Maps for Lost Lovers (25 page)

She is thankful to Allah that she doesn’t have any daughters.

Her longing for her boy is so great that last month while swimming in the lake, in the predawn darkness, she had had the urge at one point to just let go and sink to the bottom, let the water suck the life out of her while the bright moon watched above. If something doesn’t happen soon, she thinks now, I might still do that: float lifeless above the X-shaped giant’s still-beating heart. She remembers hearing from women in her childhood that this lake requires a sacrifice every six years, and she wonders how many years it has been since the last drowning.

“My daughter”—the man has begun another sentence—“thought it was the heart of her murdered uncle.”

It takes her a moment or two to register what he’s just told her. The force of it causes her to raise her hands to her breasts—it’s almost a blow to the heart. “Allah!”

“I am sorry,” he says, looking stunned. “I didn’t mean to shock you, forgive me.”

“When did it happen? Recently?”

“Yes. Please forgive me. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”

Recently. The poor man is living through the death of his brother, grieving, and there she was, planning, working out strategies, wondering whether she sensed in him an attraction towards her! Her eyes fill up with tears because of the disappointment of realizing that he is probably not interested in her—she’ll have to keep looking for someone else. She feels exhausted. And yet there is also a surge of shame, because with a part of her brain she’s also wondering whether it wouldn’t be easy for her to use his grief to her own advantage. She’ll offer him comfort and then he will become grateful to her—yes? She’s filled with self-disgust, her eyes brimming with water. What has she turned into and who is responsible for doing this to her?

“I am sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that. Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you.” She raises her veil to her face and realizes she’s been holding a piece of the desiccated peel from the oranges the young artist had been eating last month: she must have picked up the cardboard-like fragment from the shore earlier. She lets it drop, and turns to leave.

“I’ll open the
Safeena
this afternoon if you’d care to come,” Shamas tells her, attempting to delay her departure. “I was out on just a walk now.” Though of course it’s all futile: he didn’t come to the bookshop yesterday because he was afraid of himself, but she hadn’t come either. She had said she would—but she obviously has a rich and full life already, friends, family, lovers. She stops at his words, eyes still swimming. She is obviously very sensitive: the mere mention of Jugnu’s death had produced tears. He can tell her other things too. He envisages a friendship. He’ll tell her how much he regrets never having continued with his poetry, and that he would like to go back to Pakistan now that he’s about to retire, go back and see if he can do something for the betterment of his country. He’ll tell her that he heard about the discovery of the human heart from two clandestine lovers—a Hindu boy, and a Muslim girl whose mother is convinced that she’s possessed by the djinn and is asking around for a holy man who’d perform an exorcism.

“I’ll come, yes. When I was a girl, my father, may he rest in peace, brought me here to a reading by the Pakistani poet Wamaq Saleem.”

Shamas is delighted. “I was among the organizers for that reading.” They were the years of Wamaq Saleem’s exile—the monstrous military regime had succeeded in forcing him out of Pakistan. His books of verses sold by the hundred-thousand in Pakistan and India, and about a hundred people had arrived at the lakeside hut to hear him recite that afternoon despite the fact that the autumn sky was breathing a chilly wind.

“It has been said that Wamaq Saleem did for Pakistan what Homer did for the Mediterranean and what the Bible did for Jerusalem.”

Suraya says, “I remember the women listeners had brought him flowers, containers of perfume, and jars of honey, because just like the Prophet, peace be upon him, it was his favourite food. And men presented him with bottles of whisky and gin. My father had brought an embroidered shawl, and I presented it to him.”

Shamas realizes he’s smiling, feeling light if not lightheaded.

She seems to be one of those people to meet whom is to meet oneself.

She is wearing a short woollen jacket, yellow with white embroidered paisleys, and, lightly gripping it between fingertips, she says: “This was once a Kashmiri shawl, identical to the one we gave to Wamaq Saleem. It was my late mother’s—may she rest in peace—but moths chewed up a part of it. I couldn’t bear to throw it away so I cut it up to make a jacket.”

