The Last Gift (23 page)

By the time she was a teenager, she thought it was strange, being driven like that, like being a captive to little ambitions for success or wealth. It seemed a joyless life, working all the time. She thought it was a mean way to live, mean in spirit and without any interest in anyone else. But Ferooz did not seem to mind. She talked to him whether he was studying or eating, if that was what she felt like doing. Sometimes he replied and sometimes he went on with what he was doing. Neither seemed to mind. She worked hard too, cooking and cleaning and carrying and fetching so that Vijay could continue to be a miracle of perseverance. Ferooz liked to say that about him, a miracle of perseverance. She heard someone say it on the radio, Lady so and so was a miracle of perseverance in the campaign for children’s rights. She thought it was a lovely way to describe Vijay.

A car stopped outside and after a moment Anna heard a car door slam. She guessed it was Jamal arriving in a taxi, and she hurried to the front door before he rang the bell. Somehow it seemed important that he should not ring the bell, that he should not agitate the fiends that were abroad in their house at this hour. When they came back into the room, Maryam tried to rise to her feet but Jamal smothered her in a hug and forced her back into the chair. Anna had said something to him. He sat in a chair, no he was not hungry, not tired, yes a good journey, sorry he was late. Yes it was good to see her too. They waited in silence until their mother was ready to begin again.

‘Go on, Ma,’ Anna said.

‘I was telling Hanna about Ferooz and Vijay,’ Maryam said, and for some reason her eyes wandered to the photograph of Abbas that was still on the shelf and had not made it back upstairs since all the months ago when he was in hospital and she talked to Jamal about their early days together.

Things became complicated when she first went to live with them, at least for a while, and Ferooz had to make arrangements at work. Then, when they got used to her – and she tried very hard to make them get used to her – she was given a key. Ferooz did not come home until six, so Maryam had an hour or two of TV before she arrived. It was the happiest time for her, that hour or two after school, sitting quietly in the upstairs flat, feeling safe from everything, watching the excited children on TV. She loved living with them, a room to herself, fussing and kindness from Ferooz, a bit of worldly wisdom from Vijay when he remembered, and time to herself when she could do what she liked. It may seem strange for a child to think like that, to want to be alone at the age of nine, but everything had been such a bustle and confusion in her life that those afternoon hours were a comfort she had not known was coming. She always switched off a good while before six. When she was first given a key, Vijay asked her what she did when she came home from school and she said she watched TV. He did not like that. He frowned and shook his head sadly and told her she should catch up with schoolwork, not waste her time with TV. After that when he came home he put his hand on the TV to see if it had been in recent use. Then Ferooz started to do the same when she came home, so to show that she was obedient and as hard-working as they wanted her to be, she switched off in good time and sat down with a book or with crayons or something like that. She tried to like doing the schoolwork, but her mind could not settle to it.

Then as she grew older, she became the skivvy of the household. It started slowly. When Ferooz came home from work Maryam helped in the kitchen. Ferooz gave her a stool to stand on so she could reach the pots. She was teaching her to find her way round a kitchen, which she told her was something every woman should know, even if later she was lucky enough to marry a prince. Ferooz was surprised how quickly Maryam took to it, because she was still so small. Neither of them knew at the time that it was what fate had in store for her, a lifetime of pots and pans. That was how it started, helping out in the kitchen. Then Ferooz started to leave things for Maryam to do when she got back from school, peeling vegetables, getting pots ready, laying the table. Then making the dough for the chapatis, putting the dhal on the fire, until finally she was cooking the whole meal for all of them.

They were careful with money, and the food they ate was simple. It was a skinflint house. That was how they lived, saving everything for the future. When Ferooz came in from work, she checked the bin to see that Maryam had not thrown away vegetables that could have been used. She did that at first, when she could not trust her to be as careful about waste as she was.

