Maps for Lost Lovers (36 page)

“Do you know what the matchmaker said to me back in spring, after I rejected every prospect she had presented me with? I said none of them were good enough for me, but she smiled and said, ‘On the contrary, my haughty and proud beauty. I have a feeling that you want someone to whom you could feel superior. You feel that these
are
too good for you.’ I wonder if there was an element of truth in what she said.”

“Forget about all of that and try to think reasonably about the
future
now.”

“The future? I fear that if I stay away from my son for too long one day I’ll be told that he remembers me only when he is reminded of me by others, coaxed into thinking about me.” And then she says suddenly, “My Allah, Shamas, why didn’t you stop me just now when I was talking so disrespectfully of Islam? What is wrong with me sometimes? And you make it possible for me to think and talk like that: now I know what your wife means when she says your talk led Charag, Mah-Jabin, and Ujala astray.” She buries her face in her hands. “What would Allah think of my disrespectful talk? My being apart from my son and husband is a punishment from Him. Oh you don’t know how much I love them.”

“Please don’t cry. And I know how much you love your son and husband: you were willing to turn yourself into a”—he cannot bring himself to call her a prostitute—“into a . . . into . . . one of those women in order to be rejoined with them.”

“A man is allowed four wives, Shamas. You will be in the prayers of all three of us for the rest of our lives. I’ll ask your wife myself, explain my situation to her.”

“No. Don’t even contemplate approaching Kaukab. I am sorry but what you want will never happen.” They sit apart but are alert to each other like animals quivering in a forest. “I won’t marry you on principle: one of the things I find repulsive about Islam is the idea of a man being allowed four wives.”

“Please don’t say such a thing about Islam. Do you want to go to Hell?”

“Not for that, no. And, Suraya, how do you know your husband won’t get blind drunk again and divorce you one more time? He was drunk last night on the phone.”

“He couldn’t have been. He says he’s stopped drinking.”

“He hasn’t. You can’t go back to him. Here’s yet another reason why I won’t do what you say: because I don’t want you to go back to him. He could beat you. Pakistan is not just a wife-beating country, it’s a wife-murdering one: he could
kill
you in one of his drunken rages.”

“Sometimes I feel I’ll welcome death. May Allah forgive my ungrateful-ness. Shamas, let me talk to Kaukab just once . . .”

“No!” The word comes out louder than he intended and she flinches. “Oh no, did he ever hit you when he was drunk? Did he beat you?” He takes her into his arms as the sudden realization dawns on him that he must have. “Where did he hit you, where, where?” He kisses her face repeatedly while she struggles to get away. Her cheeks. Her lips (from between which he had drawn her wet tongue into his mouth, only half an hour before, and held it there while he climaxed inside her like an ewer of milk emptied in one long splash after another). “Here? Did he hit you here?” He kisses her breasts that with an amorous hum at his fingertips he had stroked that first time here at the
Safeena,
her horse-brown nipple, telling her that in a Sanskrit poem a woman’s nipple is described as being so firm
that a teardrop falling on it may rebound as fine spray.
“Here? Here?” But a realization has come to her too now, suddenly:

“My Allah, if you knew the truth when I arrived here this afternoon then why did you kiss me, touch me—
fuck
me? You wanted to dupe me into thinking you didn’t know anything yet, to satisfy your lusts one last time before confronting me. I am sure you would have had an idea by then of how much it had cost me in self-respect every time I lay down with you, and yet you still . . . You vile beast!” She hits his head with her fists again and again, trying to break free. “You monster! You deceived me, you heartless bastard! And you talk of principles!” He clings to her under her weak blows: “I am sorry, I am sorry. I love you.” She buries her nails into his shoulder: “Stop lying, you don’t love me. Otherwise you’ll do what I ask.” And when he says, “Do you think I tell everyone I meet about Jugnu and Chanda, about my poetry, about my father—about my life?” she stops her struggle, letting him tighten his embrace around her, and then lowers her face lifelessly onto the side of his neck where she lets out a howl. Leaning back, he lowers them both to the rug and they lie side by side as though felled by two arrows.

