LAST TAXI RIDE: A Ranjit Singh Novel (Ranjit Singh, 2, Band 2) - Softcover

Chapter One

August in New York City. The place is a ghost town, thirteen thousand cabs desperately roaming the streets in search of a fare.

Ranjit Singh sees the woman in the white dress waving at him from the other side of Broadway and swerves his yellow cab across a lane of traffic. Horns blare and a bicycle messenger shoutsAsshole! as he screeches to a stop.

A bare brown arm reaches for the door handle. It clicks open and the cool air-conditioning leaks out, replaced by the smell of hot asphalt, sweat, and the faint, pungent odor of melting bubble gum.

Ranjit watches the woman get into the cab, the same way he watches all his passengers, looking for signs of trouble. Seasoned New Yorkers barely even notice Ranjit’s red turban and full beard, but out-of-towners gape at him, reassured only by the hack license posted on the plexiglass partition. The crazies, of course, want to talk and talk.

This woman is different.

One long leg enters the cab, wearing a white wedge-heeled sandal, each toenail painted a perfect crimson. Her crisp white dress reveals smooth brown shoulders, her face is obscured by large oval sunglasses, and her glossy black hair cascades to her shoulders. She piles three crisp white Prada shopping bags on the seat next to her, and they crinkle against her hip.

“Seventy-second and Central Park West, please.”

Her voice is low and modulated, but there are Indian undertones to it, as familiar as the voice of a long-forgotten lover.

I know this woman, he thinks, then corrects himself. That’s absurd.

He nods in acknowledgment and pulls out onto lower Broadway, thinking of the quickest route: right onto Prince, swing over onto West Houston, cut through the Village on Sixth Avenue, and then a straight shot through Midtown to Central Park West. After two long years of driving a cab here, the city’s streets are burned into his brain.

They turn and hit a red light. The taxi is caught in the seething, rumbling flow of traffic and Ranjit feels an equivalent disturbance inside himself. The woman in the white dress is looking out of the window, lost in thought, biting down on her plump lower lip.

A memory floods through him. He was still a cadet at the Military Academy in Chandigarh, and on one stifling hot Sunday he wandered into a cinema, bought a ticket, and sank down into a seat, enjoying the air-conditioning.

He’d entered in the middle of a film, a romance, apparently, because the heroine was waiting under a concrete overpass for her lover. Unlike the other Bollywood actresses, with their ample bosoms and pale complexions, she was dark-skinned and slender, with vulnerable, doelike eyes. As she waited, it began to rain, and she shrank back against the concrete, biting down into her lower lip. Transfixed, Ranjit sat through the rest of the movie, then bought another ticket and watched it again.

He was twenty-two then, and the actress on the screen was barely nineteen, the latest discovery by the megaproducer S. K. Nagpal, who had supposedly seen her getting off a bus and said, “See that girl? I will make her into a star.”

The woman in his cab must be in her late thirties now: her voice is an octave lower, her slim figure filled out into womanly curves. Ranjit wishes that he could see her eyes, which are hidden behind oversized sunglasses.

The light changes to green, and the taxi nips around a bus, accelerating so hard that the woman in white is pushed back into her seat. She takes off her sunglasses and clutches them, and he can see her face clearly now. There is no mistaking her long-lashed, liquid brown eyes.

Shabana Shah catches him staring and smiles tiredly. “So you’ve recognized me. If you want an autograph, okay. But I cannot get you a movie role, or introduce your nephew to some producer, okay?”

He laughs. “Sorry to bother you, madam. No autograph needed. It’s just that you looked familiar, and I was trying to remember—”

“It’s okay. Happens all the time.”

Shabana Shah leans her forehead against the window and looks out at the flower district. A man pushing a shopping cart full of purple orchids hurries past, leaving a wet trail behind him.

Ranjit finds himself still talking. “My wife, she was a big fan of yours—”

“Was? Why, what happened? She doesn’t like my movies anymore?”

He feels his face flush, and remembers that Shabana’s last three movies were all box-office flops. Critics have said that she is too old to play the role of the young, vulnerable lover.

“No, no, that’s not what I meant. She’s still a fan, I’m sure. It’s just that she is in India, and I’m here. We’re … divorced.”

She looks at him with a spark of interest. “Divorced? Is that common for Sikhs?”

“No.” He feels the back of his neck burn with shame.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was stupid, forgive me.”

“Oh, there is nothing to forgive.”

Changing the topic, she gestures to the postcard he has propped on the dashboard: the Golden Temple in Amritsar, surrounded by the calm waters of the sacred lake.

“So that’s where you’re from? Amritsar?”

He shakes his head. “No, no … I’m from Chandigarh.”

There is no way to explain that he used to visit the temple with his mother when he was a child. The postcard is a talisman: when he’s stressed out, he concentrates on it and meditates, leaving the fray of Manhattan for the quiet, sacred space of the temple.

The taxi speeds on, slipping through the knot of Columbus Circle, the tall lonely statue of Columbus mirrored in the glass slabs of the Time Warner Center. Turning onto Central Park West, Ranjit feels a stab of sadness that the ride will soon be over.

With Shabana in his cab, he feels something that he hasn’t felt in a long time: not just the quick flame of desire, but something weightier, a yearning to be recognized.

New York is full of unmoored women and a moving taxi is a refuge from the harsh reality of the city. Tired or lonely, some of these women hear Ranjit’s fluent English and want to talk to him. Most of the time he humorously deflects their advances, but once he gave in.

The day he received his divorce papers, he picked up a tall blond woman at JFK airport, returning from a yoga retreat in India. They talked all the way into the city, and when she invited him up to her sleek Soho loft it seemed natural. After a drink, she simply stepped out of her clothes, and her slim, tanned body aroused him; after sex she fell deeply asleep. Gathering up his clothes to leave, Ranjit was shocked to pass an open bedroom door and see a man sleeping inside. The encounter left him feeling soiled and lonelier than before, and he swore to never pick up another woman.

But Shabana is different, and he can’t help sneaking another look. Her black, lustrous hair has been artfully cut and falls in layers to her bare shoulders, almost too heavy to be supported by her slender neck. Her eyelashes have barely any mascara, and her lipstick is a modest shade of pearl, but she wears heavy makeup on her cheeks. She is older now, but he feels as though he has known her, has lain with her through a thousand and one nights, listening to her stories.

There is the sudden blare of horns on Central Park West. Ranjit hits the brake, bringing the taxi to an abrupt stop. A cop car is blocking the road, its lights flashing. Ahead, a long black limo is skewed across the road, a yellow cab with a crumpled fender stopped right behind it. No doubt...