Maps for Lost Lovers (16 page)

And so she had written back home to ask for seeds, and seedlings and cuttings, none of which had flourished here, leaving the hoopoes and the blue-jays and the red-vented bulbuls circling above the clouds of England for want of somewhere to perch, and later she had wondered whether this country’s soil itself hadn’t been responsible for the failures and contemplated requesting sacks of Pakistani soil which was hospitable to everything as the century-old public parks and gardens of Lahore—planned and opened during colonial times—were said to testify, containing as they did every plant from every country the British had ever ruled. This land is warmer now however, and she knows someone not far away on Benazir Bhutto Road who had raised a banana tree successfully, though it never survived the denuding it suffered when—soon after a television programme on Madrasi cooking was aired—some schoolgirls followed the recipes and decided to eat their
dosa
s off banana leaves for added South Indian authenticity.

Mah-Jabin rises, stretches her body until she feels the spine pulled taut as an iron chain, goes to rinse her cup and hangs it from its empty hook. She notices that there is a dead moth like a pinch of powdered gold in one of the other cups (undiscovered by her mother because there has been no occasion to use all six for a while?), and now recalls seeing, earlier, on the curtain close to where the vase is set, the stale discoloured pollen from the Madonna lilies she had sent Kaukab for her birthday.

Once upon a time this would have been unthinkable.

The girl reaching puberty had been a turning point in the appearance of the house: many improvements were made to the interiors which until then had been seen only as temporary accommodation in a country never thought of as home—the period in England was the equivalent of earthly suffering, the return one day to Pakistan entry into Paradise.

The growing daughter’s irritation at her economized surroundings had made the mother agree to the transformation of the home, and she followed the girl into shops she would not have entered on her own, watched her ask the white assistants if this thing came in that colour and whether that other thing was available in a smaller size but with snap-fasteners instead of these tasselled ties like the one in this picture that I clipped from a magazine. She watched dumbfounded as the girl spoke English sentences at the rate she herself spoke English words, as she said let’s get rid of the tablecloth because I want to be able to “enjoy” the grain of the wood.

Mah-Jabin remembers Kaukab’s disappointment at the two “over-dependent” neighbourhood girls, one of whom had told her mother in great distress that her husband wanted to “do it from the back,” and the other who told her mother that her husband wanted to “discharge in my mouth,” and she remembers also her saying that the first fifteen to twenty years of marriage belong to the man but the rest to the woman because she can turn her children against their father by telling them of all his injustices and cruelties while they are growing up, patience being the key to happiness: and so Mah-Jabin has never revealed the truth about her marriage to Kaukab, to the extent that there are times she herself believes that her husband—the cousin she had gone to Pakistan to marry at sixteen and lived with for two years in the pale-green house in Sohni Dharti—was in desperate love with her, that he asks the trees of the forest where she has gone. In these fantasies he does not grab her by the throat— in a grip as strong as a tree root—to call her a “wanton shameless English whore” for secretly touching herself towards climax after he himself had finished, rolled over and begun to fall asleep, having wiped himself on the nearest fistful of fabric in the darkness dark as the grave.

She knows the truth that her daughter had suffered would cause Kaukab more pain than the lie that she had selfishly and scandalously abandoned someone loving. How Kaukab would react to the truth would be a proof of her love, that she is being spared it is proof of Mah-Jabin’s.

“You should rest,” Kaukab says. “Leave everything to me.” And within ten minutes the work-top is littered with broken onion skins—crisp fractured bowls of conch-pink tissue—and resembles a song thrush’s “workshop,” as Jugnu had referred to a flint ledge in a chalk meadow where a thrush had been smashing open snails. Pinching her eyes against the fuming sulphur, Kaukab cuts the onion into crescents and drops them into hot oil where they disappear under a rugby scrum of bubbles, lets them sputter until they begin to lose firmness and the tips turn a pale red and yellowish-brown—the shapes and colours of the decorative tendrils on Venetian glass ornaments. Kaukab points to the butterfly-patterned silk: “Mah-Jabin, put that into the next room, in case a drop from all this sputtering oil falls on it. I’ve just remembered that some days ago I saw a girl wearing a
kameez
made out of this very fabric. It was the girl from Faiz Street who had wanted to marry a Hindu boy but was made to see sense and married to a first cousin. Of course that didn’t work out because she didn’t get on with him—she was very young then and still influenced by the ideas she must’ve picked up from school and her teachers and friends, from life in general in this country, but she agreed to be married off a second time and is perfectly happy now.”

