Maps for Lost Lovers (31 page)

He needs to be with her, agitated and forlorn after his thoughts of death. As Kaukab stands next to him, her face partly averted, her demeanour guarded, he can tell she doesn’t wish to be polluted by his breath: she tolerates, with melancholy weariness and faintly visible disgust, the glass of whisky he allows himself a few times a month.

He’s alone as Kaukab drives away, alone under the stars that are nuclear explosions billions of miles above him. He watches as a shooting star traverses the night sky, reflected like the sweep of a razor in the paintwork of several metal roofs. According to Islam, when something important— favourable or disastrous—is about to happen in the world, and Allah is arranging the final important details with the angels, Satan moves closer to the sky to eavesdrop: shooting stars are flaming rocks that are thrown at him to drive him away; and they therefore should be read as the imminence of a momentous occasion.

Inside, in the enclosure lit with parchment moons, Shamas positions himself for the first time tonight to bring Suraya into clear view, but— after their eyes have met and he has felt himself turning red as though fanned into flame by her presence, a smile beginning on his lips—he moves farther away: this is too exposed and public a place for them to get together. He imagines what any scandal would do to Kaukab. What the ideas of honour and shame and good reputation mean to the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh can be summed up by a Pakistani saying: He whom a taunt or jeer doesn’t kill is probably immune to even swords.

Shamas feels a crushing loneliness—he feels old. Sixty-five this year, the grey hair on his head has outnumbered the black for nearly two decades now. And lately whenever he has awakened in the middle of the night and has lain there, awake and alone (Kaukab has slept in a separate bed for some years now), his whole being has filled up with a clean and intense pain: wrapped in private terror, he feels afraid at what’s to come— the inevitable black abyss. Five years? Ten? His heart fragments at the thought. The headboard of the bed feels like a headstone at that hour and he doesn’t know where he is except that he stands far from any friend. His eyes travail until his sight is sore and strained: his vision fails and he sees no new world in the vasts of the darkness. He knows humans are mere shadows across the face of time, stuff to fill graves. He feels he’s walking along life’s road with a thumb extended to hitch a ride on a hearse. And no one has ever reported looking into a grave and seeing a door to another world in one of its sides; in any case, if it exists nobody living may be said to have the key to it.

While the girl was being buried today, someone’s raised voice had brought to a halt the shovelfuls of earth that were being thrown on top of the white-shrouded form lying in the pit: the news had been brought that the dead girl’s fourteen-year-old sister had placed a letter within the folds of the shroud, a message of love for her departed elder sister to take into the next world. Since Islam forbade such a practice—nothing may be buried with the body—Shamas had watched with terror as the men climbed down into the grave and pushed aside the earth to uncover the body. They exposed the soiled shroud to the haze of the afternoon, while the air flowed a sad amber and the bees hovered noisily around the bouquets and wreaths of flowers that were lying around waiting to be placed on the filled grave. The funeral resumed only when the letter had been discovered. “Minions of Satan!” said some of the men through clenched teeth when everyone was walking away from the grave later: the letter wasn’t from the dead girl’s sister—it was from her secret infidel Hindu lover, who had persuaded one of the women who had bathed and prepared the corpse to secrete it into the shroud. “Women and infidels: minions of Satan both!” The letter was passed around, a whole page filled with neat handwriting: “Such filth—what would the angels have thought had they found this upon her person in the grave?”

You, who have gone gathering the flowers of death,
My heart’s not I, I cannot teach my heart:
It cries when I forget.

Shamas caught sight of these words before one of the grave robbers tore up the letter into several pieces and threw it into the lake like a handful of white blossoms—a garland stolen from the dead.

He must stop thinking about death. He needs to touch Suraya, her youth, the life in her, feel her living breath on his face. His eyes search for her now among the members of the audience, but he cannot locate her. Oh, cut off the beak of this bird that says . . .
beloved . . . beloved . . .
She is a believer and must feel that it’s wrong for her to meet him: occasionally during their meetings he has seen a war raging in her expression, a wild internal disorder, the dinful strife of faith and disbelief.

He changes his position several times within the enclosure but has definitely lost her.

