The Blue Taxi Read Online Free Page A

sighed and turned back
     to the pamphlet:
His Holiness in Africa: An Account of Dr. Saheb’s Tour of Light and Love Among the Vunjamguu Adherents
. He himself was planning, reading done, to take an early evening stroll to the Victorian Palm Hotel, where he hoped, as always
     and as idly, to find a fellow ex-colonial on the lookout for a partner in a business. Someone who would notice all he had
     to offer and who would take him on in a reassuring, easy venture that would unfold for him at last the future, which he vaguely
     dreamed of now and then but did not know how to find.
    In the bedroom, freed, Sarie called to Agatha. She put on herbest dress, a light gray thing with small white dots, short sleeves, and a scooped neck. With a finger and saliva, she nudged
     accumulated grime from a yellow vinyl purse. Into it she slipped a pen and five pineapple sweets wrapped in glossy paper.
     “We are going,” Sarie said. “Are you now content?” Agatha did not answer, but she nodded, satisfied. She sat down on the bed
     and, watching in the mirror, aped her mother’s moves. She did not have a purse, but she rolled her shoulders and her neck
     like a woman making an assessment of her looks, and, once Sarie was done, asked to be assisted with the zipper of her own
     best thing (a long purple-buttoned smock with a radish-print design), and smoothed down her dark hair. Sarie zipped her up
     and clipped her daughter’s mop with a cracked, worn plastic pin that had, in its first days, resembled a chameleon. Engrossed
     in the next room, Gilbert put his lightly smelly feet on Sarie’s favorite table and set about imagining himself desired and
     aglow among the dignitaries who were pictured milling pleasantly about a bird-filled Chancellor’s garden.
Peacocks
, Gilbert thought.
Surely there were peacocks
.
    On the streets, the light was fierce, but Kikanga Clinic’s world was dim and still and cool. Sarie stood still for a moment
     on the threshold, relishing the air. Agatha, waiting for the flashes in her eyes to quit, blinked six times in quick succession,
     then raised her eyebrows high before blinking again. Everything looked green. Directed by her mother, Agatha moved spryly
     towards the heavy wooden chairs that waited by the wall. Feet adangle, she sat looking up with one eye closed at two framed
     pictures of the famous Aga Khan—each of which, healthy and avuncular, almost but not quite like the other self, flashed a
     winning smile. The ceiling fan wheezed idly.
    Sarie smoothed the dotted dress down over her thighs and moved up to inquire. The receptionist, a narrow girl with fine, long
     hands and a sturdy pair of glasses over two perfectly round eyes (Bibi’s own Nisreen), looked patiently at Sarie. Nearly dropping
     but retrieving one pineapple sweet that had got caught on the cap, Sarie fished her pen out. She zipped the purse back up,
     leaned forward towards the girl, introduced herself, and explained why she had come. “It was me, you see,” she said. “It was
     me who tried to help.”
    Nisreen had heard about her from the medical assistants, who had, as it turned out, described Sarie very well. But they hadn’t
     said she’d helped. Nisreen cocked her head and said, “I see.” She didn’t say it meanly. She looked past Sarie, towards Agatha
     (the girl, she’d heard, who’d prevented them from going till she’d laced up the one shoe). “My daughter,” Sarie said. She
     looked down a moment at her dress, then swayed a bit from hip to hip. “I, too. We want to see him. How he is.” She was not
     sure how to proceed. Sarie did not go out much, not to visit people, and not to speak to strangers. She also did not know
     what happened, ordinarily, to boys who’d lost their legs so suddenly. She had seen abrasions, stab wounds, ulcers, too, sometimes
     broken arms and toes, small things plucked, removed, and once an amputation, but nothing quite like this. Was he still at
     the clinic? Sarie clenched