The Last Gift (24 page)

That evening cousin Dinesh came into the kitchen and grabbed her and groped her and tried to kiss her. He kept saying things, you smell beautiful, you are shining. He was shorter than her but strongly built. He was older than her. She hit him with the spoon she was stirring the dhal with but he just laughed and would not let go. She struggled away from him in the end but he stood in front of her, laughing, wagging a finger as if everything was just a bit of fun, groping the servant girl for a bit of a lark. That was how things became: whenever he found her on her own he tried again, each time more horrible than the last. She fought as hard as she could and landed many blows with spoons and the rolling pin but she knew that one day, when he had built up enough courage, he would force her, and the thought sickened and terrified her. She thought Ferooz knew too. She thought Ferooz looked at her as if she knew.

Then they found out about Abbas. She said his name, casually, describing him as someone she had met at the factory, but her tone must have given her away. They interrogated her until she no choice but to come clean. She could not have imagined the fuss they made, as if she had done something obscene. For two days it went on like that, with threats to lock her in the flat so she could not meet him, and warnings that if she did not obey they would throw her out. Cousin Dinesh joined in too. You have no respect for yourself, he said, curling his lip like a jinn in one of those Indian movie magazines he liked to read. On the third evening, when she came home from work, he forced her hands against a wall in the kitchen, pulled her jumper over her face, blinding her, and forced her into his room. She fought him off as hard as she could but he was stronger than her, and he dragged her to her old bed.

This is so vile, Anna thought. Why are you telling us this? Why are you telling us now? I don’t want to hear any more of this vile story.

‘Somehow, while he struggled to release himself from his clothes, I wriggled out of his grasp and ran to Ferooz and Vijay’s room and bolted the door,’ Maryam said, her voice sober and unaccustomed to their ears, giving an account of a mild horror she had witnessed, playing the moment down. ‘I stayed there until Ferooz came home. I heard cousin Dinesh begin on her as soon as she arrived, and by the time I opened the door for her she had the whole story of how I had exposed myself to him and he had admonished me and I had run away to hide in their room.’

They shouted at her and threatened her, and she thought Vijay would have thrown her out or locked her in a cellar if he had one. It was in the blood, this corruption, he said. Ferooz warned her repeatedly that if she did not show more respect they would have no option but to throw her out, after all the kindness they had shown her. It was a Friday night, she remembered that very clearly. Abbas had asked her to go to the cinema and she had agreed but of course she couldn’t go. The next morning, before anyone was up, she collected a few clothes in a carrier bag and went to him, to Abbas, and they ran away from that town.

Abbas said let’s get out of this place, and she thought fine. She did not tell him about the attempt to rape her. She was happy to go far away from the mess, get away, leave it behind. She didn’t know if she had any rights, or if they could have her brought back to be their skivvy again. So when Abbas said:
Yallah, let’s get out of here
, she said hurray.

‘I did not tell you about the cousin before,’ Maryam said. ‘And I don’t know why it feels important to tell you now. It is only a man forcing himself on me, and after all these years I should have forgotten about it, like an old scar that fades. But I still feel the humiliation of it, the injustice. I could not even tell Abbas at first, but now I feel it is important to tell you. It did not feel right to tell you before, to have you think of your mother like that, as someone who could be menaced in that way. It did not feel right to tell you those things when you were younger, to have you think that the world was that unsafe. But now I want you to know, so that you don’t think there is a dirty secret I am keeping from you. I wanted to explain to you fully why I ran away from Ferooz and Vijay, and why for so long I could not bear the thought of getting in touch with them.’

‘It’s all right, Ma,’ Anna said, wanting her to stop now, not wanting to hear any more stories about her ugly life. ‘It’s all right. It was a long time ago. Don’t distress yourself any more about it.’

Maryam looked steadily at her daughter, and she understood her desire to stop her talking. ‘It is also because I have been listening to Abbas telling me things I did not know. It made me realise how sad it is to live with these things on your own, to let them poison your life.’

