Maps for Lost Lovers (17 page)

Mah-Jabin has been fearing this question. She is unable to control the roughness of her reaction: “Oh Christ, what difference does it make who she was with?”

“You had been quiet for a while so I was just making conversation,” Kaukab says as she pushes her plate away with her hands and her chair backwards with her calves, standing up violently. The three furrows deepen on her forehead; they’ve been there for as long as her children remember, Mah-Jabin wishing to—as a child—write her alphabet on these equally-spaced straight lines drawn on the brow as though in an exercise book. “And do not try to sound white by saying things like ‘Oh Christ,’ because you don’t impress me. Do you hear me?” Her eyes narrow in a blank white glare. “I said do you hear me?”

“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault,” Mah-Jabin sighs. “I was just thinking about Uncle Jugnu.”

She winces inwardly at what she has just said, feeling degraded, that already the death of the two loved people is being used in deceit because she does not wish to hurt this living person by her side, either that or because she is too cowardly to confront her: so will this terrible thing called life extract concessions out of her, teach her to compromise, and force her to become less than her best self, force her to reduce the amount of honour due the memory of her lost ones! One day she is going to wake up and not recognize herself.

They have talked about Jugnu and Chanda on the telephone several times since January, and again on her arrival today—and before January too, over the long anguished weeks and months when they disappeared like two raindrops in a lake, the months of disappearance that led to the brothers’ arrest—and there is nothing more to be said about it: Kaukab is unshakeable that they have not been killed and that they will return one day, that to give up hope is a sin, that the brothers could not have murdered their own sister in cold blood. “I don’t care how many people agree on what has happened to Jugnu and Chanda: a lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it. And I won’t lose faith in Allah’s benevolence no matter how bleak things look: the sun never disappears, it’s the earth that changes sides.”

She has given the girl the news of the graffiti scrawled on Jugnu’s house:
They lived the life of sin and died the death of sinners
and
They have been
burning in the Fire now for over six months but remember that Eternity
minus six months is still Eternity.

Mah-Jabin clears the table in the steady golden light in the blue-skinned room, in the talkative silence of the stream that Kaukab, still angry, leaves behind when she takes her transparent-red rosary lying in a saucer like the circle of pollen grains in the middle of a flower and goes upstairs to say her prayers.

With a loose bulky knot Mah-Jabin shortens the length of the curtain covering the glass in the front door and carries a chair into the burning slice of sunlight, listening out for her mother’s loud end-of-prayer Arabic, when she begins to mix hair-dye in the plastic lid of an old aerosol can, using a worn toothbrush which she identifies from the characteristic disfigurement of the bristles as having once been used by her father.

Kaukab comes down, the cranberry rosary swaying from her grip, the beads larger than those she used in her younger days when the fingertips were nimbler, more-sensitive, just as she needs a large-print copy of the Koran now because her eyes too are beginning to fumble amid words.

Even after the contact and consultation with Allah, her displeasure at the girl, and the sadness which the outburst had caused, is there in her: she approaches the sunlight wordlessly and takes the chair, bending her head forward.

Mah-Jabin—standing ready behind the chair—knows that being unable to dispel her anger before the prayer must have exacerbated her mother, that it must have interfered with the concentration required for the worship—like the intermittent annoyance of a hang-nail during daily chores. The only thing for Mah-Jabin now is to wade upstream and begin the journey anew, this time making sure that the bend leading to the vortex is avoided, but she cannot think of anything to say.

Gently—and in strategy—she wets a knuckle with her spit and touches Kaukab’s earlobe with it: Kaukab sighs to empty herself and speaks at last, “Mah-Jabin, make sure you don’t get any dye on my ears.”

The girl smiles at her triumph. “Stop worrying.
There
—I’ve wiped it off.”

Nevertheless, Kaukab asks her to keep within reach a rag that is an off-cut from a new
kameez
she has sewn for herself: “The rag in the drawer, a shade less blue than navy. Yes, I did say to myself when I was buying it that my Mah-Jabin would ooh and aah over this colour. Four pounds per yard. I still haven’t stitched the hem of the new kameez.” And, when Mah-Jabin tells her with a smile that she would be unable to help her in that task as she could never achieve those tiny invisible stitches, Kaukab asks her if she remembers the time she had sat with a new
kameez
on her lap—working on the hem all day—and discovered at the end that she had stitched it onto the one she was wearing! “I don’t remember doing it but I can believe I did it,” replies the girl. “There. Finished. My turn now. No, hold on.
There.
Finished
now.
”

She spreads the blue cloth across Kaukab’s knees and sits on the floor with her hair in her mother’s lap.

