Maps for Lost Lovers (19 page)

Kaukab stands immovably while the girl pulls at her shoulder to make her turn around, she the most intimate of her enemies.

“How fucking wise you are, Mother, such wisdom! Victory awaits all the beleaguered Pakistani women but what a price, Mother, two decades of your life wasted . . . What a waste when instead of conniving for all these years you could just walk away . . .”

Drops of water slide off the blade slowly as the knife rises vertically through the air. “Get away from me, you little bitch!”

The hungry steel slices an arc as Kaukab swings around and then Mah-Jabin stumbles backwards with one arm raised and the other across her stomach.

“How dare you throw questions at me like stones!”

Dazzle explodes on the blade—like blood spurting from a vein—when the weapon enters a beam of sunlight. The air itself seems to contract away from Kaukab as a school of fish twitches itself to safety at the approach of a predator. The bowl that had held henna falls to the floor, spinning on its edge like the silver cups that revolve around the lights on top of police cars to make them blink.

Eyes dilated as though lost in darkness, Kaukab lowers the knife, that diamond-hard tip that had very briefly become the sharp point of her despair and defeat.

Her own jewelled eyes flashing, Mah-Jabin throws back her head and laughs for the third time today, face tilted up to the ceiling.

“Here we have proof that Chanda was murdered by her brothers, that a family can kill one of its own. I wonder if this will stand up as evidence in court so that those two bastards can be put away for life. My god, for all of you she probably didn’t die hard enough: you would like to dig her up piece by piece, put her back together, and kill her once more for going against your laws and codes, the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this country with you like shit on your shoes.”

The knife falls from Kaukab’s lifeless grip. “Oh God, Mah-Jabin . . . I didn’t know I had the knife in my hand. I just tried to push you away with my
hand.
”

“Please don’t come near me, Mother. And you would love me to go back to Pakistan to my husband, wouldn’t you, back to my ‘earthly god’? Or find me someone new like they did for poor Chanda. How many times had she been married before she met Uncle Jugnu? Twice? Three times? Yes, if it doesn’t work once, try again, because you are bound to hit the target eventually, as long as it’s
you
who decides what to do: if the bitch decides to take matters into her own hands and finds someone herself then raise the fucking knives and cut her to pieces.”

“Not everyone has the freedom to walk away from a way of life,” Kaukab says quietly. “The fact that you have managed to do it easily has made you arrogant and heartless.”

“It was not easy! It is still a torment. What hurts me is that you could have given me that freedom instead of delivering me into the same kind of life that you were delivered into. I want to go back into the past and tell that young girl who was me—and whom I love—what not to do, but no one can return to the past. But it was easier for you because I was there right next to you: if you loved me you would have prevented me from doing certain things—”

“I did not have the freedom to give you that freedom, don’t you see?” Kaukab is pained and broken at the realization that someone as close to you as one of your children can make so many mistaken assumptions when they take it upon themselves to evaluate your life.

“Don’t lie. You would have done it if you wanted to. You still want me married because you still believe a woman must have a husband. Please, don’t come near me, I said.”

But Kaukab walks by her and begins to pluck the rosary beads off the floor.

“Yes, I do want you to go back, because in the eyes of Allah you are still married to him. You may have divorced him under British law, but haven’t done so in a Muslim court. My religion is not the British legal system, it’s Islam.” Snatches of sentences are coming to her from the past few timeless minutes like waves returning to a shore and she deals with them as they come. “When I said a woman’s troubles are over within twenty years of marriage because now her grown-up children will defend her against the father and in-laws, I didn’t mean you have to connive and tell your children certain things deliberately. You need someone to talk to, to tell your troubles to, and her children are the people closest to a woman. You don’t connive to bring about that situation, it happens of its own accord.” She is on her haunches, weeping, as she lifts the beads off the linoleum like picking shells off a beach. “And what is this talk about me taking a knife to you: do you really think I could harm you?” There is a sense of consolation to the activity her fingers are engaged in, almost as though contact is being made with the dead: as a child she had seen her mother and grandmothers, and the other women in the house, similarly bent over the myriad daily tasks of the day, and sometimes—but not today, not now— the feeling is close to celebration, a remembrance and a praising of those now dead and absent but still living in her mind, unsung elsewhere and otherwise. Gone so thoroughly it is as though she had dreamed them.

