Maps for Lost Lovers (35 page)

The girl stops what she’s doing, all life gone from her hands which she rests on the fruit, and then decides to speak her mind. “I shouldn’t have left?” she says angrily. “You lot who have legal status in a rich country don’t know how lucky you are!”

Chanda’s sister-in-law is taken aback. “I am sorry, I just wondered whether you wanted to go back after making some money.”

But the girl doesn’t seem to be listening. She looks at Chanda’s sister-in-law with fury. “You don’t understand what things are like back there for most of us.” One balloon had slipped from the hands of the little girls and is floating against the ceiling above them, slowly drifting. She gives it a contemptuous glance. “Freedom for Kashmir, indeed. Pakistan can’t afford to feed the people it already has within its borders, and yet it wants more people, a bigger territory. The same goes for India of course.”

“Someone was just handing those balloons out on the street,” says Chanda’s sister-in-law, trying to placate her. “And I didn’t mean to offend you by what I said.” She knows she must give the impression of agreeing with the girl’s opinions. “Every other day there is news of a group of illegal immigrants meeting a disastrous end.Those bastard prime ministers and presidents and generals—both Indian and Pakistani—they should see what people have to go through to reach a place where they can earn a decent living. They should ask those people whether they want freedom in Kashmir or a chance to live with safety and with food in our bellies in their own country.”

No longer enraged, the girl says quietly, “They should’ve seen how the group I was with came to this country, how we ran through snow, were fired on, across border after border after border, abused, slapped.”

Chanda’s sister-in-law takes the bag the girl has been filling and begins to add heaps of red strawberries into it. “You hear about such things every day—people wading through filthy sewers and flooded rivers, leaving dead or dying people behind on mountainsides to be picked at by crows and vultures.” She leans closer: “Now listen, you are a Pakistani and so am I. It’s my duty to help you. If you need anything . . .”

But the girl is staring past her shoulder with disbelief in her eyes. Chanda’s sister-in-law turns around and the bag of strawberries falls from her hand as she watches the building collapse several miles away in the distance. With a soundless shout the girl pushes her away and begins to run towards the door. She shouts again, failing once again to produce noise, as though her words are unable to cut the air. She runs along the road that will take her to her destroyed home, the locket leaping around her neck. There are several people outside the shop and since some customers have also entered the premises, Chanda’s sister-in-law cannot go after her, which would obviously hint at some connection between her and the girl. She watches her disappear from her life. She lets out a moan at the opportunity she has just lost.

“Now what
have
I come out for?” says the woman who is standing at the counter, thinking aloud. “I am so forgetful. If I don’t lose more things it must be because my belongings have some determination of their own to stick by me.” Her daughter—dressed in a sparkly orange frock, the colour of Irn-Bru—pulls at her veil and tells her she wants two ice-lollies, one strawberry, one lime, but is told to behave herself or she’ll be given away to a white person who’ll make her eat pork and drink alcohol and not
wash
her bottom after going to the toilet—forcing her to use
only
toilet paper. The child is disturbed by the horrors disobedience can lead to and agrees to accept only one lolly, moving towards one of the glass coffins and looking in, chin resting on the edge of the freezer.

Chanda’s sister-in-law comes and stands behind the counter, smiles emptily at the customer. Presented with all the choices below the Perspex sheet, the customer’s little girl forgets the white horrors and lifts two lollies out after all. The mother sees this and shouts: “If you don’t behave, I’ll not only give
you
away to the whites, I’ll give away your brother too. They’d make sure he doesn’t learn to drive when he grows up and has to sit in the passenger seat while
you
drive. Do you
want
a eunuch like that for a brother? House
husbands,
if you please! The mind boggles at the craziness of this race.” Visibly disturbed, the girl shakes her head and puts the lime back. The mother, meanwhile, has spotted another example of bad upbringing: “Oi, you,” she shouts at the boy wearing the green shirt of Pakistan’s Cricket World Cup team, “I am talking to you, whoever you are. Yes, you, green. It is not a cupboard, it’s a fridge. Decide what you want first and
then
open it.” She shakes her head at Chanda’s sister-in-law: “The way he was just standing there taking his time, the cut-price Imran Khan. You are too kind, sister-ji, letting them get away with murder.” She narrows her eyes: “Just tell me it was him who scattered those strawberries on the floor over there and see how I teach him to clean up after himself, I don’t care whose son he is.”

