Maps for Lost Lovers (27 page)

So he has a wife, she who had the only copy of his book of poems. But he could still marry her because a Muslim man is allowed four wives.

Suraya had wondered, before coming to the
Safeena,
and has wondered during her visit here too, about how much she should reveal to him. Should she tell him everything about her situation—I am looking for someone to marry temporarily . . . But that would frighten him. Should she wait until they are better acquainted—until she has “a better hold on him”? And how will she get him to divorce her eventually? At home she had burst into tears at that.
Dear Allah, why can’t I understandthe reasons behind your laws?
It’s the
man
who deserves to be punished if he has uttered the word “divorce” as idle threat, in anger or while intoxicated, and, yes, the punishment for him is that he has to see his wife briefly become another man’s property, being
used
by him. But why must the divorced wife be punished? Nothing is more abhorrent to a Muslim woman than the thought of being touched by a man other than her husband. She hides her body like a treasure. But if she wants her husband back she has to let another man touch her. This is her punishment: a punishment she deserves, perhaps, because she did not know how to teach her husband to be a good man, how to teach him to control his anger and be a good Muslim, stay away from alcohol?

But Suraya knows she’ll be able to go through with every humiliation and degradation eventually, that she’ll let another man—Shamas, for instance—touch her because she doesn’t want to go through life without her son and husband: she’ll be one person’s friend, another’s confidante, someone else’s mistress—but she is their
everything.

“I was married to someone there. I am now divorced,” she hears herself tell Shamas now, in answer to his question. “I have an eight-year-old son who is with his father.” That’s it for now. She feels drained. “I don’t know when or if I’ll go back to Pakistan. As things stand I have no one and no plans.” She pays for the two books but she cannot leave without first arranging their next meeting. She has been thinking quickly for the past few minutes, but nothing has come to her. She tries to find a way to prolong her presence here while thinking.

And, of course, she mustn’t let him think that the next meeting is her idea—it’s possible that he’s the kind of man who likes to be in control (and most men are; women just have to orchestrate the events to let men
think
they are in charge).

“It’s just occurred to me that the noise you heard earlier could actually be a bird and not a child’s whistle.” And she tells him how a flock of Subcontinental rose-ringed parakeets is causing havoc in the gardens and orchards on the outskirts of Dasht-e-Tanhaii. She saw them herself last week. About thirty in number, they are the descendants of a pair of Indian rose-ringed parakeets that had escaped from their cage some years ago.

“I am very fond of those birds,” he tells her, “but I haven’t seen one for decades now.”

“I wouldn’t mind taking you to where the flock is,” she says (perhaps a little too abruptly?).

“I would like that, yes. We’ll look for the birds the way my brother used to look for butterflies. His name was Jugnu by the way—”

“Please don’t feel you have to tell me things you’d rather not.”

“No, I want to. I’d like to.” He looks straight into her eyes and says: “So how shall we arrange to meet again?”

As he watches her leave along the path lined with tall grasses, he wants to run after her and tell her why he is fond of parakeets. But he stops himself, deciding he’ll tell her the next time they meet.
“Do you know
the story of Hiraman the rose-ringed parakeet and princess Padmavati?”
Hiraman, the talking rose-ringed parakeet, found fault with every beautiful maiden that Rajah Ratan Sen thought about marrying. He said to Rajah Ratan Sen, “One mustn’t settle for the ordinary. Across a distance of seven seas from your majesty’s palace, there is a land called Serendip, ruled by Rajah Gandhrap Sen. And the name of the Rajah’s daughter is Padmavati. Delicate as a lotus. Radiant as the morning star. Her scented locks a monsoon cloud and the parting in them, leading to her brow, is the path to heaven itself. That brow: as spotless as the moon on the second night of a month, shining through nine regions and three worlds. Eyes like two fish playing face to face. Her glances: like two wagtails fighting on the wing. Her hips wide as an elephant’s brow. All forms of beauty are determined to cling to her the way a green pigeon grasps a twig as it leans down to drink water from a stream, for it thinks everything on earth unworthy of contact, continuing to hang upside down from branches even when killed.” Padmavati’s attributes and virtues so captured Rajah Ratan Sen’s imagination that he eventually lost his entire being to her description and set out to look for her . . .

Shamas walks around the
Safeena,
thinking of their next meeting, how he would tell her that—to his mind—Hiraman the parakeet represents an artist, they who tell us what we should aim for, they who reveal the ideal to us, telling us what’s truly worth living for, and dying for, in life.

Now and then he opens a book he had seen her look into earlier.

THE OLDEST ACQUAINTANCESHIP IN THE WORLD

Having got off the bus, Chanda’s mother stands under the cherry tree by the side of the road, on the outskirts of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, surrounded by the green slopes of the hills, while a flock of rose-ringed parakeets knives by overhead. Her husband—who had alighted with her—has gone somewhere beyond the curve of the deserted road through the hills. The grass at her feet is clogged with the faded drifts of pale-pink cherry petals. She looks at her shoes: they bought these shoes together, mother and daughter, two years ago.

She can see her husband coming along the bend in the road, muttering to himself, shaking his head, looking pallid in the lavender shadow of the hill’s green shoulder. The couple have just been to visit their sons who are being held at a prison an hour’s bus ride away. They had got off the bus at this remote location because Chanda’s father thought he saw someone disappear around a tree—giving chase to a butterfly. Jugnu? They had broken their journey home and hurriedly disembarked at the next stop. She had remained under the cherry tree and he had rushed back up the road, towards where he had caught the fleeting glimpse of the butterfly hunter. In his long absence she has let herself cry out loudly into the air, letting out the sorrow she had felt during the visit they have just paid to the prison: one of their sons was beaten up yesterday by white inmates— his left arm and jawbone are broken, and his face is bruised beyond recognition. He can’t tell on the people who did that to him and has told the prison authorities he had a fall.

She smiles to hide the traces of her grief from her husband, so as not to upset him.

“It was just a boy,” he says, drawing up to her, “with a paper aeroplane.” He looks around as though he has found himself in the middle of an ocean, searching for the shore. “But I did see someone else. Shamas, standing beside a stream. And I think there was a woman with him. Or at least I think they were together. She was standing a little distance away.”

“Allah! Are you sure?”

“I don’t know. No, I am not sure. Has another bus passed since?”

“Yes, but it was one of those that turn into Annemarie Schimmel Road, going towards Muridke, instead of carrying on towards the Saddam Hussein bus station.” She takes out a handkerchief from her handbag red as a lobster shell and passes it to him—the exertion has brought out a bath of sweat. “Was the woman with Shamas white?”

He shakes his head. “It’s probably nothing. Isn’t it from Muridke that a holy man has been summoned by that family on Faiz Street, to come and exorcise their daughter of the djinns?”

“Yes. He’ll come soon,” she replies. “She’s not behaving appropriately towards her family and husband. Last night I found myself wondering whether that was what was wrong with our own daughter—the djinns possessed her and caused her to rebel.”

He wipes his face with the handkerchief, his breath steadying slowly. He seems to have found his bearing now that he is close to her: her side always welcomes him back from being just one of the many to being the lead in the play of their life, even though certain areas of her mind are not the right shape to accommodate him. When he is not with her he is alone even if surrounded by people. Whilst sticking price-labels onto the packets of spices he would shout from behind a row of shelves,

“Chanda’s mother, how much for the packets of fennel?”

“Twenty-nine p for the small ones, 51p for the larger,” she would answer from the counter, “and must you ask me every time?”

“It’s just an excuse to hear your voice, my beloved.” He would stand up and wink at her from across the tops of the shelves, or from around the white-and-blue pyramid of sugar bags. She would quickly conceal her pleasure behind her veil; oh, what was she to do with this husband of hers! She would reprimand: they were adults, parents of three children, but he persisted in acting like a teenager at his age and insisted she behave as though the world was her bridal chamber and every day her wedding night. Many summers ago, after she had got carried away with the nail-clipper the day before (as everyone does from time to time), she had asked him to peel an orange for her, her own fingertips slightly raw, and he had taken that to be a cue for the establishing a ritual: from then on, the moment new oranges arrived in summer, he peeled one of them and left the fleshy star in a plate with a pinch of salt on the cash till beside her, the segments arranged and the plate chosen with care because the first bite is always with the eye. The customers would elbow each other, smiling, as he selected the heaviest and darkest fruit from the boxes, but it was as though she was the only one who noticed their mirth.

But there is scarcely any laughter in their life anymore.

Now he says, “I was so sure it was a butterfly collector: it looked just like a butterfly from the bus, and the boy was tall enough to be mistaken for a grown man.” He indicates the direction he has come from: “There is a group of them—young boys. Some are fishing, using rods and reels. Some swimming.”

Standing under the cherry tree, she wonders whether she should broach the subject of the two boys, and then says, “I couldn’t bear to see him all stitched up—those black knots were like spiders poking out of his face. All those bandages and that arm in the sling.”

“Even the other one looked thinner.” He nods after a while.

“He said, ‘The year is getting hotter and I can
smell
the mangoes ripening over there in Pakistan—even from behind all these doors, each with a padlock on it weighing a kilogram.’ ”

“They miss your cooking. ‘You should have this recipe printed in a newspaper,’ they’d say after every other meal.” He touches her gently on the arm. “They’ll regain their health once they are acquitted in December and we bring them home.”

She raises her bowed head, looks him squarely in the face for a moment, and then looks away in the direction the bus will come. After a silence she says, “On the bus, just before you told me about the person chasing the tangerine butterfly, I saw a tree with only one long branch in flower. The rest of the crown was dry, leafless. And I remember being told once about the grave of a pious man, how the branches of the tree directly above it continued to flourish, supplying it with shade, even though the rest of the tree had withered and was tinder dry. On seeing the tree from the bus I had the urge to get off and open the earth under that flowering branch, to see if . . . if . . .”

“You mustn’t think like that.” He looks at his golden wristwatch, comes out from under the cherry tree and moves closer to the edge of the road, where the pillar designating this point a bus-stop is planted.

“It’s hard to know what to think. A person can go insane at times. I haven’t told you this but when that woman from Bihzad Lane returned from Pakistan and said Jugnu was seen in Lahore, I madly approached Shamas to tell him that.”

“When?” he is astonished. “Why?”

“Don’t be angry. At dawn one day.”

“That was just a rumour, people gossiping. What did he say, and what did you hope to accomplish?”

“I have admitted that I acted madly, and I have asked you not to be angry—so don’t give me that look. I wanted my sons out of jail—and with good reason too: look what has happened to one of them! The day before I approached Shamas I’d heard that there were 1500 suicides in prison last year, and I had panicked, my mind in turmoil. I thought Chanda and Jugnu had sold their passports to another couple and decided to stay behind in Pakistan. It was all staged: that other couple came to England and left the luggage and passports in the house and then disappeared. I lie awake at night and the night makes you think up strange things. I set out of the house at dawn one day to look for Shamas, knowing he goes to town to get the newspapers.”

“He must think our whole family is unhinged.” He throws up his hands, too amazed by where the story leads.

“I
said
I didn’t know what I was thinking.” Her voice carries the hint of a sob.

He looks at her with a kind smile after a few moments. “I’m sorry. It’s hard to know what to think. Earlier, I thought I heard a parakeet’s cry!”

“You did,” she replies after a while. “I heard it too. They say there’s a flock of them out here. And it’s thriving. There is a fear that they’ll soon be everywhere. Such a harsh voice.” She joins him at the edge of the road for a while and then they both return to the cherry tree, to its dead litter of pink-brown petals.

“If only she had a grave, I’d plant tulips all around her,” she says quietly. “Tulips are blessed. Their Urdu and Persian name—
lalah
—has exactly the same letters as His name—Allah.”

She looks at him and sees the tears in his eyes.

“Why are you . . . ? No, don’t . . . ,” she manages to say.

He covers his eyes with his wrist.

“Don’t cry.” They have both deteriorated over the past years, as though the leavers had taken something of their life with them when they left.