He wants her to stay but senses that her wish for his company is vanishing like dew by the second, and, as though about to take her leave, she touches the cherry-red scarf at the nape of her neck and says, “Thank you once again for this.” She smiles at him. That mole. Every moment he has spent talking to her has been of great value and worth: an image comes to him of an hourglass filled not with the usual sand but little diamonds. He would like to converse for a while longer but he must go now, fettered by his conscience—that self-arresting chain—because although it has been exhilarating to be in her presence he won’t be able to forgive himself if he becomes a cause of dishonour or harm for her. Someone returning from the mosque after his dawn prayers could notice them together and by midmorning the entire neighbourhood would know, and by the afternoon the whole town due to the communication radios in taxis. And, just as numerous other places and roads have been given Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi names to give the map of this English town a semblance of belonging—amassing a claim on the place bit by bit—this lakeside location would then be named Scandal Point, after the prime rendezvous spot in Shimla, so called because fifty years ago an Indian prince and the beautiful daughter of a senior British official had met there for a long ride together on their horses, their subsequent absence over the following few days scandalizing the town’s white population.

“So, yes, come to the shop this afternoon, if you’d like to look over the books,” he hears himself tell her again, desperately, before walking away. The moment of parting leaves in him an inarticulate ache. He is embarrassed by the kind of impression he must have made on her— someone comically desperate for company. He hasn’t had a conversation with someone about the matters that interest him for a very long time. Talking with Kaukab is, for both of them, frequently another way of being alone, the conversation highlighting the separate loneliness of each.

He has also lost most of his friends from the Communist Party: he used to feel enlivened at the meetings, but almost everyone in the Party thinks the break-up of the Soviet Union would result in a better world, while he himself thinks that one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century is that the Soviet Union disgraced itself, that we danced on Communism’s grave, and so he no longer attends the Party meetings. Additionally, of course, the death of Chanda and Jugnu has made him reluctant to talk to anyone.

Suraya watches Shamas leave. She wonders how bold she should be when dealing with him. Her aim after all isn’t to just interest him in herself—it is to eventually get him to marry her. And while men are happy to consort with women who are forthcoming and assertive, they will judge that trait objectionable in a potential wife.

She has been told that she can be vividly bold; and she herself had read that component of her personality as courageous, but now she thinks of it as adventurousness, perhaps even recklessness, because it is this very trait that has landed her in the trouble she is in. She’d been sent to a Pakistani village to marry a man she had never met, and she admits that she had occasionally behaved in a spirited manner because she knew that her in-laws—and her handsome and loving husband—were in awe of the fact that she was “from England.” Her husband’s behaviour was loving towards her at the start anyway, before his secret drinking got out of control—though she was, even early on in the marriage, frightened by his acts and rough demands when he got drunk, behaviour he had no knowledge of when he sobered up and became gentle towards her once again as though she was a porcelain doll.

Yes, a delicate doll: she exaggerated the shock she felt at the primitive and coarse nature of village life, because it made her husband think she was something special, made of finer clay. She pretended not to understand the codes and mores which governed the daily conduct of the people around her, saying, for example, that she found the decades-old feud with a nearby family ludicrous. Her wide-eyed innocence was found endearing and laughed off, but one day she had gone too far. She discovered that a man—one of the men from the family with which her in-laws had the decades-long feud—had been raping his niece for the past few months and that the matter had come to light only now because the fourteen-year-old girl had fallen pregnant. The entire family accused the girl of having relations with someone and thereby bringing dishonour on the bloodline. She was unmarried but not a virgin! Terrorized by the uncle, she refused to tell who the perpetrator really was. The matter hadn’t yet reached the ears of the world outside the house because the girl hadn’t yet begun to show, but Suraya had been told about it by her servant girl who worked at that house too. Suraya feared the pregnant girl would be murdered any day for disgracing the family. She couldn’t go to the police because, under Pakistan’s Islamic law, rape had to have male witnesses who confirmed that it was indeed rape and not consensual intercourse; the girl did not have witnesses and therefore would be found guilty of sex outside marriage, sentenced to flogging, and sent to prison, marked an abominable sinner from then on, a fallen woman and a prostitute for the rest of her life.

