The Last Gift (31 page)

But nothing terrible happened to me on that ship, and that became the important thing as time passed, that I had survived my reckless treachery. I began to feel safe, safer than I had ever felt before, and there were so many surprising joys. It was all new to me, to see land alongside us as the sun was rising, to approach a great harbour like Calcutta or Hong Kong in daylight, and to think that all this had been going on, all that coming and going and commotion, while I had been sitting under that mfenesi tree, shelling groundnuts. Then there was the sea itself, so big and so rough, glittering with utter wickedness, I don’t have the words to tell you, I don’t know how to describe that to you. It is terrifying when it is in a rage, and it is terrifying when it is beautiful. The sea, it isn’t something I can ever forget, the grip of its terror.

So the newness of everything, and that nothing terrible happened to me, those were the things that replaced the panic. Even the work they gave me to do at first was new, cleaning toilets, sweeping and scrubbing floors, fetching and carrying, dirty work it would have shamed me for anyone I knew to see me do. That thought made me smile sometimes, how before I would have imagined what I was doing as something demeaning, but I did not feel demeaned at all. The British officers were aloof and did not seem surprised to see me doing that dirty work. It was what they expected of me, and that helped me not to feel embarrassed myself. Not everyone on that first ship was British. There were some Malays and Filipinos, and two of them became my friends. Raja worked in the kitchen, and Alvin worked in the engine room. I have never forgotten those two. Alvin took me to the engine room with its giant clockwork cranks and shafts like the throbbing heart of a huge beast. He loved that engine, and he showed it to me like he was letting me into a secret. These two were my companions whenever we had a few hours to wander around a port city, but at first they left me to myself as I coped with the crew and their mockery. For if the officers were aloof and superior, their juniors were chatty and aggressive, full of abusive and scorning words. They were proud of their roughness and mocked each other and everyone else all the time. I did not understand that at first and took silent offence, but later I learned to respond just as roughly when I could, forcing myself to do so as if this way of speaking was familiar to me. That first ship took me to Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Singapore, Manilla, Hong Kong and then Jakarta and back to Singapore. My Malay friend, Raja, left the ship in Singapore, and I managed to manoeuvre myself into his job in the kitchen.

I took a walk in Singapore, which I still remember today. I was on my own, walking down a tree-lined street downtown, and I remember thinking to myself: I am free. It was not that I had thought of myself as confined before, or at least not until those last few weeks before I ran away, and that was a special feeling of being trapped. What I felt in Singapore was something quite different, something I had not known before. I felt as if I could choose freely what I wanted, or what work I did, or where I lived. In any practical way, this was just an illusion. I had no money, no papers, no skills, but that did not stop me thinking I was free. I had lost my fear of the world. I thought that no one would be able to make me do anything I did not want to do again. Everything around me provided so much pleasure, the sights, the smells, even the anxieties. I even mistook an attempt to con me out of a few coins for an offer of friendship and welcome. That same night the ship left Singapore for Madras, Bombay, Durban, Cape Town, Freetown and Liverpool, and at the end of that journey I knew that my life was changed beyond recovery, beyond any chance of returning to what it had been before.

I could have said something and hidden something. I could have told you about some of it even if not everything. Maybe I did not have the wisdom to do things by halves. By the time I might have told you about my treachery, I was used to living with my own silence, to managing the gap in my life. I committed an unkind and thoughtless act, and silence was a way of coping with the memory of it, offering a deadpan face to the burden of it. Our lives were full and complicated as it was, your mother, your childhood and this difficult place, and what I did in my teens was something for me to handle. Maybe it was because I was afraid you would be ashamed of me if you knew, and that you would lose respect for me. Maybe it was that, but I think it was also easier to say nothing and hope for the best. Well, that will do, I had not meant for my silence to make you afraid. I had meant to save you from this sordid knowledge so that you would look ahead and be brave and not be paralysed by these shameful memories.

