The Last Gift Read Online Free PDF Page B

body had not healed properly after he was knocked over by a car when he was a child. Their families thoroughly disapproved of their marriage, because of religion. Her family were pious Muslims with a position to uphold in Mauritius, and forbade her to marry a Hindu. Vijay’s family were ignorant villagers and could not bear to have anything to do with Muslims. Perhaps it would have helped if they had children, but they could not. Perhaps they had offended their families too much, and without their blessing could not deserve the gift of a child of their own. But now they had a lovely little girl and did not care about those horrible families. They would be a family themselves.
    That was Ferooz, and that was the story Maryam told her own children. She did not tell them everything, not about the things that went wrong and how later she lost Ferooz and Vijay so completely. There were some things she did not know how to talk about, not to her children, not yet. She ended that part of the story by telling them about their father. He was a sailor then, visiting Exeter to see a friend. After he met Maryam he got a job so he could be near her, but Ferooz and Vijay did not like him, so they ran away together. Yallah, let’s get out of here , that’s what he said. That was the story of their love. That was what she told them. They met and ran away together and he never went back to sea. They loved what he said: Yallah, let’s get out of here , and when they were children they sometimes said that to each other as a joke.
    Maryam tried to get in touch with Ferooz after Hanna came but she could not find her again. Her letters went unanswered, and once, when she found the courage to ring her number, she discovered that it was dead. She wished that she had not waited so long.
     
    They were beginning to get into a new little convalescing routine. Of course, they already had a routine, one that grew and changed over the years as their lives changed. That was the thing about growing old together, you shuffled and made space and learned to be comfortable with each other, if you were lucky. Maybe she did not really mean growing old together. She did not feel old, and did not think of Abbas as old, even though there were so many unmistakable ways in which he showed his age even before this illness. It was not their ages that made them comfortable with each other. It was more like being so used to living with someone that you did not need to speak about some things, and other things you never mentioned, out of kindness, out of what they provoked. She saw people coming to the hospital, couples who looked battered and worn out, so that it was impossible to tell which was the one who was ailing. Yet first this one hovers over the other, steadying her as she stumbles slightly over a bubbled-up floor tile, and then she waits patiently while he hesitates whether to go left or to go straight ahead, or whether to ask someone for assistance. Then she steps up, links arms with him, and somehow something is agreed and they set off again.
    She got up first in the morning as she had always done, went downstairs and made them tea. They drank their tea in bed, hardly exchanging a word, dozing for a few seconds now and then. She loved the ease of it, the unhurriedness now that it was just the two of them, and sometimes he promised that he would get up earlier and make tea for them the following week. Yes, she said, when you are feeling better. Then she got up, washed and hurried downstairs to make herself breakfast and get ready for work. That was how it always was with her, a moment’s ease followed by bustle and tumult, the story of her life, she just could not get the tempo to steady. She laid the table for him to have his breakfast later. Even when he was well, he only had a cup of tea before leaving for work, picking up an apple or a pear on his way out, the frugal habits of a lifetime. She knew that when he came down, he would put the breakfast things