Mah-Jabin moves towards the stairs, on the floor coated with dried-up or drying henna that she had shaken loose when she hit herself, and from the powdered layer under her feet it is as though she is in a room in Pakistan after a dust storm has just passed through. “Don’t worry.” She pauses by the bottom step. “It’s not the first beating I’ve taken from you. Your husband beats you and you beat your children in return.”

“I cannot understand why you constantly pluck this one string. I wish to Allah I had never told you about him hitting me and I’ve told you a thousand times since that it only happened that one time and that I didn’t speak to him for many months afterwards. He begged for my forgiveness and when that didn’t work, he even moved out for nearly three years.” Kaukab comes to the stairs, obstructing the flow of light into the well, and watches the girl’s ascending back. “Have
you
never made a mistake? Remember if you ever go back in time, make sure you choose to fall in love with the right person at fourteen, so that when he marries someone else two years later you wouldn’t have to ask your parents to arrange a marriage for you somewhere far-away—somewhere like Pakistan, for instance. We sent you to Pakistan because you wanted to go live in a place where you wouldn’t have to witness that young man leading a happy life with another woman.”

A moth pressed to a window-pane, Mah-Jabin stops on the staircase as though air has suddenly solidified ahead, but she doesn’t turn around. She rubs the point of pain at the base of the neck where the safety-pin has broken the skin, rubs it until it is lost in the smudge of heat the friction creates, and then, when the light rises a tone higher to signify that Kaukab has returned to the kitchen, she continues up the stairs, breaking free of the chains that her mother’s words had briefly become around her ankles, head bowed like a lily on a broken stem.

He, a stranger, had smiled at her for a few moments and held her eye. That’s all it had taken. Over the next few days she re-imagined and revised those first moments. He had paid her a compliment by noticing her and she had fallen in love: it was that easy because she had never been an object of curiosity, a scrutiny other than the kind that was openly intrusive, always aggressive, usually hostile. But what was deadlier was that she believed he too was in love with her, that he contrived to run into her here and there. She imagined herself beside him as his lover, naked, her tresses parted in a two-panelled robe along the front of her body, playfully identifying on his person the thirty-two signs of excellence in a man: deep in three respects and broad in three as well; glowing a healthy red in seven; fine in five and long in four; elevated in six, and shapely and short in four. He lay with his head in her lap, and she kept up a commentary as she ticked these off to him, both of them attempting to suppress their giggles, “It is said that it is a mark of excellence in men if the navel, voice and breath are deep, and the thighs, brow and face are broad; if feet and hands, the corners of the eyes, palate, tongue, lower lip and nails have a rich red hue; according to the ancients it augurs well if fingers and finger-joints, hair, skin and teeth are fine; in the rulers of the earth the jaw-line, eyes, arms, and the space between the breasts are long; happiness is said to be ensured if chest and shoulders, finger-and-toe nails, nose, chin and throat are raised and prominent; and if back and shanks and the male member are shapely and short—oh dear! Well, thirty-one out of thirty-two isn’t bad. Alright, I agree that it should be thirty-one and a half because it
is
shapely.”

Each day she found another justification for her obsessive belief. He didn’t have to speak: she
felt.
He gave no sign but she thought he was being prudent because in this neighbourhood, and in the way they had been brought up, the things that were natural and instinctive to all humans were frowned upon, the people making you feel that it was you who was the odd one out. Everyone here was imprisoned in the cage of others’ thoughts. She and he were born here in England and had grown up witnessing people taking pleasure in freedom, but that freedom, although within reach was of no use to them, as a lamp with a genie was of no use to a person whose tongue had been cut off, who could not form words to ask for the three wishes.