“I’ll clear that myself,” Chanda’s sister-in-law says quietly, unable to stop thinking about the lost girl. The leaves of the strawberry plants are hairy like grape foliage, reminding her of the vines that used to grow in her childhood home in Pakistan. Her father had planted them but her mother always complained of the leaves they dropped on her clean floor. When he fell ill she saw her chance and cut them down. She was halfway through when suddenly the courtyard was filled with about a dozen sun-birds, screeching and circling the fallen arbour. They had fed on the grapes and had probably made nests somewhere under the large leaves. The girl with the locket had been like that minutes ago; you grieve in that manner only when your home is destroyed. In his room her father screamed and waved his hands in the air like birds above his bed but her mother kept axing and sawing.

The sister-in-law looks at the column of dust rising towards the sky in the distance, like a battle between djinns in the desert.
We’ll find another
suitable young woman
—she tells herself.

CINNABAR

Shamas waits for Suraya at the
Safeena,
the interior filled with the previous six-hours’-worth of midsummer heat and with the odour of paper and ink. Today was one of those hot days that are a reminder that the world is powered by the sun. But the first thunderstorm of the summer has begun, the raindrops coming down fast. It looks as though the heat and the sunlight would be scrolled up and put away for the next few hours, the shower washing away the constellation-like hopscotch grids that the children had drawn on the pavements.

He stands at the window and watches the Cinnabar moth that’s sheltering against the pane on the other side; its forewings are the darkish brown of milk chocolate with markings in an arresting red, one of those vibrating shades that you can get drunk on by just looking, but the hind wings are entirely red. He remembers Jugnu smiling and saying the Cinnabar have been paying attention to the way Pakistani and Indian women dress: the upper body is covered with the
kameez
-shirt which is made of a fabric printed with designs—flowers, geometric shapes—while the
shalwar
-trousers single out one of the main colours of the
kameez.

The rain sounds like the stridulating of grasshoppers. Bubbles— nothingness lightly wrapped around nothingness—dot the lake’s surface out there. He blinks and now Suraya is running along the edge of the lake, her veil blowing about her, and she smiles at him as she spots him in the window, strands of her hair and the red-silk scarf rising up into the air behind her, the scarf that she must love so much, wearing it as she does all the time. The water and the afternoon sky and the stones visible in the shallower parts of the lake are all grey, blue-black, white, and in those shallow areas the mosses too look dark, those long emerald-green and slimy strands which trailed between the toes of his children like thongs of delicate sandals when they paddled in the water with the hems rolled up.

She lets out a surprised cry when he moves forward into the rain and takes her into his arms, the rain falling on them both. With a laugh she pulls away from his kiss and brings them both into the shelter of the
Safeena,
the world out there gleaming as though just finished and taken off the easel.

“I looked but couldn’t find the gold Koh-i-Noor pencils that I said I’d get you so you could begin writing poetry again,” she says, shaking water drops out of her hair.

But with quick speed he takes off her clothes, the dusty and stained lampshade filling the interior with yellowish candle-warm light, her skin the colour of paled jasmine. On her elbows on the snake-and-ladders rug, her lips married to his, she suddenly lets her head loll back away from him, disengaging their mouths, and he goes down past her navel to the pubis. His abruptness and speed make her release a sound of surprise and protest occasionally but then her breathing stills like a river and the pairs of deer in their red flame-of-the-forest bowers on the walls turn their necks to look at her.

“Your husband telephoned last night.”

She has been rearranging the clothing she’s put back on, and turns to face him only after several seconds. It’s as though the true meaning of what he’s just said becomes clear to her very slowly like a bubble rising in honey. “I love my son, my dear dear son, and my husband, Shamas,” she says weakly.