This morning I made a list of the places I lived in during those years. It is surprising how speaking about those times in my life has made me want to go back in my memory and how so much has survived my desire to suppress it. Sometimes when a job ended I was not ready to join another ship, and lived for a while wherever I found myself. That was how I lived in Durban for some months. I fell in love there, but that was not the first reason for staying. I did not like the ship I was on, and after an argument with an officer, I impetuously asked to be relieved of my duties, and found myself wandering the streets of Durban. I ended up in the Indian part of the city and immediately felt comfortable there. The cafés and the food were familiar. The buildings reminded me of my home, as had buildings in Bombay and in Madras and even Colombo. I heard the muadhin calling people to prayer, and was tempted, but decided to stay on at the café and have another mug of sweet tea.

As I sat there, a tall man of about my age came into the café. He looked in my direction and then looked again as if he had recognised me. I began to smile because I knew what was going to happen next. He smiled back and came to my table. He asked me if we knew each other and I said no, but he thought we did. It happened to me all the time, in different places in the world, except in England. I kept meeting people who thought they knew me. That was how I met Ibrahim, and in no time at all, it was as if we did really know each other from before. He helped me find cheap lodgings and a few days later found work for me in his uncle’s scrapyard. In the evenings we went wandering the cafés and sometimes had a few surreptitious beers. He came from a religious family and did not want to embarrass his relatives by drinking openly.

He lived in a large household, two brothers with all their families living in one house. They were Iranian. One of the brothers was the scrap-metal merchant whose yard I worked in. The other brother was Ibrahim’s father, who was an imam. The part of Durban they lived in was so densely packed with Indians that no one they did not want could find an inch of living space in there. That was how the Indians liked it. It kept the savages out of their midst, although they did not mind so much the Arabs, as the rest of the Muslims were called. That was the official name the government had for them. Even Muslim Indians were Arabs. It was important not to be called native, because then you would be subject to bad laws, and anyway, none of them wanted to be called African then.

Ibrahim’s grandfather had been an Ithnaasheri imam, travelling huge distances in South Africa to see to the needs of his scattered congregation, conducting weddings and memorials and other holy rites. He was already gone by the time Ibrahim could remember anything, but the grandfather always felt nearby during his childhood. I never had anything like that as a child. I knew nothing about my father or my mother, and never knew any of their relatives or anything like that. But in Ibrahim’s family, the grandfather’s name was invoked every day, and some of his stories were repeated like ritual. One that I still remember was of the grandfather being called hurriedly to read for a man who had suddenly died. When he got there he discovered that the man had been buried too quickly. His relatives noticed on the morning following the funeral that the mound over the grave had shifted, and fearing desecration had opened the grave. They found his body twisted out of the trench where he had been laid on his side as custom required, and his mouth was full of soil, and so they knew that there would still have been a spark of life in him when he was buried and these were his last struggles to breathe. That story made a great impact on me, and sometimes when I remembered it I struggled to breathe.

When Ibrahim’s uncle found out I could read and write, he moved me to work in the office, which was on the ground floor of the house they lived in. At lunchtime I was sent food from upstairs, and that was how I came to know Ibrahim’s sister and fell in love with her. Nothing could come of it, of course. They were a big family and I was a hooligan sailor passing through, and I already knew what came of exchanging longing looks with a rich merchant’s daughter. We hardly spoke a word to each other, but somehow Ibrahim knew about our hesitant smiles and the brief sparkle in her eyes when she brought my bowl of food to me. Perhaps these things are obvious to everyone except to the two people who believe they share a secret. Ibrahim took the trouble to tell me about his mother. I suppose it was some kind of warning, and I heeded the warning and left the job in their family business immediately, and moved from my lodgings on the same day. I left Durban a short while afterwards, as soon as I found a berth. This is the story Ibrahim told me about his mother, and I always associate Durban with it, in ways that I find impossible to explain.