“He couldn’t have been drunk last night, and he says he won’t lift a finger to me in the future. He’s learned his lesson, Shamas. When I moved out of the house after the divorce, living in a rented room, he came to see me every day, repentant, making a long and tiring journey to the city where I was. I had taken a job as a receptionist in a hotel but when the manager fired me, for shaking hands with a male guest, I expected recriminations from my husband, thinking he would doubt my virtue once again, would quote Mohammad—peace be upon him, peace be upon him—who said, ‘He who touches the palm of a woman not legally belonging to him will have red-hot embers put in the palm of his hand on Judgement Day,’ but he believed me when I said that I had forgotten myself for only an instant when I extended that hand to the male guest. He has changed. I trust him and I trust Allah.”

The man on the telephone last night was drunk, but Shamas lets the matter drop for now. “Why didn’t you tell me everything days ago?” The blood in his body had felt brighter over the past few weeks but now he feels each wincing vein losing light moment by moment.

“I didn’t think you cared for me enough yet. I thought I had to . . .
be
with you a few more times.” She’s looking up at the ceiling. “In a way I am glad you found out everything on your own. It’s stopped me from sinning further. I would have gone on sleeping with you for a while longer, not sure how you felt about me yet. And also, you were hope. If I didn’t tell you anything, then I could keep thinking that when I eventually did tell you, your answer would be yes.”

He turns his face to look at her, towards that body that smelt differently in different places, cloaked in a complex veil the way a single flower can produce as many as a hundred chemical compounds, with scents mixing and combining in patterns that change over time, with parts of a blossom smelling differently from other parts, the smells sending out a variety of signals to the visiting insects, one telling them that
This is food,
another that
Eggs may be laid here,
another that
This groove leads to nectar.

He says: “Forgive me for accusing you of manipulating me, because I myself contemplated deception. While lying with you here earlier, making love, I thought for a moment that I wouldn’t tell you this afternoon about your husband’s call, that I’ll wait until you yourself decided to reveal your plan to me at some future date. I knew I’d lose you this very afternoon if I told you I knew what you wanted from me, and that my answer is no. I didn’t want to lose you, your company . . . and, yes, your body.”

She waves her hand in the air: “That’s all over and done with.” And sitting up, she says, “I have to go. What’s your answer?”

“I can’t do what you want. But I
will
help you begin custody proceedings for your son.”

“That’s out of the question.” A look of fear crosses her face. “The case could go on for years, and if I lose they’d never let me see my boy out of vindictiveness. I know of women who have never been allowed near their children. You’ve forgotten what Pakistan is like. I sometimes wonder why my mother sent me to that country.” She’s silent for the next few moments and asks: “Why did you marry
your
daughter Mah-Jabin to someone in Pakistan?”

“It’s complicated . . . She wanted to go . . .”

He wants to touch her—wishing to siphon some of her pain into himself—but knows he’s not allowed; he mustn’t. (For many years now, similarly, every time he touches Kaukab he feels he is committing a sin.) He cannot bear the thought of not being able to see her anymore. In the future how would he know what has become of her (just as he doesn’t exactly know what’s befallen Chanda and Jugnu, where in India his aunt Aarti is)? He tells himself once again to stop being selfish, to stop thinking about the consequences of her departure on his own spirit and inner life. What matters is Suraya and her predicament.

“Please don’t make me look for someone else,” she says. “Please don’t make me humiliate myself with another. Please.”

As though a storm has carried her away, she’ll leave in a while and he’ll never see her again, will be alone with the Cinnabar moth dressed like a woman from the Subcontinent. She’ll vanish from his life, a small figure dressed in blue hurrying through the rain, in the grey, blue-black and white downpour, leaving him behind surrounded by the wallpaper deer in their flame-of-the-forest bowers, out past Scandal Point and then under the high cable that brings electricity to the
Safeena
and is twined this month by the pure-white-flowering bindweed, the arrow-shaped leaves dripping with rain.

“No.”

“Would you like some time to think about it? Ten days, a fortnight?”

“My answer would still be no.”

“Say no
then,
not now. I have ordered the Koh-i-Noors for you: they’ll arrive just in time and I’ll bring them. Meet me here one last time, by our
Safeena,
our Scandal Point. Let’s decide on a day.”

She kisses him on the forehead before leaving. She is a believer, and sex outside marriage is one of the greatest sins in Islam. He has an image of her going home after their meetings and frantically scrubbing herself.

