The Last Gift Read Online Free PDF

while the family went out. Maybe it was not all night and she just fell asleep on the floor in the end. When she woke up in the morning the door was unlocked. She cried all the time and kept asking for Mum and Dad, but she never found them again. She was sent to live with another family that had two proper children about the same age as her. The mother was dark and had asked for a dark child to foster, so they had given her Maryam, because by then her complexion was darkening more than ever. But Maryam would not stop crying for long – you are not a baby any more, her dark mother said – and she did not want to play with the proper children. She was in big school by this time and was being bullied constantly. One day she hit a girl who was tormenting her. The teacher had put a vase with flowers in water on their table for them to draw but the girl kept moving it and scribbling on Maryam’s paper and calling her smelly. Then the girl spat in her face, and Maryam snatched the vase and flowers and water from the girl’s hands and hurled it at her. It hit her in the face. The headmistress sent her to sit on her own in the school hall until her mother came to collect her. Her dark mother said she did not want her any more and she was fostered to another family that was going to put her right.
    Maryam could not please them. They had a daughter of their own who was a year older than Maryam. Her name was Vivien, and she kept an eye on Maryam and reported on her if she broke any of her parents’ many rules. The father was a teacher, and he gave Maryam reading tests and intelligence tests, and told her that she was backward for her age. He organised routines to improve her ability to learn and gave her practice tasks to do as homework. The daughter reported any infringements of this regime, after giving Maryam her own scolding first, pinching and slapping her for her stupidity. The mother taught her table manners and where to put her hands when she went to bed and how to wipe herself throughly so she did not leave soil marks in her knickers. In the end, the family could not really come to like her, even though she stayed with them for more than a year. They tried but could not put her right, so they sent her back.
    By this time Maryam was nine years old and had a good idea of her worthlessness. So when they found another family to take her, and her new mother called her Maryam and stroked her hair and said what a lovely little girl, she knew that she would have to do everything she could to be lovely, so that she would never stop liking her. She was given a small room of her own, and her new mother decorated it with pictures of animals and a crimson and gold butterfly mobile, which hung over her bed. She was a thin smiling woman with a laugh that seemed to bubble out of her. It made Maryam laugh just to hear her laugh. She was a nurse, and her new father was an electrician in the same hospital. It is a psychiatric hospital, do you know what that means? That was how she talked to her from the beginning. Nobody had talked to Maryam like that before, not that she remembered, expecting her to ask questions, to want to know about things. At least that was how Maryam wanted to remember her, as someone who spoke to her differently from the way anyone had spoken to her before, someone who expected her to be curious. Her name was Ferooz, she told Maryam, and she was from Mauritius. Her husband’s name was Vijay and he was from India. Ferooz got the atlas out and showed her where Mauritius was, and told her how it got its name and how no one used to live there, and who lived there now and what they did. She also showed her where India was, and pointed to the city where Vijay came from, or rather to the city nearest the village he came from. In any case, she showed her a map, and told her about places she had never heard of and gave her a glimpse of the world.
    She also told her many things about their lives. Vijay limped badly because his