“I saw her earlier, just near Omar Khayyám Road,” Mah-Jabin says, withholding the fact that she was with her Hindu lover. And she wonders at the ease with which she has slipped into thinking of the roads and streets of this town by the names the immigrants of her parents’ generation had given them, the names she grew up hearing.

Kaukab is at the cooker with her back towards her, and the turned-away body in that corner of the kitchen produces a surge of homely familiarity in the girl: her mother standing over a pot, expressing her fears about what she is cooking, or attempting to tighten the loose screw on a panhandle with the tip of a butter knife during the washing up at the sink next to the cooker.

“How do you know her? Some days ago I couldn’t ease apart a plastic bowl that had got stuck into another one during the washing up, and— since I don’t have my own children around me—I looked out and walking by was the Hindu boy she had wanted to marry, so I called him in to help me. As I said, the girl is perfectly happy with the new husband her parents found for her.” She falls silent and then adds: “Ending up with an obedient daughter is a lottery, I suppose.”

Mah-Jabin does not wish to enter this perilous game that recognizes no rules, where a mere comment may be a lure to entice the other into a confrontation. “Would you like some help, Mother?”

Kaukab shakes her head but all the same brings the wooden stirring-spoon to Mah-Jabin: “You’d better taste this and see if the salt and spices need adjusting. My own tastebuds are mangled from the fasting I have just finished doing.”

“Fasting! Was it Ramadan recently?” Mah-Jabin is aghast. “I had a feeling that I had missed the Eid festival. Why didn’t you phone?”

“No, the Ramadan is in the autumn. I just fasted for two days to ask Allah to bring me peace.” She shakes the spoon to draw the girl’s attention to the matter in hand. “And you
have
missed
two
Eids. We didn’t celebrate anything last year because Jugnu was missing; but the one the year before, you did miss that. Why should I phone you: you shouldn’t have to be reminded.”

“Mother, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.” The problem, of course, is that the Muslim festivals are based on the lunar calendar and it’s hard to keep track of them from year to year. Mah-Jabin wipes a trace of the sauce onto her tongue. “Perfect. But I phone every month: you could have said something.” The response when it comes is devastating:

“It happened to be Eid the day you phoned that year.”

Kaukab has returned to the cooker. “It’s my own fault for having brought my children here: no one would need reminding in Pakistan when Eid is, or Ramadan, the way no one can remain unaware of Christmas here. The only way you’d know it was Ramadan here was that the catalogue shop in town does a brisk business in alarm clocks so that Muslims can wake up before dawn to begin the fast.” The wall before Kaukab’s eyes dissolves in her tears and the wooden spoon stops its circular motion. Mah-Jabin’s languishing feet are tangled in the thick forest of the chair-legs under the table but she frees herself in time to rush across the room with the lightness of a tugged balloon, or a paper-boat borne on a sudden downward current, to stop her mother from sinking to the floor, her young arms strong enough to hold the woman upright.

“This house is so empty,” Kaukab sobs in tight breaking heaves as Mah-Jabin had earlier, at the moment of arrival, letting the white lilies tumble to the floor with a rustle and herself falling into her mother’s arms without a word needed as explanation that she was weeping for Jugnu and Chanda, this being her first visit since the news of the two brothers’ arrest in January. So have mother and daughter always laid claim on each other, consoling to be consoled in return.

Kaukab continues to weep. “I am sure none of you will come to pray on my grave when I am dead. Sometimes I become so frightened that nobody would ask Him to have mercy on my soul.”

The porous white steam above the pan begins to turn into black smoke. Kaukab swallows her trembles neatly and rapidly back into her body, loosens Mah-Jabin’s grip from her stomach and pushes her away to give herself space. “You are going to have to check for salt again,” she attempts a smile that comes out grotesque in the chaffed face, “because my tears have fallen in.”

