
bright eyes, and who had given her a ride sometimes in his nice taxicab?
A taxi cab
. She shuddered.
This
. A second test. The envelope: could it be from dead Uncle Amal’s last and happiest wife? From a friend Issa had made once
when he was far away? Well, Bibi didn’t know, but once she got her mind around it and decided that she could not go back on
her word, the envelope in her mind’s eye made her feel that good things might be along, if she could only wait. The sign of
an announcement? Something that she didn’t know showing it was there? She sat up slowly and prepared to go into the bedroom,
where she kept a lot of woven things she could unravel for her stitching. The envelope. Pink, she’d need. And blue.

Seventeen

T
he following day, Nisreen went to work as usual. She walked in Issa’s company down to Seafront Road. The two of them had tea.
Next, he brought her back up India Street and left her at the clinic. They parted as they always did: she unlocked the front
doors, and Issa watched her enter, then went on back towards the ocean, where his own office was. At reception, Nisreen slipped
out of her shoes. She watered the three croton plants and wiped their concrete pots. Sharpened up her pencil and looked idly
at her files. Things were just the same, she tried to tell herself, as they had always been. Weren’t they?

Nisreen’s shoulders hurt. Her eyes stung. But she did try to be brave.
Weren’t
things just the same? Wasn’t Issa gentle, the sea exactly where it always was, still as large and blue? Weren’t the park-side
casuarinas shifting loosely in the wind, as high, slim pines should do, and hadn’t her sweet tea tasted as it ever did, too
milky and too hot? But though she tried to make a mental list of all the things that
were
none other than what they’d always been, Nisreen had the feeling—one that had been lurking there for months—that she herself
was not.

Nisreen was not blind, despite her failing eyes, and neither was she deaf And just because she limped, a little, well, it
didn’t mean she couldn’t feel the ground beneath her feet. And though she didn’t think that Issa minded, didn’t think he cared
as much as Bibi did about the flatness of her stomach and the smallness of her breasts, she herself was tired. She felt sad.
A person must fall down
, she
thought,
if they’re pushed and pushed enough
. It wore on her, Bibi’s poking at her stomach as though fingers through a cloth could bring about conception, frowning at
her chest as if a glare could call up milk. Sometimes Issa told her, “It will happen when it happens. Nevermind my mother.”
But would it really? When? Nisreen wasn’t hard enough not to be upset, and she was too obedient not to wish that she could
do exactly what was wanted, what old Bibi asked. And when Bibi had, the night before, just going up to bed, winked and pointed
at her own ancient loins as if Nisreen did not know where anything began, Nisreen had gone into the storeroom, where she’d
stayed for a long time and cried, until Issa broke open the door and pulled her, shaking, out. At her desk in the clinic,
Nisreen rested her sore head on her hands and wished she were in her bed.