The Last Gift (6 page)

He was not sure if at first he thought the story of his mother’s abandonment was real. Probably not. When he was a child everything felt so unlike the world he knew in some other place in his mind, that he did not know how to disbelieve anything. But at some point he must have realised that it was a real story and he clutched at any new detail that his mother released. By the time he was a teenager, and could be spoken to with greater openness, his mother had settled into her own style of disclosure. Jamal was nervous of disrupting the pattern, of making her wary of speaking about such things to him. Hanna was less obedient, more confident of getting what she wanted from her Ma. She asked for events to be made clear, for names to be repeated, and to be told what happened to people who figured in the stories. How far is Exeter from here? Where were your mum and dad living now? How did Mauritius get its name? Her questions forced their mother into asides and explanations and out of the confiding tone in which the most intimate details emerged. When Jamal was on his own with his mother, he let her speak uninterrupted, relishing the deliberate way she added depth to the picture, pausing to allow a forgotten detail to emerge, surprising herself with something she had forgotten to remember before. And Jamal did his best to make no challenge when he noticed any contradictions. He did not know then that stories do not stand still, that they change with new recollections and rearrange themselves subtly with every addition, and what seem like contradictions may be unavoidable revisions of what might have happened. He did not know this consciously, but he had an instinct for listening, which amounted to the same thing.

Once, while he was still living at home, Ma was talking about Exeter and a bad winter there when everything froze. One thing led to another and she began to reminisce, and as she talked she grew sad: about how she never visited there since they left in
1974
, about friends she had lost touch with, about Ferooz. Ba was also in the room and he looked up from his crossword as he sensed Maryam’s mood and boomed out,
It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Boots
, which was one of their jokes about when they first met.

Ma smiled. ‘I do wish I could find Ferooz, though,’ she said, looking at Ba.

Jamal knew that her mother had tried to get in touch with her adoptive parents but could not find them. They all knew that, she often talked about how after Hanna was born she had wished for a reconciliation more than anything, how she regretted losing touch with Ferooz. She did not talk in this way in front of Ba, at least Jamal had not heard her do so. Then when she did, he looked at her with a discouraging look.

‘Why do you worry yourself about those people?’ he said, snapping at her. He must have heard the snap, because when he spoke again he made his voice sound sane and persuasive. ‘They did not treat you well. At least you tried to find them, which is a great deal more than they will have bothered to do for you, I can assure you of that. You tried to find them and you failed, so now there’s nothing more you can do. Forget them.’

It was a tense moment, and Jamal saw that his mother held his Ba’s look for a moment before he dropped his eyes to his crossword. He understood that the look she had given Ba was a kind of challenge:
I don’t want to forget them. I don’t want to be like you
. What could have happened that was so bad that it made her run away, yet was not bad enough to prevent her yearning for reunion? Maybe nothing in particular. Perhaps she had just been impetuous, a girl of seventeen making a romance of her life, and then she waited too long to admit her regrets. It was in such moments that they seemed a strange family, these moments they approached and then retreated from, these stories and events which made brief unexpected appearances and then disappeared amid long looks and drawn-out silences.

Why was Ba so silent about his time before? Jamal gently patted his father’s thigh as he lay there on the hospital bed. ‘What did you do? Can you hear me? You can’t be that ill, or they’d have punched holes in you and filled you up with tubes and hitched you to a machine,’ he said aloud.

Abbas opened his eyes suddenly, stared blankly for a moment and then shut them again. It shook Jamal, that sudden bloodshot stare, as if the dead had spoken, and then he felt unkind for the thought. You’re not that ill, look at you, huffing away like some pasha in his hammock, he said softly. But then he noticed that his breathing had changed, had grown slightly agitated. Should he call someone? He could hear staff moving about the other side of the curtain that surrounded the bed. After a moment, Ba heaved a small sigh and his breathing gradually became regular again. It was strange to be sitting beside his sleeping father, who lay there defenceless as he had never known him to be before. Usually he was such a light sleeper that, should you by some unusual chance have caught him dozing, he stirred as soon as you approached. Maybe those taut nerves of his were still working, and Jamal’s voice had penetrated through the drugs and made him open his eyes.

Jamal patted his father on the thigh once more.
Don’t scare me like that again. Just rest now. Why do you never talk about your family?
Because he never had, at least never to do much more than draw a sketchy picture of a miserly father and a put-upon mother. Sometimes, often, he talked about being a sailor and the countries he visited, or the various bad jobs he had had to do over the years before he settled into the one he did for the rest of his life, as an engineer in the electronics factory. But never about his family or even about where he came from. When they were younger Hanna or Jamal asked, in the uncomplicated way of children, about where their grandparents were or what they were like, or other questions of that kind, but most of the time their father brushed their questions aside, sometimes with a smile and sometimes without. You don’t want to know about that, he would say. Now and then he would tell them things, precious little things as they seemed to Jamal, but nothing very precise, nothing very concrete. It was as if he spoke out of a reverie, unguarded for a few moments, holding up a fragment of a whimsy before letting it float away into the blinding light.

He remembered how one Christmas he told them about rosewater. This is how we greet each other in our celebrations. On the first day of Idd, people called on each other to offer greetings and share a cup of coffee and, if they were well off enough, a small bite of halwa. In some houses, the host sprinkled his guests with rosewater as they arrived, shaking it out of a silver fountain into their hands and sometimes lightly showering their hair with it. When Hanna asked for more, because she wanted to know about these people and which houses they visited – as did Jamal but he did not have her fearlessness about asking – he told them about how rosewater was distilled from rose petals and how it was used in various foods as well as in religious ceremonies in all parts of the world from China to Argentina. He told them about Idd and gave them a travelogue: how Idd was celebrated in that country as opposed to another one, in which month of the lunar year it occurred, what a lunar year is. When they asked him about his home country, he said he was a monkey from Africa.

