The Blue Taxi (49 page)

Spare parts. Majid thought about it in the nighttime, after Sugra had gone home. People needed spare parts then, of course,
for all the things that plied the streets and groaned and shuddered and clack-clacked along the dusty roads, for all the things
that broke or died and had to be revived. But wasn’t that the problem? Everybody needed them. People paid large sums to smuggle
needed things into the country. Where did Mr. Turner hope to get them? Did he have a link, a friendship of some kind, with
an amenable official? Surely, Majid thought, the man must have a plan. He’d dealt with many people in his time at the High
Court, no doubt. Had surely traveled both sides of the law. Gilbert Turner must have made connections. He had, after all,
held a respectable
position
.

Clearly Mr. Turner also hoped that Majid would know something, too, about how spare parts could be gotten, handled, moved,
dispensed. Whom did Majid know with an interest in cars? Connections? Rahman, if he could be convinced to speak with him again.
Or that clever young man Issa, who, so he’d heard from Sugra, seemed to know a lot of men who worked with engineers (and weren’t
they building
roads?
). Even Sugra’s husband, who had a car himself. There were others, too, if only he could let himself think back into the past,
if only he could bear it. Hadn’t one of his
own teachers—a man who had approved of Majid’s poems—also driven taxis? Wasn’t he alive somewhere? Didn’t all those fleet
young boys just outside his house fix buses all the time? Did they not know him by sight? Yes, there might be others, too.

Cars. He tried to think of all the cars he’d been in in his life. He himself had never owned one. Before their emigration,
his older brothers had—a shiny Benz that had taken him and his once-wife to parties, weddings, birthdays, to the clinic now
and then if another boy was on his way. It was in that fine Mercedes, Majid thought, that he had come back from the clinic
that sad day without Hayaam. The brothers in Nairobi certainly had cars, and in Mombasa several younger in-laws, too, zipped
around with radios blaring, tops rolled down, in Peugeot 504s.
Fiats
, Majid thought.
My sons think those are grand
. Others. The Citroëns that made him think of lemons, low and growling, sleek. The Austins and the Morrises, older, some with
cloud-white bonnets, with steering wheels as large as any tire. He thought about the buses and the trucks, their dips and
shining curves, the long, enormous bodies of the dog-rib trucks bearing their wood boards. The Leylands, heavy, iron scaffolding
on top, fitted with a canvas sheet, some rolling down the roads diagonally, no longer shooting straight. The DAFs, with colored
aprons.

Later, Majid dreamed of chrome and squeals and smoke. And of Tahir’s metal crutches, crumpling. He got up in the dark and,
night-eyes full of diesel fumes, ears sore from hard dream-sounds of metal, he went into the bathroom. As his urine streamed
onto the floor, a quiet little spill, he squinted up into the square that had been cut out of the wall, showing him the sky.
He thought he saw the stars. His own small boy had been knocked down and split in two by a big bus. A Tata, made in his own
India. His grandfather’s, more like. A mystery-country far away. Buses. Back in the dim hallway,
hands damp against his naked chest, he leaned against the wall. Weren’t Hungarians bringing in a bus, these days?
That’s right
, he thought. The Icarus, boxy, hopeful, painted red and white. As he fell into his bed, Majid laid an arm down fast across
his eyes. He knew all about that story.
Icarus
, he thought.
Sure. Too close to the sun
.

Twenty-five

I
n the breeze at the Victorian Palm, Majid was introduced to Kazansthakis, who, he learned with interest, was Greek. Gilbert
introduced Majid as M.G. and Kazansthakis as the Frosty King. Majid listened while Gilbert and the Frosty King told him what
they thought. Majid, telling what, if he had not believed it in the depths of his new heart, would have been a lie, assured
the Frosty King and Mr. Turner that he had in his day managed more than one successful business. That he had deftly managed
them to death, he wisely did not say. He would do his best. He also said—and this was true—that he remembered having seen
once with a man he knew (that Mr. Essajee, who could bring dead appliances to life, who’d been so kind to the boys) a clever
youth named Idi Moto, who could, it was softly said, pull a radio from a pebble, then make it disappear.

Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee’s fine name—for Jeevanjees had managed many places in the world, made them what they are, and also
fought for very honorable things—left a great impression on the Frosty King. Kazansthakis also wished to be impressive, and
while he had resisted telling Gilbert exactly how much he could help, he found himself declaring rather recklessly that he
could easily procure for them some European brake shoes, screens, and the necessary pumps. The excitement made him jumpy,
restless. He left the Palm before them, saluting as he went. “We’ll meet again, my man,” he said, to neither one, to both.
“I go to Mrs. Frosty.” And Gilbert raised his glass.

Outside, the sun was low, and the sky over the flat white sea was fluid, turning slowly plum. A kitchen boy, dispatched to
the innards of the Palm, turned the generator on. It was time for all of them to go. Gilbert and Majid rose up from their
chairs and with a shake of all their legs loosed the wrinkles in their slacks. Majid pushed his chair closer to the table
with the care of a new guest at a luncheon who folds a napkin formally before going on his way. He leaned forward on the backrest
for a moment. In the leaking twilight, a silver ring on Majid’s smallest finger gleamed. Thinking briefly about Sarie, he
felt a sharp thing in him tumble down a crevice, leave a tingle, disappear. Majid sighed, and looked for a long moment at
the sea. And then he said, “Let us go together, Mr. Turner. We are almost neighbors, after all!”