Outside, as he walks out of the marquee, past the roses’ stare, the dark-blue night air is stroking the lake’s surface, the ripples washed with moon’s pale silver light. At dawn the reflections of the sunlit ripples would be projected on to the bellies of the birds that would fly above the lake. Where is she? He is walking away, along the moonlight and glinting water of the shore, Nusrat’s voice becoming dimmer with each step, singing of wounded lovers, dancing proudly in the face of death and ruin. No clear path is available to him in the darkness and the trees creak like ships’ masts around him. His knees touch past tall wild flowers and grasses as he walks on. Where did she go? Only occasionally does he find a curved path that lies like a dismembered limb almost concealed by the tender cirri and tendrils of growth. Like hurrying skateboarders all around him, gusts of wind arrive occasionally, swerving, landing, gambolling and taking off here and there, all weave and waver. He has arrived at the edge of the cemetery, the graves outlined by foot-high fences, scrolling delicately like musical stands. Isn’t it in one of these dreaming clusters of trees that the two ghosts roam, calling out to him without opening their mouths?

He stops because there is movement nearby, and he hears his name being spoken.

“Shamas-uncle-ji.”

The dead girl’s lover steps out of the shadows ahead of him. “Uncle-ji, I am lost. Could you please guide me to her . . . to her . . . grave . . . her resting place.” He’s holding a bunch of orchids in his hands. “I’d like to give her these.” He speaks softly in a voice that is wearing mourning clothes.

“I think I remember where it . . . she . . . is,” Shamas says, having recovered. “Come this way.”

“I watched the funeral from the trees so I thought I’d remember the location,” the boy says, looking down at the flowers as he walks. “There are almost a thousand graves here but I knew how to find her when I came in the evening, thinking the funeral was over and there would be no one here, but a lot of women were visiting her at that time. I went away and now I am lost in the darkness.”

Shamas nods. Women aren’t allowed to be present at the burial, and must come to the cemetery later. The dead girl’s sister had wanted to watch her being buried but she had been told that it was an impossibility. In her grief she would have rebelled—it was her first direct experience of death so she wasn’t familiar with the rules that must be observed, and she would have thought that her great loss entitled her to break Allah’s law— but it turned out that she was having her period: so they informed her that she couldn’t go anyway because of that reason, because she was in an unclean state. Forbidden to touch the Koran, enter a mosque, pray, even prepare food according to certain sects—that she was impure and polluted during menstruation was something she had known for some time, something she had come to accept by now, her arguments against it fully exhausted. And so she had acquiesced, agreeing to visit the grave later.

“It’s there,” Shamas points to the mound where the wreaths and garlands are dying, furred with shadows. The boy takes a step towards it but stops. In the moonlit darkness his skin looks blue as Shamas’s own must appear to him: the colour of Krishna, the god who multiplied himself a thousand times so he could be with the thousand maidens simultaneously in the night forest—and so all lovers are one. The boy shakes his head: “I don’t really know which rules to observe at a Muslim grave-site. Earlier I thought Muslims burned candles on their graves because I saw a light flickering on her resting place but then it disappeared—it must be one of those fireflies that have been discovered hereabouts.”

Muslims do burn lamps on graves and the moths they attract are said by some to be angels, the spirits of the departed by others, or lovers in disguise come to say prayers for their beloveds’ souls. “Fireflies, here in England?”

The boy takes another tentative few steps, fearful of protocol. “Yes, there have always been rumours of their sighting in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, but last week they were confirmed.”