She had been brought up to be patient—because for every thirst there was a cloud—and so she had waited, waited for their wedding night when they would come together at last like the two halves of a deck of cards cut and pushed back into each other with a forced ease, merging with a hesitant avidity. And may that night be longer than all nights.

Girls frequently sighed with relief when they got married because the husbands were less strict than the mothers had been, with whom it was as though they’d been handcuffed to dangerous lunatics at the moment of birth. Mah-Jabin, however, learned that the women of the family in the vicarage—the women whom she had to win over to gain access to the man of her life—were at least as traditional in outlook as her own mother, and she covered her head so quickly it was as though she was standing under a bird-filled tree, stopped wearing the few Western clothes that Kaukab had allowed her, and prayed five times a day.

A year and a half passed in the hopeful torpor, the single-mindedness, and the apparent masochism that had to be made intelligible to her white schoolfriends, there being no need for explanations when it came to the Indian and Pakistani girls, most of whom were trapped helplessly in similar webs of their own.

And then one day Kaukab mentioned in passing that so-and-so’s boy was getting married. Mah-Jabin ran upstairs before Kaukab finished speaking and bolted the door as though it could shut out that news from her life.

The boy had not been able to get into a medical college within commuting distance and would have to move away in the autumn: the parents suspected it was a conspiracy of the white people to get Pakistani children away from their culture, to make them have sex before marriage and every day as though it were a bodily function, and to eventually make them marry white people, it being a neighbourhood curse to say may your son marry a white woman; Mah-Jabin remembers being sent into her brothers’ room by her mother to look for condoms, and addresses, photographs or phone numbers of white girls, and remembers being told about a family that was tragic because the father had cancer and the daughter had just married a white boy.

And so—after telephone lines had burned between England and Pakistan—it had been decided that before he left for medical school the boy would marry his cousin from Pakistan; the parents had made sure he was ambitious and a high achiever—if he gained 90 percent and stood first in class then that was fine, but if 95 percent meant only a second place then it was not good enough. And they were not about to lose their prize of a boy to some white girl who most probably wouldn’t be a virgin.

The two doctors in the surgery at the end of the road—Dr. Lockwood and Dr. Varma—who had taken an interest in the boy after learning that he was applying to medical schools and wasn’t just another young nohoper from around here, warned him of the dangers of inbreeding, but the father had gone to the surgery and reminded the Englishman that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins, and told the Hindu woman that before lecturing the Muslims on the dangers of genetic defects she might want to do something about her own gods, who had eyes in the middle of their foreheads and what about those six-armed goddesses that were more Swiss Army knives than deities.

Shamas warned Kaukab to be careful and not lay a hand on the girl, because otherwise tomorrow the local newspaper would be carrying the headline BRITISH-BORN DAUGHTER OF PAKISTANI MUSLIM COMMUNITY LEADER BEATEN OVER MATTER OF MARRIAGE, bringing into disrepute, in one fell swoop, Islam, Pakistan, the immigrant population here in England, and his place of work, which was—in the matters of race—the officially appointed conscience of the land.

“How will I bear it, Mother, seeing him with his arms around someone else?” They were in the bathroom and Kaukab was shaving off the hair at Mah-Jabin’s groin while she stood in the tub with her legs spread: the girl had lost all sense of herself, but the religion demanded that pubic hair must not go beyond the length of an uncooked grain of rice. “I don’t want to live here, here in this neighbourhood, this town. Let’s move away.”

Kaukab dried the girl’s legs with a towel and looked for the box of sanitary pads: “We’ll think of something, baby.”

The wife of Shamas’s elder brother had died recently in Sohni Dharti and the olive-green house was without a woman (a fate that may not befall even an enemy’s home); Kaukab and Shamas had felt it their responsibility to somehow come to the aid of the devastated husband and son the dead woman had left behind: they asked Mah-Jabin if she would marry her cousin and move to Pakistan; she said yes. Life for her had become wandering from one dark room to another. As she was looking into a hand-mirror one day and had turned it around—to the side that gave a magnified image—she realized that she had been looking at the magnification of her face all along: she was wasting away.