Gilbert cast a glance towards the bar, where two expatriates were hovering, each over a drink: Jan, the gloomy man from KLM,
and a quiet engineer. Gilbert looked above their heads and saw himself reflected in the heavy mirror that rose up behind the
bar. He puffed his chest out, just a little, and clapped Majid on the back. He cleared his throat and said, “We
are
neighbors, indeed!” He hoped that the expatriates would hear, and turn their heads to see.
That’s right
, he thought. Gilbert Turner might not be flush with funds as yet, and he might not have slapped a bright all-weather road
down in any tangled wilds or by himself have conjured spark plugs from the air; but he could, at least, at last, perhaps say
that he belonged.

As they reached the steps, Gilbert, made sentimental by one too many drinks, the Frosty King’s salute, the promise of success,
and the violet of the sky, shook his lowered head as though he had just found a lost thing that had been there all along.
Sounding sweet, confused, as though someone were to blame, he said, “Tell me, Mr. Jeevanjee. Why have we not met before?”

Majid gave his partner a gracious little smile. “It was not yet planned for us,” he said. “It was not meant until now.” And
Gilbert, who had often read that certain peoples had a tendency to believe in things like that, that it meant some things
were planned by God, felt satisfied at last. Victorious. He patted M.G.’s back. Majid felt light-headed. Tahir would be proud
to know that his own dad had sat beside the famous Frosty King—didn’t Sugra take the boys for sundaes at the Kreem? They might
even go again, together. Kazansthakis, he was sure, would offer little Tahir a vanilla scoop for free.

As Gilbert made his way along the seafront, all aglow, Sarie stepped into the parlor. In the gluey light of the one bulb,
she stood before her husband’s shelf. Resting horizontally across the other volumes: the dog-eared
Everyman’s Car Handbook
. Sarie winced and picked it up.
For the cars
, she thought.
The motors
. Why had she not seen it before? Why had she never paid attention to the things that Gilbert read? She held it for a moment
but did not part the covers. Instead, she slipped it vertically between a tattered guide to the attractions of East Africa’s
long coast and a book on making bricks. What was she looking for on Gilbert’s precious shelf? Where had Gilbert put them?

She turned, and looked under the piano, below the rocky table. Not there. She looked under the pillow of Gilbert’s favorite
chair and wondered, as she did so, if he had ever purchased ointment for his skin. She found a rubber band. She put the pillow
back and yawned. On her knees, she paused. Perhaps behind the settee. She crawled towards the wall. There it was: Mr. Frosty’s
box.

Not a big box
, Sarie thought,
but look what it has done!
She’d been amazingly defeated. By the spark plugs, and the tea, her husband.
But she also felt impressed and curious that she had been, at least, thwarted by an interesting, redoubtable, international
opponent. Had he said
Japan?

She plucked a spark plug from the box and lifted it between two fingers to the light. What a clean, smooth middle the thing
had, what weight in its small shape. Sarie sighed. With the spark plug in her hand, she went into the bedroom, where she lay
down on the bed and thought about the lover she had left. “
Rompu,
” she said out loud. And then she wondered at the word, how “romp,” in English, meant something else entirely.

When Gilbert returned home, he found his wife asleep. Exhausted by the nearness and the dazzle of their future, Gilbert took
his shoes off, then his trousers and his shirt. He stretched out beside her. Oh, Sarie had done well! He would tell her all
about his new good friend M.G. when the two of them woke up. Perhaps she’d make him breakfast. In sleep, Sarie felt the mattress
shift. She clutched the spark plug tighter. She was dreaming about Mr. Jeevanjee’s high balcony, the bubbling street below.
And mountains far beyond. All of Majid’s plants. Grown, and shivering with fruit, the little palm, she saw, was bursting through
the slats.

Twenty-six

B
ibi started out the week thinking happily about Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee and everybody else she’d spied on from her balcony.
What great moments there had been! She’d seen them all, she thought, and she was, for once, satisfied entirely with her rather
limited location.
If I were following just one
, she thought,
I would be missing all the rest
. Indeed, what if she had, like a bird, followed poor Majid Ghulam—who’d looked so fresh, so nicely bathed and wasn’t that
wild mustache now neat!—into the New Purnima Snack? It’s true she would have seen that he had eaten jalebis and later had
bajia mix and not, as she had so firmly told herself, kachori. But if she had been checking on whether it was chutney-yes-or-no,
she would have missed Salma Hafiz sneaking from her house with her face hidden in a niqab, going who-knows-where, and also
Mama Ndiambongo slipping through a doorway just three houses down and coming out again (
Surreptitious!
Bibi thought) holding a big basket. And if she had been able to sneak into Mrs. Turner’s house—a nice one, Bibi was quite
sure—to see what things were like in the long-legged woman’s bedroom, and then, perhaps, unseen, down to the Kikanga clinic
to make certain that Nisreen was not flirting with the doctors, and to all the other places for which she sometimes felt a
hunger, she would not have seen the most amazing thing of all: just the other day, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee accompanied by,
of all things, a British man, who talked and talked and talked while the new, presentable Majid cocked his head and listened.

She had been amazed to see on the first day that Mad Majid Ghulam walked proudly, decently, in fact. He’d been looking sometimes
straight ahead, then to the left or right, without shouting out at anyone or talking to himself. That was already, Bibi thought,
a step.
See what an affair can do?
But seeing him a second time, so easy in the company of the almost-bald white man, listening so carefully, was something
else indeed.
Perhaps
, thought Bibi,
Jeevanjee’s setting out to trick him. Maybe-maybe, there is still a spark in him, a business-flame at last. Is he borrowing
money? Will he start the paper up? Make a special deal? Is he offering a service? Something only local men can do for too-soft
old white men?
Here Bibi held back a hot chuckle, remembering Mrs. Livery-Jones’s red husband and the swaggering alley boys.
Not that, surely. Not a grown man like Majid
. She dismissed that thought with a happy sniff and raised a palm up to her face.