Shamas waits until the boy has reached her and kneeled down, and then he withdraws. In Shamas’s thoughts, the girl—during her last few days on earth—appears as the moon threatened by the dragons of the eclipse—surrounded by her criminally stupid parents and that monstrous holy man. He goes back the way he had come, and when he arrives back at where he’d met the boy he sees that there is a heart lying in his path, there, in a patch of moonlight falling from the foliage above, a heart sliced neatly into two halves: the two pieces are lying next to each other— the inner chambers are exposed in cross-section, curved and muscular. Shamas backs away when the two halves are suddenly and weakly illuminated as though from within. The red light colours the ground and only then does he see that they are two orchids fallen from the cluster the boy had been carrying. The firefly that had alighted on them has just given a pulse of light—it arcs into the air and vanishes, leaving behind a blinding smear on Shamas’s retina, a long trail slow to fade. He picks up the two blossoms, looking around for other fireflies, remembering how he captured those luminous insects in his childhood and kept them in glass bottles topped with perforated caps to make lanterns that quivered like liquid. A mass of them moving in the distance after a monsoon shower: the points of light opened and slowly closed like mouths of fishes. The air would be alive with responsiveness, and he could see them even with his eyes closed: in the darkness they conferred a facial vision that the blind are said to possess—a trembling warm sense of something there, nearby.

Could the presence of fireflies be the origin of the stories about the two ghosts wandering in the lakeside woods? He sets out again carrying the blood-coloured orchids. And now he remembers how a few days after his father’s death, all those years ago, he had one night found himself walking towards the Hindu temple where his father had set himself on fire. He remembers seeing a cluster of fireflies in the distance, there near the temple: the edges of leaves, or various sections of the insects’ own wing beats, could be seen by the light, faintly. But then something made him frown— the creatures were standing still, unmoving, as though a spell had been cast over them. When he drew close and saw the cause of that stillness, the fright had sent him—a grown man—running through the darkness. He remembers the sight to this day: each of the hundred or so insects had been pierced onto the thorns of the tree that was home to the birds known as the “butcher birds” because they impaled their victims on to spikes to kill them or to eat later. The speared fireflies had been alive, in the process of dying.

No, no, he must resist these thoughts of death! He speeds up madly to make a way out of the cemetery, going along the paved paths between the graves, getting lost, needing a map of this labyrinth, a flaw in the net to burst through, this net made up of almost a thousand knots. He needs Suraya. His teeth are bared and ache with dryness as does his epiglottis. The faster he runs the louder the noise inside his chest as though being produced by a dynamo attached to his legs. The tips of thorns of various bushes break and become lodged in the weave of his clothing as he thrashes his way forward. Where has Suraya gone? He’s back on the lake’s edge where the sand-grains glitter because all impurities have been washed out of them by the waves’ motion. The beautiful radiant-skinned girl is no more and the boy was wearing black clothes, black as the wisp of smoke that remains when a flame is snuffed out. And now suddenly he knows where Suraya is: his search has stopped being a search and become a journey. Taking the moon with him like a balloon on a string he is walking towards the
Safeena,
towards Scandal Point, a mile and a half away. He feels he’s moving further and further away from death with each step he takes towards her, holding a broken heart in his hands, pushing aside the blue brocade-and-velvet of the foliage as he shortcuts through the trees and grasses, the wetness on his fingers and palms making him think that a bunch of overripe cherries must have burst in his hand when he gripped a low branch for balance in the darkness, but then he remembers that it’s only May and that the fruit won’t appear till August, and he realizes that the wetness on his palms and fingers must be the sap that the two flowers are releasing, and he continues, the passage through the vegetation now narrowing like the neck of a bottle, now widening to bring him at last to the stir-less vicinity of the
Safeena.
He can see no one.

The night awakens at the sound of her earrings.

She is here as he somehow knew she would be, waiting for him. Going past the reeds’ thicket of knives, he walks into the black lozenge-shaped moon-shadow thrown by the
Safeena
and lets it close over him like water. In the darkness he gently wraps his left arm around her neck and lowers his mouth onto hers, his other hand letting go of the orchids so that they fall at her feet, and then this free hand sinks up to the wrist in the curls of her head, her skin giving off the scent of birch bark and almonds. Bright gnats of static electricity dance in her hair and he tries to prevent the pulsing world of fireflies from invading his mind. She struggles at first but then kisses him back and he leads her to the
Safeena.
She’s life. The angel of mercy. A clock-tower strikes one somewhere far away and the fragrance she’s wearing is an olfactory smear in the hot dry air. He is aware of the noisiness from her lungs and of the difficulty she is having breathing in an orderly manner. When Zeus came to lie with Alcmena he stretched the night to three times its length; and so he too now wishes for dawn not to arrive at the appointed time.