Maps for Lost Lovers (30 page)

According to the report in
The Afternoon
the coroner found the arms and legs broken by a cricket bat. The front of the chest had caved in as though she had been jumped on repeatedly.

His beard large enough for peacocks to nest in, the holy man has been arrested and will probably be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, and the mother and father would perhaps receive a decade or so each for being accessory to the killing.

In the neighbourhood there are as many opinions about the death as there are mouths:

Amid the young: “I went to school with her and she was fine with us, her friends. She must’ve acted strangely only at home. And I too wouldn’t be caught dead speaking my parents’ language—even though I can.”

Amid the old: “What kind of mother is she, hmm? What kind? How could she eat herself when the girl was going hungry? He beat her with a bicycle chain.”

Amid those in the middle years: “These holy men are crooks, the kind who are aiding the white people to blacken Islam’s name. I myself was exorcised and it was successful. Look how healthy I am now, while before I used to have terrible stomach pains and used to black out all the time.”

Some of these Shamas heard today at the girl’s house and during the burial, and some were told to him by Kaukab. Shamas has been careful to control his rage and grief when talking to her about the killing because he knows that Islam requires her to believe in djinns, in witchcraft, in spirits. She too has quietly preempted his objections, saying to herself earlier today but within his hearing, “
This
holy man was a charlatan or incompetent, and the diagnosis that the poor girl was possessed could have been wrong—but that doesn’t mean there are no djinns. Allah created them out of fire—it’s stated plainly in the Koran.” Almost everyone in the neighbourhood believes in such things. Only today Kaukab said that, while she was at the shop buying hibiscus-flower oil for her hair, a woman had nervously approached her and, having casually opened the conversation by asking her if she knew a way of getting out eye-kohl stain from white linen, had asked whether her husband’s name was Shamas: “The children are going around saying that in the lakeside woods a pair of sad ghosts wanders, luminous, like figures stepped down from a cinema screen, a man and woman, his hands and her stomach glowing more than the rest of their bodies.” Kaukab and Shamas both know about this rumour, but now there is a new detail: “And they call out repeatedly and quietly to someone called Shamas without moving their lips.”

The air is filled with the perfumed longueurs of an Urdu lyric as Suraya arrives at Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s performance. Troubled and tender, Nusrat’s voice is singing its moon song inside the glowing white-canvas enclosure on which the blue foliage moving in the warm breeze has draped its slurred shadow. Faces, alike as coins in their attentiveness, are turned towards him, the arena lit intimately with pale paper lanterns containing electric light-bulbs.

Suraya was getting ready to come here when her husband and son telephoned. While she was speaking to her boy he said, “You are wearing your gold earrings, aren’t you, the ones Father says look good on you? I can hear them jingle.” Yes, she was, and after telling him that he was a clever young man, she had taken them off, feeling she was betraying her husband by ornamenting herself for another man. But after the shocking news her husband gave her a few minutes later, she had decided to put them back on. Her mother-in-law is planning to find another bride for her husband. Suraya had almost screamed out in pain but then the old woman had come on the phone to tell her that a man needs a wife: “How long is he supposed to wait for you?”

The pendant earrings tinkle gently on her ears: she needs them, has adorned herself for Shamas. Apart from the encounter at the dead girl’s house earlier today, the two of them have met several times since going out to see the flock of rose-ringed parakeets, and she has even persuaded him to recite fragments of his poetry, has brought her mother’s old car back into use to be able to get to him more conveniently, and they have even had a small argument (about his irreverence towards Islam: “Whenever I said something that my mother perceived as contrary to Islam,” she had told him, deeply shocked by his words, “she would respond: ‘Speak softly! My Allah lives in my heart and He will hear you.’ ” And when he persisted with his reasonings she had snapped at him, deeply offended, telling him that the limited proofs and illusory understanding of this world couldn’t cast a veil upon Allah: “The water’s surface does not stop a plunge.”) But she has been unable to decide what her next step should be.

