Maps for Lost Lovers (32 page)

Up to her waist in the water, swaying with the coming and going of the buried giant’s heartbeat, Suraya washes herself in the darkness. The reeds lick her skin as she weeps quietly, desperately cleaning herself between the legs, on her breasts. “My Allah, please forgive me for what I have done. O Compassionate and Merciful One, forgive my sins.” She scoops up water and rubs her body hard and fast, recalling the details of her debauchery. From outside the
Safeena
had come the buzz of a night-flying bee while he touched her everywhere, sowing little fires on her skin, small detonations, and from the wallpaper the pairs of deer in their red flame-of-the-forest bowers turned their necks to look at them, their noses depicted by black heart shapes. On the snakes-and-ladders squares of a Sindhi rug, he kissed off the pale red orchid-sap that his hands had smeared on various places of her body when he helped her undress—the saliva a magical liquid erasing bruises from her body. He whispered, saying he was surprised that he was already familiar with her breathing when he placed his face against her body. “This small shadow that your earlobe casts on the side of your neck is also known to me.” They lay side by side, adrift in a boat, borne along by their story. “I should open the window a little so that the three butterflies of
Madame Bovary
can fly out at dawn to feed on the nectar outside.” “What?”

She weeps among the reeds, scrubbing herself, while he is asleep indoors. She told her husband over the telephone that she has a most-suitable candidate and that he and his mother should give her a few more weeks before deciding on a new marriage for him.

She has the urge to lie down in the black water and stop breathing but the prospect of her son—soon to be on the mercy of a stepmother?— gives her courage to remain living. She has asked her husband to let the boy come to England for a few weeks but he says he fears she won’t let him return to Pakistan. “The laws in the West are favourable to women: the authorities will side with you and I won’t be able to do anything.” And Suraya knows that his suspicions have some basis in truth: if she could have possession of her boy, she would gladly live with the wound of having lost her husband. “Why don’t you
both
come for a visit,” she’d suggested not long ago. But he had developed an intense dislike of England during the two years he had spent here after their marriage. She had been lonely in Pakistan and had persuaded him to come and settle here. “This country may be rich but it is too different from ours,” he’d declared finally. “We have to go back. A person can’t do anything here that he can freely over there. A dog was asked by another why he was fleeing a rich household where they fed him meat every day. ‘They feed me meat, yes, but I am not allowed to bark.’ ”

She pleads with Allah as she purifies herself. One day when she was a little girl, she had gone home from the mosque in tears, having just learned that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said there would be more women in Hell than men. The girls had been chattering during the lesson and the cleric had threatened them with that information. Weeping, she told her mother that she no longer wished to be a Muslim. She consoled her and explained that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had indeed made that statement but that it had been made good humouredly: in a mosque, when the collections were being made, he had joked with the women who weren’t giving up their jewels to feed the poor and finance the jihad against unbelievers. The moment he made that statement the women stood up and argued with him merrily. But now, amid the reeds, Suraya wonders whether her childhood cleric might not have been right all along:
We women are wicked.
She had resisted having to do what she had done with Shamas last night, but had she resisted hard enough? Perhaps she should have tried to find another way of resolving her difficulties rather than sinning? But there
is
no other way.

She shivers with terror as she weeps. The moon’s age-old eye watches her from above, the midges flickering firmly in perfect silhouettes against it—the orbits are strong enough to not let the breeze blow the insects away. She washes her face and wonders if her crying had been heard in there. Shamas said last night that occasionally when she speaks the songbirds in her throat awaken and he can hear the voice that as a girl had sang the poetry of Wamaq Saleem, accompanying itself with a guitar and a peacock-feather plectrum. She can hear those songbirds when she cries now. She gathers up her hair, pulling off the damp locks that are gently pasted onto her shoulders, each leaving behind an impression of itself in cool skin, a sensory shadow in low temperature. The gusts and ripples of breeze can be heard murmuring in the night foliage around the jetty’s xylophone.

There must be a jasmine creeper somewhere nearby because it has shed some flowers into the lake—with outspread fingers she sieves a few out of the water and only now sees that they are in fact small pieces of paper, covered on one side with writing that she is unable to read due to the lack of light. Someone’s torn letter, perhaps.

She sits in the darkness and wonders what her next step should be. Tonight she gave him what he wanted and now she has to ask for something in return. He turned out to be a great sensualist, probing her gently with his tongue and hands so that she moaned in shame and humiliation (and once with pleasure). He was gentler than her husband, whose member had been so large that she frequently suffered from cystitis. Afterwards, as they lay beside each other, he slid his hand out from under her head and gave her a book of henna patterns to rest her head on: “Quite appropriate. Pillows filled with henna blossom are used to induce restful sleep.”

She has taken the first step back towards her son, he who made her feel she was at the place that was the planet’s navel whenever she was near him or with him, the place where the earth was connected to the sky, he who said last month that no one makes
zarda
the way he likes it, “the way you used to make it, Mother. Grandmother always puts too much raisins in and it’s too gooey.” She could see him waving his hand in indignation, his small faintly hairy forehead creased furiously. Suraya had tried not to laugh out loud. In order to pass on the correct recipe, she’d had her mother-in-law brought to the phone, that woman who perhaps even then was planning to find another “mother” for Suraya’s boy. How she would like to cut off her grey rat’s tail of a braid! She has always resented Suraya, that woman, jealous (perhaps like all mothers) because the wife can give her son the
only
thing she herself can’t, is not allowed to give by law and by nature. How shocked she was when the day after the wedding she caught sight of Suraya’s back: Suraya had had a flowering vine painted with henna along her spine for the wedding night, from the small of her back up to the spot between her shoulder-blades. Her strong and handsome husband had become excited beyond measure by the surprising detail during the night, but the old woman read it as a sign of decadence.