He stands at the window, and the sight of his face—reflected ghostlike on the glass pane—fills him with disgust: she must have loathed him secretly, at what she had to do to regain entry into her real life. How the feel of these hands must have repulsed her! In her eyes he was a beast letting loose his lusts on her flesh. Licking those orchid-sap stains from her breast and thighs. He hates himself for acting like an animal, a bull rejoicing in the cow. Clouding the glass with his breath, he makes himself disappear.

Before she left, she asked to be forgiven for her husband threatening him with violence over the telephone last night; and she said she forgave him for deceiving her earlier this afternoon. But he cannot silence the accusations inside
himself
the way it is said that deer are troubled by the musk that springs from their own bodies, that sometimes, driven insane, they begin to describe circles around themselves, start to run madly in the deserts and the forests in the hope that they may locate the origins of that encircling perfume, that they may discover the reasons why it clings and seems to chase them.

There is dandelion fluff caught in a spider’s web, out there, looking as though the arachnid had taken off a fur stole and hung it in one corner of its dwelling (as little Ujala said once; or was it something he’d read in
The
First Children on the Moon
—he is aware that a part of his consciousness is influenced by his father’s magazine, looking at the world as though it is a bright toy). A lapwing sounds from somewhere around the lake—. . .
bewitched . . . bewitched . . .
The high bindweed has folded its flowers to prevent the rain from diluting their perfume and nectar. Now and then giving a lazy flutter to its brilliant cerise wings, the Cinnabar is still there: the wind has changed direction and the creature is now being lashed by water drops; he goes out and brings it in, placing it on a shelf beside a book with a bluebell-coloured jacket, reminding him also of the blooms of a Pakistani jacaranda tree. The colour of her veil.

There is
nothing
he can do to help her.

There on the opposite shore of the lake, in the dense trees, is where the ghosts of the two murdered lovers are said to wander, calling out to him, aglow, giving out a light without heat like fireflies. Pale eyes change colour soon after death—Caucasian pupils appear a greenish-brown—and he wonders what colour Chanda’s eyes became after her murder, she whose eyes used to change with the seasons. Her ghost’s belly is said to be brighter than the rest of her, an indication that it contains a luminous child, the child that died with her.

Time makes memories of everything. Would he forget Suraya, her memory coming to him only occasionally? But he doesn’t think he has enough time to be able to forget her, because many decades are needed for such processes, and he is too old now. This one will go with him to the grave.

AT SCANDAL POINT

Beside the
Safeena
stands a leafless tree resembling an antler, as though a deer buried there is beginning to emerge free of the earth’s grip, and it is there that Suraya awaits Shamas’s arrival. She shakes order into the garlands printed on her clothing, the August sun blazing around her. How hot it burns. A summer breeze comes in from the lake’s surface, from the sharp slopes of tight purple heather and patches of willow herbs with bright pink light clinging to them.

The agreed hour has come and gone. So his answer is no? But even now there is a vague hope that perhaps he’ll come here eventually— having changed his answer to yes after all. She tries to hold back her tears when she realizes how absurd the thought is. And now, as the drops of sweat slide down her body, activating the nerve-endings, there is a surge of anger: how dare he reject someone as intelligent, beautiful and desirable as her, how dare he not come! And she recriminates herself for her temper—Satan the Stoned-One is aware of her pride and vanity and takes full advantage whenever he can. Yes, you need to be confident and self-possessed in life, but only a little. There are limits you shouldn’t go beyond. There are some substances that are regarded as medicines up to ten drops, but are included in the list of poisons on the eleventh.

Her quick temper is a trait she seems to have passed on to her little son. “Why did you go to that house anyway,” he said last night on the phone. “It’s all your own fault.” Shocked by the authority with which he accused her, she suspected that her mother-in-law had started filling the boy’s head against her. He must hear things around the house and streets all the time too. Had he said something as objectionable and insolent as that to her while she was in Pakistan, she would have slapped him, hard, knocking all the brazenness out of him. When he grows up will he torment her with his accusations, ever wilder, ever more obscene? She shudders. She fumes at his grandmother, and her husband, he who had dared to hit her, beat her. Three days ago, she had found herself fantasizing for a few moments about how delicious it would be to taunt her husband, to torment him, torture him, by giving him all the details of her lovemaking with Shamas, telling him he was a better lover than him. But—she had mused—surely that would jeopardize my getting back together with my son. But then she had come to her senses:
My Allah, Suraya, you love
your husband and are a worshipper of Allah
—
where have such thoughts
come from!