In another year or two, Maryam could not remember exactly how long because time moved differently when your life was like that, she was also doing the cleaning and the washing. Ferooz did not talk so often about her future career as a psychiatric nurse, but she kissed her when she came home and found the washing folded away and the table laid for dinner. And Vijay was happy enough to have Maryam sitting with them, fetching something for him when he needed it, and having her around as someone they treated kindly. Because they did treat her kindly, they told her so, and they told her what they had rescued her from. She did not always understand their meaning at the time. Perhaps that was what they had in mind all along when they took her, to exercise their kindness and save her from a degraded life. To teach her to find some dignity in living with sober people and doing honest work. She had been confused at first by Ferooz and her talk of family.

The work she did in the house was not hard. She even liked it, to prepare a meal and cook it, and then clean up and put everything away and wipe the kitchen down. It felt like it was an achievement. Something she could do and complete with satisfaction. Even Vijay did not tell her to work harder any more because he could see she was. Her school work improved too. She was in a secondary school by this time, a noisy and crowded school where teachers and pupils kept each other on the run all the time. She was so far behind that she was put in with the thick ones. That was what they called themselves. The work they did there was easy. Some of the teachers brought them comics to read and let them play board games in class. She started to get good grades for the first time. She also made some new friends. Their teacher was pleased with her and she liked being in his class, Mr Thwaite. He had a big ginger beard. He even called her Maryam instead of Mary, which no one else at school did. He told them some very unexpected things, Mr Thwaite, drifting away from his lessons into improbable stories that they never wanted to hear the end of. One day he told Maryam a story about her name. After the Muslims conquered Mecca, he said, they went to the Kaaba to remove all the idols and paintings that pagan worshippers had put there. Do you know what the Kaaba is? It is the great stone towards which Muslims face when they say their prayers. There was only one God for the Muslims, and the idols of other gods made the Kaaba unclean for them, so they had to remove them. But among the paintings was a small icon of the Madonna and child. Mohammad, the Prophet of the Muslims, put out his hand to cover the icon and ordered that everything else should be painted over. The name of the Redeemer’s mother is beloved by all people, Mr Thwaite said. He had to explain many parts of the story to her before she understood it, and years later when she understood even more, she wondered what happened to the icon.

Anyway, after school she went home to all her chores. When they were done she went to her room and listened to music on the cassette recorder Ferooz and Vijay had bought her for her birthday. She could listen to music all day then.

She told herself that she was happy, but of course she wasn’t really. Nobody of that age really is, with all the things that are happening to you, and your confidence is low, and you are afraid to look the fool. So what she was telling herself was that in spite of those things that make everyone unhappy at that age, she was a happy teenager. She wished she was cleverer and had something to look forward to, something to do with her life, but she was not unhappy. She was used to the watchful way Ferooz and Vijay lived, counting everything, even the spoons. She thought of them as kind people who let her live with them and looked after her. She was grateful to them, and she did not mind doing the chores for them, or if she did mind it was only now and then. She began to understand why they worked so hard and watched everything. They were determined not to fail, not to be defeated, not after coming such a long way and putting up with so much. She thought it was all that struggle that sometimes made them gloomy.

Then Vijay’s nephew came to live with them. She was sixteen and in her final year at school when he came. Vijay now worked as an accountant in a firm owned by two Indian brothers from the same area he himself came from. His main work was to do the accounts of several small local businesses. He wore a suit to work and it was easy to see that he thought of himself as someone who had achieved something in life. Well, he had, he had, although this did not stop him studying as hard as ever for the next stage of his professional qualifications. The nephew, whom Maryam was told to call cousin, was Vijay’s sister’s son. Vijay sent for him and arranged for him to study accountancy at a college in Exeter. It was Vijay’s offer of reconciliation with his family, but also he had thought of starting his own firm once his nephew had enough training, a proper family firm of accountants. So the nephew came to live with them.

She had not spoken about him before but he had something to do with what happened to her, with how she left Ferooz and Vijay. They had to know these things. Well, they didn’t have to know, but it might help them to understand something of how things have turned out. And she did not want to keep this to herself any more.