How many more times should she let Shamas touch her before revealing everything to him. Perhaps last night is already enough? He has told her about his brother and his girlfriend. Chanda too could not marry Jugnu due to the laws about Islamic divorce and women. She wonders whether she should exploit that similarity: would it help her gain his sympathy more readily?

Of course, she was shocked that Chanda and Jugnu’s life ended in murder, but she had been appalled when she heard that they had set up home outside wedlock, sinning openly—but she had hidden her real reaction from Shamas, not wishing to alienate or contradict him. She had kept only the thought of reuniting with her son in mind and let Shamas talk as he pleased, not that the thought of her boy is ever far from her, making life difficult for her. That first time at the
Safeena
when she was half-looking, half-pretending-to-look at the books of poetry she had come across a line of Kalidasa and had almost had the wind taken from her lungs. In the forest a doe was walking

Slowed by her suckling fawn.

The need to be with her son had resulted in the dazed brevity of the previous days when she cultivated Shamas’s acquaintanceship, ignoring the shudder of doubt and dread, relying on a boldness that has resulted in her committing tonight’s sin. Now, all her bravery has evaporated and nothing remains but guilt and shame, a feeling compounded by the night’s darkness around her, a sense of disaster and doom.

Her head feels heavy as a jar full of pennies due to stress and lack of sleep as she looks out over the dark lake, the surface of the water moving placidly like a sheet of very heavy silk to the left of her. She can smell the wild flowers that grow nearby, the bee- and beetle-filled wild-rosebushes the petals of whose flowers she as a small young girl would stick onto her finger-nails with spittle on the way to school to briefly give herself grown-up fingers. Earrings, necklaces, ribbons, perfume, lipstick. The young girls were learning to be women, to be false, teaching themselves to become the figures in men’s dreams and fantasies. Now she realizes how lost she is at times because a dreamer isn’t there. Well, they can all go to Hell. The only love worth striving for is her child’s, her son’s.

With a riot in every vein, she walks up to the
Safeena
and watches Shamas sleeping on the floor; the two orchids he’d been carrying when he arrived—a gift for her, obviously—are set beside his head, their ruffled edges aglow: he had dropped them outside but had gone out an hour later to retrieve them, one miniature reflection of them shining in each of his eyes. There are beet-coloured almost-black marks on one of the orchids— injuries suffered by the petals when they were dropped, or when the fingers pressed too deeply on to the thin succulence.

He has told her that his father was a Hindu and the terrible persecution he suffered in Pakistan; and so she wonders whether, to gain his sympathy, she should tell him that at school she herself had fallen in love with a boy of another religion—a Sikh—and that her mother had taken her out of school. But now suddenly she is ashamed:
Such cold-blooded shrewdness,
Suraya! What would Allah think?
—and she lets out a whimper in desperation.
But what am I supposed to do: become nothing more than his sex slave,
and then when he tires of me, go and find another man so that
he
can pasturethe black scorpions of his eyes on my nakedness?
But, no, no, she won’t allow herself to exploit the horrific death of Shamas’s father. He has mentioned something about his wife’s brother wanting to marry a Sikh woman back in the 1950s, and it was obvious that his sympathies lay with the two lovers (she herself had, of course, approved of the actions taken by the young man’s family: imagine, marrying a non-Muslim!); and so she decides that she should tell him about her own young Sikh love, and that her disgusted mother had taken her out of school and enrolled her into a girls-only Muslim school, the segregated school where daughters could be taught traditional values like modesty and submission. The headmistress—and founder—of the Muslim school lived in the outlying suburbs and drove to the poor neighbourhood every morning, having dropped off her own daughter at a private co-education school; the Muslim school wouldn’t do for her girl but was good enough for “these” people. While her own daughter sang about the pussy cat that went to London to see the Queen, the girls at the Muslim school sang,
Fatima,
Fatima, where have you been? I’ve been to the mosque with Nur-ud-Deen.

Suraya had resented being sent to the Muslim girls’ school, but that was just a young person’s petulance, she knows now. She is glad her mother took her out of the co-education school and sent her to a place where they taught her to fear and love Allah, made her think of the afterlife—saved her soul.

Yes, she will tell him about the Sikh boy: it would be another layer of sympathy for Shamas to view her through. But, of course, she can always use the girl who was buried today: Shamas has told her how he had seen her in the company of a Hindu boy—a conversation about those two secret lovers can be easily steered towards Suraya’s own forbidden love. And now once again she is ashamed and distressed at how she is having to exploit the dead to free herself from her predicament. She holds her head in her hands as she remembers that the exorcist had made the poor girl urinate on to an electric heater so that she fainted from the shock she received.

She realizes that a wet scrap of paper—obviously part of the torn letter she found bobbing on the water earlier—has been sticking to the side of her neck from when she washed herself in the lake: on the piece a whole sentence is legible, undissolved—

They say that the heart is the first organ to form and the last to die.

A clock’s three strikes spread across the lake’s surface like ripples. She should awaken him and drive him home. This much time away from home can just be explained—
a
group of us men got together and ended up
talking after Nusrat’s performance
—but he cannot be away from home all night. She remembers how she used to lie awake at night when her husband went out drinking, every sound in the night making her think a ghost was about, that the djinns were abroad, or that he had arrived home intoxicated at last, each thought filling her with more dread than the last.