Nusrat and his party of eight musicians are on a slightly raised dais at the front, the bright Persian carpet under them as intricately patterned as the foil around Easter eggs, the wool flashing its sapphire and lapis lazuli. The complexity of this music requires years of dedicated training and absolute coordination within the party as a whole, but the resulting melodies and rhythms are so immediately appealing that they are loved and memorized even by children—like Suraya’s own son; and since children are always included in family outings and occasions in the Subcontinent—the concept of babysitters being alien—there are several of Nusrat’s younger admirers here tonight, a four-year-old recognizing him upon entering the marquee and shouting to his mother, “Mummy: Nusrat! Look, there!”

Suraya’s mother-in-law said: “He’ll marry another woman now and when you are finally through your own difficulties he can marry you too. Islam allows him four wives.”

“I won’t tolerate another woman as a rival wife,” Suraya had roared down the telephone. “As Allah is my witness, I’ll kill her.”

But isn’t that what she will be asking Shamas’s wife to do—share him with her, even if briefly?

Her hands shaking, she steels herself as she listens to Nusrat who is singing a love lyric, and when he comes to the word “you”—denoting the earthly beloved—he points to the sky with his index finger to indicate and include Allah in the love being felt and celebrated—a lover looking for the beloved represents the human soul looking for salvation.

Time is running out for her. She turns and searches for Shamas in the crowd: something (what?) must happen soon. Tonight.

What have you written under my name in the Book of Fates, my Allah?

Shamas locates Kaukab from where he stands at the back—she has made her own way here with a group of neighbourhood women—and then, with the same glance, he spots Suraya, shadowy in olive-green silk, poised as a cypress, the moonlight smiling in her glass bangles.

Nusrat is in the Thal desert of Southern Pakistan, a sandstorm raging about him, many centuries ago: he is the beautiful Sassi, the young woman who was born to a Brahmin priest but had been placed in a sandalwood box and floated down the Indus because the horoscope predicted she would bring disgrace to the family by marrying a Muslim; she was found by a Muslim washerwoman and raised as her daughter. Now, grown up, and become lost in the burning dimensionless Thal, she cries out to her beloved Punnu, looking for any sign of him as the howling gusts tear at her clothes. Punnu had mysteriously disappeared from her side during the night and she had set out to look for him . . .

The tips of the tabla-player’s fingers are moving on the skin of his drum very fast like a skilled typist’s on a keyboard.

The birth horoscope of Sassi had also said that her story would be told for many centuries to come.

She will die in the desert, but not before a single footprint left by Punnu’s camel has provided some hope, the last sign of her beloved:

She pressed it to her breast.
Too often though, she feared to touch it
Lest it disappear.

She dies with her head resting on the crescent shape.

A girl in the audience, moved to tears, is weeping to herself as Nusrat sings in a pain-filled voice. Shamas recognizes her: according to Kaukab, she is married to a first cousin brought over from Pakistan, and their first child was born with one lung smaller than the other, while the second child has no diaphragm in his torso, and, in the sixth month of her third pregnancy, she has recently learnt that the foetus has failed to develop ears; she has to have a scan every day. As she weeps now she is, no doubt, asking the soul of the pious and ancient poet-saint—whose verses are being sung by Nusrat—to tell Allah to lessen her burden.
I speak to you,
my brother in far generations . . .
The women hold her, striving to console, their faces on the whole more still and troubled than the men’s.

Shamas can see Chanda’s parents in the group of listeners, near the white globe of a lantern that is being circled by a yellow-bodied Large Emerald moth. He must avoid eye contact with them. The Large Emerald alights and begins to skim scuff flutter along the upper slope of the white sphere, and, coming to the round opening at the top, it drops down into the lantern like someone throwing himself into the mouth of a volcano. Shamas has heard that one of Chanda and Jugnu’s murderers has been attacked in the prison; and for some days now he has been expecting Chanda’s parents to approach him, needing help to have their son moved to another prison. They cannot speak English themselves and are among the many people who require Shamas’s help and advice every day in negotiating a path through their life in England. At his office he and his staff have to explain various procedures to men and women who are unemployable in two languages, loathed in several, who know no English or are too intimidated to walk up to someone white-skinned for help.