‘Oh God,’ Anna said. ‘What has he been saying?’

Maryam stared at them for a moment, looking for words, then she said: ‘He has another wife. He abandoned her and her child in Zanzibar many years ago.’

Jamal sighed and leaned back in the chair. Anna glared at her mother.

‘I can’t bear this,’ she said angrily. ‘I can’t bear these shitty, vile immigrant tragedies of yours. I can’t bear the tyranny of your ugly lives. I’ve had enough, I’m leaving.’

‘Shut up, Hanna,’ Jamal said. ‘Let Ma speak.’

‘My name is Anna, you moron,’ Anna said, but she did not leave.

Then briefly and as brutally as before, Maryam told them how Abbas ran away because he thought the child was not his, and since then had not spoken of his flight to anyone. For forty years he has lived with his shame, Maryam said, unable to speak about it to anyone. Now he wants to talk about it because he thinks he’s dying. Let him tell you himself, she said.

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t want to know. I’m leaving. I’m going to call a cab and catch the next train to London. Or to anywhere.’

Jamal left the room and went upstairs. The upstairs landing was dark but he did not need a light to know his way around. He opened the door to his parents’ bedroom and slipped silently inside. He steadied his breathing and after a few moments of standing there in the dark, he knew that his father was awake.

‘Ba,’ he said.

‘Jamal,’ Abbas said. Then he began to whisper, and when Jamal drew near he realised that he could not understand anything his father was saying. He sat on the floor in the dark and listened to him ramble. He could hear Anna’s raised voice downstairs.

‘Zanzibar sounds like a wonderful place to be from,’ Jamal said, but Abbas took no notice.

After what seemed a long time, his father stopped whispering and Jamal guessed from his breathing that the medication had put him to sleep. The noises from downstairs had also stopped. He heard the bedroom door opening gently behind him, and from the stray stairlight he saw that it was his mother. He followed her outside.

‘He’s asleep,’ Jamal said.

‘Maybe,’ Maryam said. ‘Sometimes he just pretends.’

‘He was whispering for a long time,’ he replied.

‘Yes I know,’ she said. ‘He will do that for days now. He loses his way when he becomes upset. Then he does that whispering in his language as if he has forgotten to speak in English. I think he knew I was telling you about his running away and he has gone into hiding.’

‘Has Hanna left?’ he asked.

‘No, she’s downstairs,’ Maryam said, smiling in the half-light. ‘She found a bottle of wine in one of the kitchen cupboards.’

The next day their father did not get out of bed. When Jamal went to see him, Abbas looked quietly at him and then began to whisper. Jamal pulled up a chair and sat beside him while his Ba hissed away for an hour or more. In the end, Jamal smiled, kissed his father’s hand and went back downstairs. Maryam told them some more of what Abbas had told her, but as the day wore on she said there was no point them staying any longer. He had gone into one of his deep places. When he comes back from there, I will get him to continue speaking into the tape. He prefers that now. He sits there on his own and just says whatever he wants, and does not need to look anyone in the eye. She did not want to put any more stress on him, her sick bigamist. The word startled Jamal, but Maryam said she was saying it so that she should become used to it, so that it would not pain her as much as it did at first.

‘It isn’t so strange for men to have had another family in these situations,’ Jamal said when they were on the train to London. ‘Think about it. It isn’t impossible to imagine how it might happen.’

‘By these situations you mean immigrants and refugees,’ Anna said, still swollen with outrage.

Jamal smiled. ‘You are really rolling that word round your mouth these days,’ he said. ‘Vile immigrant tragedies, no less.’

