The Blue Taxi Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, whonow 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: Majidwas 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