Free The Blue Taxi by N. S. Köenings Page A

his fingers from
     the sheet and let it flap down very gently over Agatha’s bent head. She pulled it back to show him she was frowning. “The
     bad thing,” Tahir said—Agatha felt here that she ought to pay attention—“is that now I’ve lost my slingshot.”
    Sarie came to call her. Agatha slid gently off the bed and faced him. She noticed how his eyebrows slanted towards each other,
     pointing to his nose. She returned the pillow to him, then reached out and pinched his face. “I don’t think it’s true,” she
     said. Her words were like a hiss. Tahir felt the tautness at his eyes return. He blinked. She whispered: “I think it hurts
     a lot.” Then, as grown men dismiss matches, she flicked the soft part of his cheek with a rapid parting of her forefinger
     and thumb, and skipped towards her mother. Leg and cheek both smarting, Tahir took his pillow back and held it, not sure what
     had happened, or if he should be glad.
    Sarie hesitated before stepping towards the bed. They’d come for his sake, after all. And yet now that she was in his room,
     she faltered. Out on India Street, she had stroked this child as intimately as she (sometimes) stroked her own. As we touch,
     strangers though they be, those whose pain is great enough to warrant unabashed care: one dispenses with formality. Yet now
     she felt that he was owned, by that nice Mr. Jeevanjee, even by the house, by the long-dead mother whose name she had not
     learned, and by the empty chairs between the beds, meant for visitors whose vigils were expected. She felt that touching Tahir
     Jeevanjee might require a permission from his father that she had not obtained.
He never knew his mother
. It occurred to her that in this way she and Tahir Jeevanjee were very nearly linked, but she was not one to stop for long
     on sad and tender things. She focused on the boy.
    Other women come to sit themselves down here. They touch him
. She saw an army of them, heavy, scented ladies dressed in pinks and blues—colors the Kikanga mansions had once been—women
     meant to be there, petting the sick boy and speaking very softly. Comfortable and right. She knit her light eyebrows together.
     Thinking—of the once-bright wife and visitors (whose absences had weight), the height and girth of Kudra House, the parrot
     squawking in the gloom—made a heavy knot in her. She wanted to behave in such a way that if Mr. Jeevanjee had been a witness
     (he was not; subject to an unknown lightness in the other room, he was eating biscuits, still) he would find her actions irreproachable
     and right. So she leaned in above the boy and tugged softly at the covers. “I am sure that everything,” she said, “will soon
     be going well.”
    Tahir could not make out the features of her face. He noted only that Mrs. Turner’s hands were freckled and that she smelledfaintly of talcum—not the kind Aunt Sugra wore, which smelled of wood and roses, but like what mothers patted on their babies’
     chests and rumps after they’d been oiled. Agatha, also tugging on cool cloth, pulled her mother’s dress. Sarie, used to Agatha’s
     imperium, sighed, and gave her the five pineapple sweets. Agatha eyed the brothers for a moment; then she made her choice.
     Firm, she took smart-mouthed Ali’s bony hand and opened it with hers. She liked a challenge, too, and she could see that he
     was sly. Too surprised to pull away, he trembled nonetheless. She slipped the sweets into his palm then closed her fingers
     tightly over his, pressing to make certain they would stick. She had made him nervous. “No telling what girls like that will
     do!” he later told his friends, who, though they’d seen the smuggled magazines in the corners of the paan shops, had never
     spoken to a white child, let alone had one pull open their hands. Agatha released his shivering fist and pointed at the patient
     in the bed. “They’re for him,” she said. She was looking at Habib, sensing even then that Habib