“When you decided to sleep with me the first time, was that a kind of down-payment? Giving me a glimpse of what was to come if I married you?”

She steps up to him, and her hand moves several times towards his shoulder, to touch him, but she withdraws it in the end. “Allah placed you in my path that morning on the bridge to help me when you retrieved my scarf. I knew you were a good man . . .”

“Someone easy to manipulate?”

“I had no choice. I would do anything for my son and husband. Love is the only thing that inspires boldness in a woman.”

“I thought you were being bold because of what you felt for me, while all the time you were just boldly degrading yourself for the love of your husband and son.”

“A man is allowed four wives simultaneously, Shamas. You could . . .”

“Had you worked out all the details? What was the plan?”

“I swear by my eyesight that there was no real plan. I eventually wanted to tell you everything.”

“Let’s leave love aside—I am no fool—but did you even like me or care for me a little?”

She looks away, but then says with sudden rancour in her voice:

“Did
you
have a plan: what did you think the outcome of our meetings would be? Were you going to leave your wife for me?” She seems to think that she shouldn’t expect from him a song—a lament—about the suffocations of marriage and the heroic defiance involved in refusing its hypocrisies, because she continues: “I know without you having told me that your wife is the most important fact of your life. I made decisions in a dazed state just like you.” She continues in a more amenable tone: “Shamas, you know that a man can have more than one wife . . .”

Yes, he knows that. A man came to Muhammad and said he was unhappy. The Prophet advised him to get married. He returned some time later, married, but still complaining of unhappiness. Muhammad said, “Get married again.” The man was back after a while, twice married—and happy.

“I know you are angry, Shamas. Don’t think I didn’t care for you—I haven’t slept with anyone besides my husband.”

“I am just trying to understand what you were doing. How were you hoping to have me divorce you after the marriage?”

“I didn’t think that far ahead. I didn’t know what I was doing then just as I don’t know what I am doing now. I close my eyes and wish all of it into non-existence, beginning with me going to the house of the enemy that day in Pakistan. I walk around missing my son, my husband, mourning my mother, begging forgiveness from Allah for committing sin with you, and, yes, I ask Him to forgive me for deceiving you.”

“I don’t think you are to blame. And don’t forget you went to that house to save that young girl’s life.” He turns towards her where she’s lowered herself onto the rug beside him: he touches the edge of her veil.

“I wonder sometimes about my motives. It was perhaps all vanity on my part. I wanted to be the centre of attention in that small restricted place, wishing people would think I was brave enough to save a girl’s life, exposing the criminal acts of her uncle, and, perhaps, even bringing an end to a decades-old feud. Maybe all this is Allah punishing me for my pride and vanity. I was so tired of living in that little place, I wanted to be looked at, appreciated, wanted stimulation.”

“These are very human failings. Don’t feel bad.”

She talks on in a low monotone: “I could speak English, I was quite pale-skinned, I had more knowledge of certain things than anyone else in that village. I pretended to be superior at times. That my mind had access to the higher secrets of life was, of course, a charade, a pretence.” She gives a little laugh to ridicule herself. “Knowledge! I was corralled up in that wretched third-rate Islamic school for most of my learning years, committing to memory the names of all the Prophet’s wives. I know how pedestrian my intellect and my understanding of life really are, how basic and limited my knowledge of life is. I was—
am
—terrified of having my ignorance exposed whenever I talked to someone who is
really
educated, someone like you.”

“I don’t know anything.”

She ignores him again, “Of course I
could
have been something. But to become that would have required long demanding work, a life dedicated to the pursuit of it—”

“And even then nothing is guaranteed.”

“I liked the look of awe and admiration on my husband’s face when I quoted—not always accurately—something from one of the poems I knew because, yes, it flattered me a little, and then the very next moment I was filled with shame and disgust, because I know no one acquires real knowledge because of
vanity.
”

“Don’t torment yourself like that.”