It did not take very long for them to learn not to ask him certain kinds of questions. Jamal could not bear the look of irritation on his face when they persisted with their questions. It was Hanna mostly, because she felt the deprivation more than he did. She preferred to pin down details, and sometimes she found Ba’s evasiveness so intensely frustrating that she had to leave the room.

‘No, not evasiveness, evasions, Beautiful One,’ she said later when they were old enough to talk about such things with bitterness, and when the undergraduate Hanna had acquired enough language to analyse what she called her dysfunctional family. Long ago he had asked his father what the name Jamal meant, and he told him it meant the Beautiful One, and so that became the name Hanna used as his ironic nick name. She herself preferred to be called Anna, and that was the name she used outside the house.

‘They are lost,’ she said. ‘Ba deliberately lost himself a long time ago, and Ma found herself lost from the beginning, a foundling. What I want from them is a story that has a beginning that is tolerable and open, and not one that is tripped with hesitations and silences. Why is that so difficult? I want to be able to say this is what I am. Yes, I know, so has every human being who has ever given the matter any thought, but I don’t want to crack the mystery of the soul or the nature of being. I just want some simple boring details. Instead we get snippets of secret stories we cannot ask about and cannot speak about. I hate it. Sometimes it makes me feel that I am living a life of hiding and shame. That we all are.’

Jamal recognised the feeling she described. It came to him at unexpected moments when he too felt he had to dissemble and fudge. That feeling – that there was something to be ashamed of – had been with him most of his life, even when he did not know of its presence and had only slowly begun to understand its several causes. It added to the sense of difference and oddness that he had grown up with, a sense of strangeness. He had learned to recognise that feeling in many ways, and not just in response to hostility and unkindness and the teasing at school. He saw it in the stilted and careful smiles he received from some of the mothers of other children he knew, in the way people tried hard to prevent him from noticing that they had seen something to notice, in the ingenuous and sometimes insistent and cruel questions the children asked about his country and its customs. It was years before he learned to say
this
is my country, and it was Hanna who taught him to say that.

Even when they tried to, they could not forget his difference and nor could he, even though he pretended to. How could it be otherwise? After two or three centuries of unrelenting narratives about how unalike one another they were, how could it be otherwise? Sooner or later, the meaning of their difference would be there in a look or a word or the sight of someone walking across the road. The teacher might be talking about poverty in the world and would not be able to resist a quick glance in his direction. Poverty is to be found in places where people like him lived, and we, who have redeemed ourselves from this condition, must learn not to despise those who have not yet found the means to save themselves. We must do what we can to help them. That is what he took the teacher’s pained look to mean, Jamal (and Hanna and those others who look like them) is one of those poor wretches but we must not despise him or say cruel things to him.

Whenever someone old and dark-skinned came shuffling along the pavement in the way of old people, hair dishevelled perhaps or a grubby coat buttoned up askew, they chuckled, the children he grew up with, and glanced at him, embarrassed for him. He pretended that he did not feel any discomfort, pretended he was not any different from the chucklers.

‘There are times when I hate that they brought me here,’ Hanna said. ‘That they did not find another place to have me and to have you. Not because other places are free from cruelties and lies, but just to be saved from so much demeaning pretence. Not to have the chore of pretending to be no different from people who are full of shit about themselves. But I suppose they did not have any choice in the matter, really, only an appearance of choice. They could have chosen not to have me, but after that the matter was out of their hands.’

It was after they both left home that Hanna raged like this, about the secrecy and their suppressed and dissembling lives. For a while, the matter seemed to possess her, then somehow she found some way of coping with it. It was university that did that, and the new friends she met there, and the love affairs, and academic success. As she made her way in the big world, the frustrations of being Hanna Abbas, growing up in a small modern house in Norwich with parents who seemed to her to be out of their depth, became less urgent. She was fully Anna now, and hardly ever talked about her difference in the same way. Instead it became an embellishment of her Britishness. Once he teased her and said that perhaps he should change his name to Jimmy, and maybe that would make him less fretful. He saw that he had hurt her, that he had made her seem treacherous to herself.

‘I hate the name Hanna,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where they got it from. Anyway, you’re the one who called me Anna.’

‘I know, I know,’ he said, placating her. ‘When I was a baby and couldn’t say the whole thing. Only teasing.’

Jamal had not got to where she was yet, but perhaps prudence led inevitably there. He could not quite make himself say
home
, when he meant England, or think of
foreigners
without fellow feeling.

He used to think that there were not many people who knew as little as he did about his parents. He used to imagine that other people knew who they were, and who their grandparents were, and where they lived and what they did. They would have uncles in Ireland and cousins in Australia and in-laws in Canada, and perhaps an awkward and disreputable relative who had cut himself off from everyone. They had obligations and get-togethers and tiresome relations. That was what normal family life was like, from what he could tell, whereas they were a vagabond family, wanderers without connection or duties. He had learned different since he started his doctoral research on migration movements to Europe, had learned something of how precarious, how mean, how resourceful the lives of these strangers were, how blood-soaked some of their stories were. He learned to be patient for the story that he knew his Ba would tell him one day. He looked at his father, breathing regularly in his drugged sleep, so recently close to departure, and thought perhaps the time for the telling was not too far off. If you stop struggling so hard against it, life can be quite tolerable, he whispered to his father, but he was not sure if he believed that himself. Why didn’t his Ba do more with his life? Why didn’t he want more? But was it so little what he did and what he wanted? It was not so little to spend so many years waiting in patient silence, knowing that one day he would be struck down just like this.