The hair does not fill the lap anymore and Kaukab misses the weight; she draws the comb of her fingers along the length and when it ends suddenly—shockingly, as in the dream in which the dreamer stumbles off a kerb—her fingers groping the empty air are an illustration of what is now missing from her life, what was once so palpably there—so palpably
here.

She begins to say something but remains silent, simply runs her fingers through what remains of the black locks just for the slippery slipping pleasure of it, how it slides off her fingers, the softest sensation in the world to her, and, once absent, impossible to summon at will.

“Are you comfortable propped up like a rag doll on the floor? Let me know and you can sit on the chair and I’ll stand up.” Kaukab works the wet henna into Mah-Jabin’s hair, scoop by scoop of fingers. “Well, tell me anytime you get tired and I’ll stand up. In Pakistan we used to squat in the toilet and when I came here I thought I’d never get used to the Western toilets. But now, after all these years, those others seem impossible: how did we manage to squat like that every day?”

“The body gets used to things.”

“Even if the mind doesn’t.”

She packs the entire bowl of henna into the girl’s hair, patting it on until the head appears as though coated with a fragrant mixture of mud and moss, tangy as tamarind, sweet as brown sugar; and the pulverised dark green leaf, through each pore and microscopic crack that the drying and the powdering had opened up, begins to release its red sap, diluted by water and made sticky by the lemon.

Kaukab holds the blue cloth firmly at the girl’s shoulders and slides her chair back across the floor so that the cloth is pulled off the lap and rests like a little sailor cape at the girl’s back, a barrier between the henna and the fabric of the girl’s shirt. She takes the front-door key, attached—for want of pockets on her
kameez
—with a safety pin to her veil, and gives the pin to her to secure the blue cloth at the front.

The back of the house has been moving out of the sunlight at a snail’s pace over the previous hours, and now—now that the sun has vaulted over the roof—it is in total shade, the sodium-yellow warmth directed at the front.

Mah-Jabin makes herself coffee, Kaukab peels an orange and places the segments curved like leaping dolphins onto a plate, and they both go outside to sit on the front step where the breeze turns the lilacs’ pages in the little garden, the shadows beginning to stretch like chewing gum.

Light is gone from the back to appear here as rain soaks into the earth and flows away underground to emerge elsewhere as a spring.

The girl sits diagonally on the step, instinctively turned a little away from the house that joins theirs on the right, to keep it out of sight: Jugnu’s house. But it is there nevertheless, she cannot ignore its presence: the soul has many eyes, is capable of seeing in every direction.

The woman next door on the left has taken advantage of the sunny afternoon and put out a rug to air that releases swinging plumes of fenugreek odour. “She must put fenugreek in everything,” Kaukab says; she is consuming her orange in the Pakistani manner, dipping the blunt-nosed segments in salt first. “The smell penetrates. In Pakistan it gave no trouble because the houses there were—are—big and airy and nothing lingers. But here the rooms are small and closed up, and the smell refuses to shift.”

“That’s not the least of it: if I remember correctly from the few times you used fenugreek the damned thing gets into your sweat and urine after you’ve eaten it.”

“Be quiet!”

“Sorry,” Mah-Jabin laughs, for the first time in weeks, and touches her mother’s knee with her own. The laughter dissolves in the sunlight, while, like a music-box left open beside her, the coffee steams in the dry air.

A voice bursts through like a ball landing in the little garden: “Mother and daughter are enjoying the sunlight, I see. And the daughter-empress wants to lighten the colour of her hair, does she?”

Mah-Jabin looks up: a vaguely remembered neighbourhood woman is struggling with the rusted screeching latch of the garden gate. Kaukab explains how to circumvent the eccentricities of the catch and the woman—acting on the advice—gains entry to advance towards them under the jewelled nets of the lilac branches.