‘I just wish their stories were not so pathetic and sordid,’ Anna said. ‘My dad is a bigamist and my mum is a foundling. Can you imagine telling anybody that and not sounding like a character out of a comic melodrama? Of course it’s not so strange for immigrant men to be bigamists, and foundlings were everywhere in the
1950
s. How perfectly ordinary. We should all of us be more understanding and not make a fuss about it. Is that what you’re saying? You should’ve told that to our father, so he didn’t feel that he had to make everyone unhappy with this silent burden he was carrying around. It was wrong of him not to tell us years ago. And what does she mean by telling us now that she was raped by some monstrous Indian boy when she was sixteen. Could she not have just kept that to herself?’

‘Not quite raped,’ Jamal said. ‘And she told us because it hurts her to remember the hurt on her own. Maybe.’

Anna fell silent for a moment and then began again, stopping and starting for a good while before she gradually lapsed into stillness, staring out of the window at the hurtling countryside. Jamal resisted many moments to speak, to protest, to say that Ma was telling them about more than the rape. She was telling them about how these people had treated her well and then later wounded her with such casual misuse, and she was telling them about the guilt she felt for kindnesses she had not understood or repaid. She was telling them about a humiliation she had suppressed and no longer wanted to. But he did not protest or defend, and he sat in front of Hanna while she had her say. There was a cruel edge to Hanna, he thought, as he had thought many times before. She was unkind when nothing could come out of unkindness, when it was nothing more than a flourish of her wit, and she spoke in that aggrieved manner as if everything was intended to hurt and aggravate her. It suited her idea of herself that she was not going to stand for any rubbish, that she would speak her mind and not hide behind courtesies and sentiment.

He told her about Lena and saw her eyes slowly light up with interest and pleasure. He told the story as an entertainment, how he had been secretly besotted with her, tongue-tied with adoration when he was with her, and then how he was so surprised by the kissing after the party and did not know how to proceed afterwards. She shook her head with pity at his fumbling. He told her about the boyfriend Ronnie, and about the postcard, and how she came back from her holiday on the Shannon and took charge. He kept it light, the way she liked her stories. She loved the postcard episode.

‘You are such an innocent,’ she said. ‘She more or less had to put her life in danger with her super-fit hunk before you realised that she wanted you.’

‘I’m an idiot,’ he agreed. ‘But there’s no need to exaggerate. How was her life in danger?’

She brushed aside Marco’s attempt at suicide. An exhibitionist escapade, she said. He was going to jump out of that car when the moment was right. He just wanted to scare the living daylights out of his parents. Jamal saw how she hesitated when he told her that Lena’s father was Italian, frowning a little at another immigrant story, but she let it pass without remark. Then when he finished telling her what he could for the moment, the silence opened up between them again and her face turned morose. They were on the outer edges of London when she began to tell him how things were between Nick and her. I think he’s fucking someone, she said, or several someones. Or that he will sooner or later. Jamal listened silently while she went into detail about her unhappiness with Nick and all that she thought lay ahead for her. The detail surprised him. She had never spoken to him in this way about Nick before. Jamal had thought that Hanna and Nick were permanent, and had long ago learned to keep his opinions on the matter to himself. He could not understand how Hanna could tolerate Nick’s egotism, and his flaunting of his intelligence and knowledge. Now as he listened to his sister talking about the failure of her love with such glib misery, he felt sorry that he had lost the habit of speaking openly to her. He watched her as she talked, absently stroking her mobile phone, and he could not find the easy words of reassurance that the moment required.

As they pulled into Liverpool Street station she said, I’d better call our leader. Stay in touch, beautiful one. They went in different directions on the Circle Line, she to Victoria and he to King’s Cross. On the train north, his mind turned to his father and the secret he had endured and then forced on them, and to his mother and the unhappiness Ba had caused her. He thought of what Ma had told them, of the woman he had married and how he thought himself tricked, how he cried so much as he spoke of those times and those events. It’s no good though, she said. Nothing can be done about these things. The crying does no good now. He should have spoken about all this many years ago.

He felt he should have stayed with them for a few more days.

The Return