His mother, he said, sometimes became strange. Her mind drifted from its moorings, and her eyes turned blank and depthless. She broke things and hurt herself. She talked unstoppably, saying real words as well as gibberish, which made what she was saying very difficult to understand. It happened perhaps once a season, out of the blue without very much warning. There was a pattern to what she did when she became strange, but it was not predictable. Sometimes she broke things silently and stared with her unblinking gaze, at other times she talked without breaking a thing.

As soon as the first sign of turning strange showed itself, her daughter (the one I had grown to like) or her husband or one of the servants tied her hands behind her back and her feet together, and gagged her. She never resisted this restraint unless she was too far gone to know what she was doing. In fact, she was often the one who called out when she felt the approach of a strange spell, calling for whoever was with her to tie her up. Then her eyes turned blank and her mind drifted away. She hardly ever went out and was never left alone for long.

She was an intelligent woman, he said, but in her state she was likely to shame herself and her family with one of her mad outbursts. That was how they spoke of her, poor mad Zahra. No one needed to explain to her why it was necessary to tie her up and gag her, and restrict her as much as possible to the house. Madness is a cataclysm, an act of nature whose meaning is explicable only to itself, because it serves neither human nor divine purpose. Ibrahim’s father said this from time to time, invoking his own father, the imam, as the author of this wisdom.

I understood that Ibrahim was warning me not to disturb these arrangements in his family, and not to bring shame to them with my attentions to his sister. I said goodbye to him that evening and took to wandering the docks like an old-fashioned water rat. Apartheid was well entrenched by then, but they did not bother too much with us sailors and I had my British-protected papers, which made me safe from harassment even from jinns and afreets, let alone boers. I wandered the streets of Durban for days, avoiding the places Ibrahim and I used to visit, and I felt once again as if I had been freed from the misery of human sanctimony. Perhaps, I told myself, I have a weakness for sidelong glances and lingering tremulous looks, and only merchants’ daughters who spend their youth locked away from shame can provide these. I regretted my eviction from the pleasure I had found in Durban, but I regretted even more the loss of Ibrahim’s friendship. I had even begun to think that I might seek his help to find a way to stay in Durban and put an end to my wanderings. There is always a way, but after he told me about his mother, I knew that was no longer to be.

She told me I should not stop because talking is doing me good, but that I should say more about Zanzibar. My time in Durban is very interesting but they all wanted to hear more about Zanzibar, not about that little slut of a merchant’s daughter. I got angry with her, which is not hard to do when the bitch is being such a nag. Leave me alone, I told her. I don’t want to say more about Zanzibar, I don’t want to say more about anything. I threw the machine across the room hoping it would break and she would leave me alone, but I have no strength and it did not and here it is beside me again. Oh Maryam, I don’t want to think about that place any more. I have thought about it every day for all these years, even when I was not thinking about it. I don’t want to think about that woman I abandoned and what she had to cope with, or of the child and what it grew up to do and what it must think about me. I don’t want to think of my mother and how I did not have an opportunity to say to her how sorry I was that her life had been so wretched because of us. I don’t want to think about what happened to them, and what they must have thought of me as their world became ugly. Did you want me to talk about the breeze that blows through the trees at twilight or the murmurs of the silent lanes early in the morning? I don’t want to think about these things that cause me pain. I am going to switch this thing off and I never want to see it again.

She insists I should try. She says I should try. She says I don’t realise how much good it is doing me, my therapist. I have agreed to speak into this thing one more time and then that’s it, whatever she thinks. I intended to talk about her, my tiresome harpy, how she found me just in time and what a lucky day that was for me. But I find I don’t know where to begin. How beautiful she looked when I met her, and how her laughter was electric? Shall I tell her that? I did not know how ridiculous and lonely my hooligan life was until I met her. Shall I tell her about the joy the children brought and how empty everything would have been without them and without her? Shall I tell her that I cannot imagine my life without her companionship? She knows all these things.