But they haven’t approached him yet. Perhaps their daughter-in-law is an English speaker and has taken charge of matters? Nevertheless, he must let it be known, through Kaukab, that Chanda’s family are welcome at the office any time they need assistance. A curl of smoke is issuing from within the lantern where the yellow-bodied moth has obviously been incinerated by the burning bulb. He needs to sit down—the idea that he has to help the two murderers! But he must: he must let Chanda’s parents know that they shouldn’t hesitate before asking for help. Nor is there any need to approach him directly if they don’t want to. He doesn’t
own
the office, he just works there.

There are flames in his breast. Like a jet of air from a bellows, each breath he takes fans the fire inside him. He needs comfort and looks around. He doesn’t want to have to think about Chanda’s brothers— terror in his heart as he imagines the two lovers’ last moments on earth. Earlier today, at the burial of the girl, he was told by someone that human remains were found outside the church in the town centre by road-digging labourers yesterday. The news was to Shamas’s skull as axe to wood. But he has since learned that it was probably a very old grave. If the bones are less than seventy years old the police are required by law to investigate how the person died.

He stands listening to the music. People are jubilantly throwing double handfuls of banknotes at Nusrat as he sings. A young woman gets up and, dancing there and back, goes to place a rose in Nusrat’s lap; her open movements of pleasure are seen by some as a lack of womanly restraint and they win her disapproving looks from a number of people in the audience, male and female.

Shamas’s gaze—running past three teenaged boys whirling slowly in one corner, their arms entangled in the soft antlers of smoke rising from incense sticks, their mirrored caps glittering in the pale light—finds Suraya in the seated crowd of women. He notices with consternation that a number of other men are looking at her every few moments, taken by her beauty.

Suddenly the amount of light in the place increases, as when lightning flashes during the day: she turns around to meet his eye briefly.

Nusrat’s voice has now become the fabled Heer. Given in marriage to a man she doesn’t love, she is inexplicably feeling drawn to the wandering ash-smeared mendicant who has appeared at the door asking for alms. She doesn’t yet know that it’s her beloved Ranjha, the flute-playing cowherd.
Don’t anybody call me Heer,
says Nusrat-Heer in a pining tone,
call me Ranjha, for I have spoken his name so many times during this separationthat I am become him . . .
Her brothers—in collusion with the rest of the family, and the corrupt holy man of the mosque—are going to poison her eventually for abandoning her husband for Ranjha. She would condemn them with her last breaths, the poet-saints of Islam expressing their loathing of power and injustice always through female protagonists in their verse romances: Heer didn’t consent to her marriage to the man she didn’t love—refused to say “yes, I do”—but the mullah conducting the ceremony had been bribed by her family and he said that he had seen her give a nod, and that that was sufficient as a sign of her consent. In their turn these verses of the saints—because they advocated a direct communion with Allah, bypassing the mosques—were denounced by the orthodox clerics, so much so that when the poet Bulleh Shah died the clerics refused to give him a burial, leaving the body out in the blazing sun until hundreds of his enraged admirers pushed the holy men aside and buried him themselves. Even today the Sufis are referred to as “the opposition party of Islam.” And always always it was the vulnerability of women that was used by the poet-saints to portray the intolerance and oppression of their times: in their verses the women rebel and try bravely to face all opposition. They—more than the men—attempt to make a new world. And, in every poem and every story, they fail. But by striving they become part of the universal story of human hope—Sassi succumbed to the pitiless desert but died with her face pressed to the last sign of her lover.

Shamas watches as three women in the audience—one of them carrying a half-asleep child holding a doll with a moustache drawn on in biro—get up and leave the gathering: they belong to a sect that forbids this music and devotional singing, but since their disapproving husbands are restaurant waiters and wouldn’t have been home until after two a.m. they had decided to come to see Nusrat; they have obviously lost their nerve and are returning early.

Kaukab had arrived with the three women in their car, and, with a glance and a raised hand towards Shamas, is leaving with them. He catches up to her—out in the narrow street with its cattle-like crowding of parked cars—to say that if she wishes to stay she should, that he will arrange for someone to take her home later, but she says she would prefer to leave with her friends; the strong perfume of the incense has given her a headache.