Mah-Jabin—fearing that the woman has come to collect material for gossip—wishes to retreat inside, but the woman flags her down: “I won’t take a seat, beautiful. I’ve just stopped by to remind your mother that Ateeka—the wife of Zafar-who-has-a-clothes-stall-in-Thursday-market and not the left-handed Zafar—is flying to Pakistan on Monday, so if there are any presents that have to be sent back home there is still room in the luggage.”

Kaukab tells her that earlier the taxi-driver-Mahmood’s wife had called her out to the garden gate in passing and given her the same message; Mah-Jabin can envisage the woman going along the street, one of the many who begin doing the rounds in late morning, all involved in that organized crime called arranged marriages.

Mah-Jabin dips a finger in the hot coffee until it begins to burn, pulling out just in time, as though she were teasing a pet bird, withdrawing the fingertip from the bars of the cage before the inevitable inflamed peck.

She looks at the roses to distract herself, the petals wrinkled like elastic-marks on skin, the blown heads lying in whole clumps under the bushes like bright droppings of fantastic creatures.

The grass is rising like knives, the green the colour of the butterfly fabric, and now Mah-Jabin remembers that this woman is the mother of the girl she’d seen earlier with her Hindu lover on Omar Khayyám Road. Mah-Jabin examines her with interest now.

The visitor slips a foot out of her shoe and rests the dry cracked sole on the bottom rung of the fence dividing this garden from the next. She has not stopped speaking since she came: “Of course Ateeka’s boys are growing up and eat everything they can lay their hands on, so all the fancy food and the biscuits and cakes intended for the visitors who are coming to the house to see off their mother must be hidden away. She thought that the built-in space under the settee in the kitchen—where she stores her linen and pillow-cases—was an ideal hiding place. And what do you think happened? This: the guests came last night and settled on that very settee! Now the kettle is whistling and steaming, the milk has boiled and got cold and been boiled again, the cups and plates are at the ready, but how to get at those pastries, from Marks and Spencer no less? She says she just sat and looked at the guests’ faces, getting up now and then and pretending to give the cutlery and crockery one last wipe with the dish cloth. ‘I’m sure they thought I was the cleanest woman on Allah’s earth,’ she told me just now. ‘Either that or the most forgetful and the most crazy.’ It must have been a spectacle to behold, Kaukab.”

Mah-Jabin finds herself gripped by helpless laughter; all three are shaking with noisy delight, touching wrists to the rims of their eyes.

“I am telling you the truth, Kaukab. If it isn’t true you can change my name to Liar.”

Kaukab soaks up on a tissue paper the line of red liquid that has broken onto Mah-Jabin’s forehead.

“Kaukab, what brand henna is it, Lotus- or Elephant-?” the woman asks, but does not wait for the reply, continuing distractedly: “These last few days have been very hard on Ateeka, though, because her sister in America was fondled and handcuffed by police for wearing her head-to-toe veil. It would soon be a hanging offence to be a Muslim anywhere in the world, it seems. The police officers—”

“Whereabouts in America, auntie-ji? Wearing masks in public is illegal in some states over there,” Mah-Jabin explains. “The officers could’ve mistaken her face-veil for the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member.”

“What? A
who
member?” the visitor is puzzled while Kaukab—breath pulled in in disapproval—gives Mah-Jabin a look of reproof for interrupting and trying to enlighten a grown-up. “In Portsmouth, Virginia. They stopped her as she walked towards the shops, and even though she explained she was wearing Islamic dress they asked her to uncover her face: when she refused they handcuffed and searched her while she screamed ‘Stop touching me, stop touching me.’ An
unmarried
girl: anything could have happened.”

Yes: the girl could’ve damaged her hymen in the scuffle, Mah-Jabin thinks, with contempt. She had not been allowed to see a gynaecologist when she had hormonal problems at twelve, not even a female one; the neighbourhood is full of teenaged girls who are doughy and have chins coarse as cactus, bristly like their brothers.

But it is the tears that fill the visitor’s eyes in sudden overflowing fullness that are occupying Kaukab: she quickly tells Mah-Jabin to go indoors and look at the post that has been waiting for her in her absence, upstairs in her room. The girl stands up, baffled, notices that the woman is on the verge of weeping, and edges open the door to enter the house quietly.