The Blue Taxi Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.” Sheturned 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 Bibihadn’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: