Maps for Lost Lovers (29 page)

She assents with a nod, “I suppose.” The bus resumes its journey. Neither says anything during the many minutes it takes for the bus to arrive at the ring road around the town centre, the vehicle’s turnings and movements jolting the passengers lightly like bottles in a crate. The little anglers at the back begin to collect their nets and baskets and harp-stringed rods, and it is suddenly discovered amid much merry howling that the bait tin had been left half open.

It is the pearl hour of late afternoon, mildly radiant, and the bus passes the roads lined with shops on either side. The boys scented with the green-leafed world are walking on their haunches in the aisle, looking for the maggots between the passengers’ shoes, grinning widely as though each holds a slice of melon before his face. Chanda’s mother lifts her feet up with great anxiety, holding them away from the carrion-eating worms, kin to those who have fed on her dead daughter.

“I can’t help wondering if something
is
going on upstairs,” Chanda’s father points up towards the metal ceiling.

“Don’t,” she shakes her head. “He’s a good man. See how helpful he was to the driver? And I remember how polite he was towards me when I approached him with that harebrained idea that dawn.” She looks at him. “Don’t frown—I give you my word that I won’t approach him again.”

Chanda’s father
is
frowning, has grown more thoughtful:
I thought
Chanda and Jugnu had sold their passports to another couple and decided to
stay behind in Pakistan . . .
But why couldn’t it have happened? Why can’t they persuade a couple to go to the police and say they entered Britain on Chanda and Jugnu’s passports? But: he shakes his head—who would agree to do such a thing?

As he sits there the first few details of the subterfuge begin to fall into place:
“Oi, Gupta, or whatever it is you call yourself, Abdul-Patel. Mr. Illegal
Immigrant–Asylum Seeker! Get back into your
seat . . .”
Illegal immigrants! Couldn’t they get a couple of illegal immigrants and pay them to go to the police with this story?

He turns to his wife: “You just said it was all a stupid idea about a fake Chanda and Jugnu coming to England and all that, but I don’t think it is. Not really.” Uncharacteristically demonstrative, he leans in closer to her. “I have been thinking. Why
can’t
it have happened? Who’s to say it didn’t?”

“My Allah! Are you saying Jugnu and my Chanda are alive?”

“I don’t know. But why can’t we get a man and a woman to go to the police and say they entered Britain on the passports they had been sold by Chanda and Jugnu in Pakistan? No one at the airports checks to see that the photographs match.”

“That is exactly what I said to Shamas.”

“I think we can do this.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Who will agree to go to the police and say such a thing?”

“The country is full of illegal immigrants. We’ll find a couple and pay them to do it.” He is talking and thinking fast, the adrenaline coursing the veins. “The police would deport the couple, obviously, but I think they will be happy to go back to Pakistan if we pay them. We’ll pretend we have other candidates available for the two vacancies so they won’t ask too high a sum.”

“That still doesn’t explain where Chanda and Jugnu are.”

“But the story proves that they were not killed by anyone in our family. Why should Chanda’s brothers be in jail if she cannot be located? It’s not
their
fault.”

Chanda’s mother shakes her head. “It won’t work. There are too many inconsistencies.”

“Name one.”

“Allah, you are being serious about this?” she says, aghast.

“Deadly serious.”

“Chanda’s ghost will never forgive us.”

“Let’s take care of the living first.”

“Such heartlessness!” She bursts into tears. “Men! How can you say that about your daughter?”

He doesn’t respond immediately, waits until she’s exhausted her tears, her breathing beginning at last to stretch deeper. “I do have a heart,” he says quietly. “I saw the wounds and the bandages on my son earlier today, and you yourself said we have to do something to ensure their safety, didn’t you? I won’t ask Shamas. So we have to do something ourselves.”

She doesn’t reply immediately, “They are my sons too.” She sighs and then asks, “What if the fake couple agree to go to the police, and do go, but then later decide to tell the police that we had put them up to it? We could all go to jail. Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”

He considers this for a few beats and then shakes his head: “We’ll just deny it. It’s their word against ours.” He thinks about it and adds: “We’ll pay only part of the sum to the couple to begin with. We’ll give the rest only after they have done their work and are about to be deported.”

“Or we could say they’ll get the remainder of the money only in Pakistan—only once they have been sent back there.”

He nods. “That’s even better.”

He has enough money in bundles of banknotes. The boys had been part of a group that had managed to smuggle in heroin from Pakistan some years ago, hidden in fruit and vegetables. No one in the family knew and when they had told him about it he had made them promise never to do it again. The boys’ friends—one of whom owned a curry house—had set up a dummy company, importing seventy-four boxes of guavas and loquats and
jamun
and
shaftalu
and mulberries and
falsa
on one occasion, and forty-six on two others. Heroin with the street value of about £750,000 had been brought into the country but the boys had participated only on the first occasion—their job was to go to a motorway car-park, meet the man who had collected the boxes from the airport, and bring the boxes to Dasht-e-Tanhaii in their own van.

He says, “Just the other day a young man came to the mosque, saying he was an illegal immigrant from Pakistan and that he was looking for his brother who had come to England some years ago and hasn’t been heard from since.”

“Did he leave an address where he could be contacted?”

“No. He said the missing brother has a single hair of real gold amid the normal black ones on his head. But, no, he didn’t leave an address. In any case, there are many others like him. We’ll have to keep our eyes and ears open for similar people.”

The vanilla-yellow and apple-green bus lurches and winds its way through the town centre towards its destination, stopping every now and again at the piano keys of a zebra crossing, its reflection passing across the glass of shop windows the size of cinema screens, and they sit wordlessly side by side, their faint reflections out there making them feel they lack the quality of presence.

She places her sun-sheathed hand on top of his, very tenderly, and rests it there for a while. Whatever has happened to her has happened to him too.

When the passengers begin to disembark at the station, they both remain seated as though dazed. “Her soul will never forgive us,” she says quietly. And then they watch as Shamas comes down, on his own, followed by three other passengers. “We were obviously mistaken,” Chanda’s mother says. “He and the woman were not together.” The woman is the last passenger to come down from the upper deck.

“Did you see how beautiful she was,” Chanda’s mother whispers as she gets up to leave. “Allah, she was like a houri.”

Lost in their own thoughts, neither of them had noticed that at the end of the journey it was
Suraya
who was holding the bright-green parakeet feather.

THE DANCE OF THE WOUNDED

It’s the task of insects to pollinate flowers. But Shamas remembers being told about a rare plant that is found only on a remote hilly island, and how soft paintbrushes are employed to collect and transfer its pollen from flower to flower: the insect that had performed that function until quite recently has become extinct—an insect unknown to man. It is agreed that the plant couldn’t have survived through the ages without the now-missing insect. No one knows what it was. The flowers are the only indicator that it must have existed until quite recently.

They are like flowers placed on a grave, mourning an absence.

As the late-May evening darkens towards night, he, walking towards the lake, takes in the rich fragrance hanging about the roaming inflorescences of a buddleia, the whir of a moth reaching him from somewhere inside the grey-green foliage like a burst from a sewing machine.

The hazy perfume decides to accompany him for a few steps while, above, the moon drifts companionless. Since meeting her at the
Safeena
that afternoon in early May he has seen and talked to Suraya a further five times, never arranging the next occasion too definitely or firmly, and never knowing if she would come but always expecting that she would.

They have remained formal, almost shy, and there hasn’t been even an instant’s physical contact, because between them lies a glass bridge. So far there have been no consequences and therefore, at times, he finds it difficult to believe in the reality of the entire matter. He has read somewhere that, although the constant stimuli of daytime experience keep us from noticing it, we are dreaming at low levels all the time.

Each time he has met Suraya his sense of betrayal towards Kaukab has been stronger than before.
It is not as though I am leaving her:
he had tried to reason with himself early on; but he is too old to be deceived by an argument as feeble as that: he
is
leaving her—he’s just not moving out of the house. Each journey towards Suraya has required a lion’s heart, and he has tried not to think about Kaukab’s reaction if she ever finds out.

The moon is still quite low and the junk shop is stuffed to capacity with its dusty reflections, one hanging in each peeling mildewed mirror. Stars and a number of constellations are visible in the darker parts of the sky, and looking up he remembers that the powdery galaxies are supposed to be the dust raised by Muhammad’s winged mount as it carried him to the heavens for an audience with Allah on his Night Journey. He steps over the crooked transparent vein of a small stream. He is walking towards the cluster of large and costly lakeside houses where flowers bloom by the hundred and the unopened frond tips of the giant ferns look like fists of red-haired gorillas.

The family in one of the houses is descended from a holy man in the Faisalabad region of Pakistan. Among the followers of the revered ancestor of the lakeside family had been the forefathers of the devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—the man referred to by one London critic as
the
best and most-powerful singer in the world today,
and by another as
one of
the three or four truly sublime voices of the twentieth century
—
up there with
Maria Callas and Umm-e Kulsum.

Whenever he can, Nusrat attends the annual
urs
celebrations at the shrine near Faisalabad to humble himself before the ancient saint. The saint must have shown some kindness towards his ancestor, all those centuries ago, but no one can tell exactly what it was; nor is this specific detail relevant to Nusrat—you don’t recall the taste of your mother’s milk but that doesn’t mean you didn’t need or drink it at one time. It is also his way of honouring his own ancestors: if they thought the saint was worth venerating then their descendent is willing to trust them.

Nusrat’s growing fame in the world has meant that he is in England this month, performing a number of concerts before flying to Los Angeles to record the soundtrack of a Hollywood movie. Immediately before that he was in Japan, filming a television special; this had coincided with the annual Faisalabad
urs
and, regretting that he could not attend the shrine this year, he has instead decided to visit the descendants of the saint during his stay in England.

Tonight—while the aspidistras in the dark gardens open their flowers so that they can be pollinated by snails and slugs—the awe-inspiring voice will perform its ecstatic songs in a white moonlit marquee behind the lakeside house, to an audience of all-comers. Suraya will be attending. And Kaukab.

He told Suraya about the concert during a brief encounter earlier today: the girl whom Shamas saw on the riverbank with her secret Hindu lover a few weeks ago—the young couple looking for the place where the disembodied human heart was found—has been beaten to death by the holy man brought in to rid her of djinns. While Shamas was at the house of the dead girl’s parents earlier today, a house filled with mourners and people come to pay condolences, he had found himself alone in a room with Suraya for a few moments. Like everyone else she was dressed in the palest possible colours so as not to offend the dead and the bereaved with reminders of the joys of life, the joys the dead girl and those whom she has left behind will never now experience themselves. Suraya was looking for the roses and the jasmine blossoms. “They are to be added to the water to wash the body,” she explained, and he had handed her the canvas bag full of crimson and white blossoms lying in a corner of the room, blossoms as bright as bee-eating birds. Here and there a small frail-winged insect clung to a petal with its gold-coloured legs. “I saw children picking them earlier from our front garden, blowing away the aphids, carefully picking up any petal or blossom they dropped on the ground,” he said to her, “and I couldn’t understand at first who had sent them or why.” And then he had found himself telling her about Nusrat’s recital tonight—his way of asking her whether she would come. She hurried out of the room, leaving him wondering whether the subject of songs and singing wasn’t deemed inappropriate by her in the house where a funeral was being arranged. But he was anxious to see her again and hadn’t meant any disrespect to the helpless girl who had died so brutally. She was killed during the exorcism arranged by the parents with her husband’s approval. The holy man reassured the family that if reasonable force was used the girl would not be affected, only the djinn, and that there was no other way to drive out the malevolent spirit than by beating the body it had entered. The girl was taken into the cellar and the beatings lasted several days with the mother and father in the room directly above reading the Koran out loud. She was not fed or given water for the duration and wasn’t allowed to fall asleep even for five minutes, and when she soiled herself she was taken upstairs to the bathroom by her mother to be cleaned and brought back down for the beating to continue. The holy man heated a metal tray until it was red hot and forced her to stand on it. It was obvious that she
was
possessed because she began to speak in Punjabi, her mother-tongue, which she had never spoken with her parents, the cunning djinn inside her realizing that the holy man could not speak English and could only be reasoned with in Punjabi, pleading for mercy.