Mah-Jabin smiles weakly and, looking for a diversion, says after a silence, “Mother, the hair on the back of your neck is completely grey. Why don’t you dye it properly?” It is like a patch on the fur of a cat.

“Is it obvious?” Kaukab says after a while, twisting her neck as though a glimpse of the back of the head is achievable. “The white people on the street must think we ‘fucking Pakis’ are ridiculous, don’t know how to do anything right. Your father has stopped colouring his hair, you see. Before, we used to do each other’s on the same day but now I do mine myself, not wishing to trouble him or get stains on his hands . . . I hope this food isn’t spoiled . . . So do you think the hair looks strange? Really? But it doesn’t make much difference at my age: a red harness is not very becoming on an old mare.”

“I’ll put the dye on it properly for you after lunch.” Mah-Jabin plays with her own hair: there haven’t been enough days since for her to have discovered all the possibilities of the new cut. “I’d like to put henna on mine to get rid of its complete darkness, though it’s so black that I wonder if it would take the colour. And, by the way, I bet Father doesn’t think you are an old mare.”

“Hush, you wretched girl!” Kaukab blushes. “Sometimes I wonder if you are mine.” She leaves the cooker and rummages in a cupboard: “I
think . . .
Yes, I
have
a packet of henna here.” The little sachet lands on the table before Mah-Jabin. “No, wait, there are two. Here, take this one as well. We’ll do each other’s heads this afternoon. And squeeze half a lemon into the henna: that will bleach the hair a little and then the henna will show.”

Mah-Jabin mixes the henna in a bowl. Like four cut-off spectral hands the transparent cellophane gloves that came with the two henna sachets have floated to the floor to lie invisibly on the linoleum arabesques.

“Only one chappati for me, Mother. Your chappatis are heavier than mine: I can usually eat two of mine.” Mah-Jabin had begun to be tutored into making chappatis at about twelve years old, the boys complaining and laughing in brotherly amusement at her efforts, feigning sickness as she removed one misshapen disc after another from the baking-iron, once or twice reducing her to tears, the elder calling her Salvador Dalí, but Kaukab was firm that a girl’s family must endure the earlier efforts so that the husband and in-laws can enjoy the skilled creations in the future.

Having broken three handfuls of dough from the mass in a enamel basin, Kaukab now presses one back. “Your father always says how lovely and light your chappatis are, the way they puff up on the iron. And he’s been saying it a lot recently because I’m still not used to this new baking-iron—the handle came off the last one—and my chappatis have been mediocre at best as a result. I remember when I came to England I had a baking-iron in the luggage: your father had written especially, since they were not available here then. Men used to make chappatis on an upside-down frying pan—”

“Yes I know, you’ve told us. But I think there is a thing called a ‘griddle’ in Britain that resembles Pakistani baking-irons, and of course the Mexican tortillas are cooked on—”

“If we’d had you to guide us during those early years we would have done things differently, and I apologize if I repeat something I’ve already told you but I don’t lead a life as varied as yours.” It wouldn’t tip the scales on a pin, the amount by which a comment has to fall short from the ideal in the listener’s head for it to be regarded an affront, an offence—a crime. “If I tell you something every day it’s because I relive it every day. Every day—wishing I could rewrite the past—I relive the day I came to this country where I have known nothing but pain.” Immediately after taking it off the iron, Kaukab polishes the chappati with a pat of butter that melts and is propelled forward on the hot surface like a snail secreting the lubricating slickness to move on as it goes.

There is a curve of pale-yellow crust—the remnant of a previous meal—on one of the plates Mah-Jabin takes out of the cupboard, on the china so intensely pigmented it seems to stain the air with each movement like a beetroot leaking colour: once it would have been Kaukab who noticed such a flaw in a chore assigned to the girl.

Her mother is getting old.

They sit together, eating side by side, Kaukab letting out a sigh of pleasure and touching Mah-Jabin every now and then. The girl bites off buttered chappati segments and jabs at the limp, endlessly compliant ampersands of the pepper-rings soaked with sunflower oil, the fork marking the sauce like bird-imprints on sepia mud.

“I wonder what that girl was doing on Omar Khayyám Road,” Kaukab says. “Did you talk to her? Was she with someone—that Hindu boy, perhaps?”