The nephew was older than she expected, about twenty-three or so, full of smiles and namastes when he arrived from the airport with Vijay. He slept on a quilt on the floor of the living room because there was nowhere else, but Vijay said that would be no problem because Indians can sleep anywhere and are used to hardship. He was no trouble at first. In the morning he rolled up his quilt, had a cup of tea and a slice of bread, and left for his college. He did not come back until it was time to eat in the evening. He spent all his time in classes or in the library, and did not even stop for lunch. Vijay thoroughly approved of his dedication. She didn’t think he went anywhere on his own in the city, and when he came home he did not say much except to Vijay. He was a bit shy about his English, with very good reason. She could not understand him most of the time, and even when she did, his words came out in a jumble, as if he was speaking his sentences backwards. Then after he settled down, Maryam sometimes came home from school and found him there in the flat. All along he knew that she was not the daughter of the house, not even adopted, just a wastrel taken in by his relatives and now the household skivvy, Maryam Riggs. All the daughter talk was slowly forgotten as time passed, except as a kind of scolding. It had taken so long for her to understand, but when she saw the way Vijay was with his nephew, she understood something about family, the responsibility, the affection and a little pride, and knew that Ferooz and Vijay had not felt like this about her.

The nephew grew to be a nuisance to Maryam. When she came back from school and he was there, he followed her around, speaking in words she did not always understand but whose meaning she grasped from the gestures that accompanied them. When Ferooz and Vijay were around his eyes followed her like he was touching her. She knew already from the arguments she had overheard between Ferooz and Vijay that he was complaining about sleeping in the living room when the girl had the room. Dinesh needs to study and to get a good rest so he can concentrate at college, Vijay said. If he can’t sleep, he can’t study. That was his name, Dinesh. She had not said his name aloud for a long time. Ferooz argued with Vijay and said, Maryam is like our daughter. Maryam smiled when she heard her say that. Vijay said, yes of course she is, which is why she will understand that this is for the good of the whole family. Maryam knew that sooner or later she was going to have to give up the room, and then there would be nowhere to hide from cousin Dinesh when they were alone in the flat.

She got into trouble with Ferooz because she stayed out longer to avoid the cousin and she could not do all her chores properly. They thought she was beginning to turn wild, wasting time in the streets and seeing boys. In this country, a girl will be spoiled sooner or later, however carefully you look after her, Vijay said. She had thought to say something to Ferooz because cousin Dinesh was now a menace to her, making her frightened of what he might do. So when Ferooz got annoyed with her again for staying out too long, scolding her for neglecting her duties when they had looked after her like a daughter all these years, Maryam became upset. She said that cousin Dinesh was bothering her, that was why she was staying away. Bothering her how? Ferooz asked. You know how, Maryam said. Ferooz made a disgusted face and slapped her. That’s what she did, she slapped her on the face when she had never hit her once in all the years. Then she told her that she was a filthy girl and never to say such a thing again. Maryam couldn’t tell her that he came into her room and looked through her things. She couldn’t say that he followed her around and put himself in her way. She couldn’t say that he put his hand on her waist and on her hips, and that she knew that one day he was going to do something worse to her. But after Ferooz slapped her . . . It was such a shock to be hit on the face like that. After that she could not tell her what was happening and what she was afraid of.

After the school examinations, they told her to move out of her room so that cousin Dinesh could have a proper space to do his studying. It was as if the nephew had been promoted to nobility. He called for Maryam to fetch a drink for him, he told her off for not ironing his clothes properly, he complained about the food. He even treated Ferooz in a different way, smiling at her as if she was foolish, sometimes ignoring her when she spoke to him. That summer after her last year at school, Maryam got a job in a café and thought if she could earn enough she would move into lodgings. But the money was not enough and the work was such a drudge, although she liked her mates there. Later she got a better job in a factory, which is where she was working when she met Abbas. She still went to the café sometimes to have a cup of tea and meet with the people she used to work with, and always got a cream cake on the house. That was where she saw Abbas the second time. He glanced at her and recognised her. He hesitated for a moment and then came to say hello. She couldn’t remember what he said but after a while he sat down and they chatted and then he said goodbye, see you again some time.