The confidence of her English life still clinging to her, Suraya decided to go to the house of the feuding family to reveal the real truth to them and ask them to be compassionate. She was walking into a conflict decades in the making but she thought she could be persuasive.

She realized her mistake very soon after she walked into the enemy courtyard. She remembers every detail, the time slowing down. The men of the house clustered around her and barred her way when she attempted to leave. People were always losing their way in the thick winter fogs and she pretended she had entered the house by mistake, putting aside her fears about the pregnant niece, her own survival now at stake. Eventually she was allowed to leave the house with her virtue intact; the men did, however, tell her that they were going to let everyone know that they
had
raped her because it would cast a mark on their honour and their name and their manhood if people thought they had had a woman from the other side of the battle-line in their midst and hadn’t taken full and appropriate advantage of the opportunity.

As it turned out it was as bad as if they had raped her. What mattered was not what you yourself knew to have actually happened, but what other people thought had happened. Her husband and in-laws believed her completely when she said that she was still pure, that nothing irrevocable had occurred in the house of the enemy, but in the end that fact was worthless.

All this pushed her husband over the edge. More and more he began to seek solace in alcohol, saying he needed it to breathe, often coming home knee-walkingly drunk, taking off his cap and waistcoat and attempting to hang them on the
shadow
of the hat-stand on the wall, his behaviour becoming increasingly volatile so that eventually she was afraid to even let her bangles make a sound, not knowing what would provoke him, though he was always remorseful after his outbursts, telling her how much he loved her, that he just couldn’t get the barbed comments of people out of his head.

There were days when, in his shame, he didn’t want to see anyone: not even himself—he draped the mirror with a cloth. But then there was disgust and rage in him as he handled the veils that came into the house to be dyed because her father-in-law was a dyer: “They are getting shorter and shorter. The women of today are increasingly shameless.”

She could always tell by the sound of the knock on the door at night that he had been drinking and also how much he had had; his language was coarse when he addressed her on these nights, as though he wouldn’t get the full worth of the money he had paid the alcohol-seller if he didn’t call her abusive names.

She tried to resort to her earlier spiritedness, trying to remind him of happier times, but that behaviour now seemed to enrage rather than enchant him, a sign of Western decadence.

One day he slapped her with his coarse rectangular hand. The next day he began to shake her violently: “I
know
what you did in that house. Admit the truth at once if you don’t want my fist to aid your memory.” He did beat her the next day. And the day after that he waved a knife and shouted, “Your death is hidden in this dagger . . . The role of a woman is to give life, the role of a man is to take it . . .” The next day he took the final step:

He said the word
talaaq
three times: I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.

And he pushed her away with his foot. In the morning he claimed he didn’t remember uttering the deadly word in triplicate; and even if he did say it, he certainly hadn’t meant it—but what had been done could not be undone now. The husband—who was the only one in a Muslim marriage with the right to divorce—had uttered the word three times and according to Islam they were now divorced.

There were no witnesses but even then they couldn’t ignore what had happened: Allah had witnessed.

Many drunks were repentant in the mornings when they woke up to find the wife and children weeping at the ruin their life had become a few hours earlier: the husband, intoxicated, had probably had his hands pushed away in the darkness by the wife who was revolted by the smell of alcohol and he had said the word three times in rage.
Talaaq. Talaaq.
Talaaq.
It was as simple as that.

Every day the clerics of the mosques all across the Subcontinent were visited by thousands of distraught couples, and every day the Muslim newspapers—here in England, and there in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—received letters from men who said they loved their wives and children dearly, and that they wanted to keep their family together, that the word
talaaq
was uttered by them only in anger—but Allah’s law was Allah’s law and nothing could be done.