Maps for Lost Lovers (37 page)

She hears a sound nearby and looks up, her heart full of hope, but it’s only the wind brushing past the reeds.

She’s dizzy from the sun. The thought suddenly panics her that Shamas has been waylaid by some friends of her husband’s.
My Allah, he’s lying in
a ditch somewhere, dead to the world.

Her hands tremble, the Koh-i-Noor pencils rattling slightly in their box.

No, no, Shamas is not lying somewhere, dead or dying
—she reassures herself, with no cause for this optimism but the compassion of Allah.

But now, once again, there’s anger: what if he hasn’t come to any harm but has rather become afraid that he
might
be beaten up by her husband’s friends, and has not come to see her out of cowardice?

The anger at him is such that it makes her want to go to his house immediately. But, suddenly restored to sanity now, she knows that she must resist the impulse—any confrontation would endanger her chances of being accepted by Kaukab. Over the past four days she has found herself circling his house at odd hours, but every time she has remained clearheaded enough to withdraw. Once she caught a glimpse of the woman who must be Kaukab.

She recognized the roses and the jasmine in Kaukab’s front garden: they were added to the bath water in which was washed the corpse of the girl beaten to death by the exorcist.

Another sound and Suraya tells herself not to look up and have her hopes smashed again—
he’s
not coming, Suraya, but you are a strong and
resourceful woman: with Allah’s help you will cope with anything: You don’t
need Shamas
—but her resolve fails within seconds . . .

LEOPOLD BLOOM AND THE KOH-I-NOOR

Semen was found on the mosque floor late last evening.

It’s almost a year since Chanda and Jugnu disappeared. This time last year they were in Pakistan. Shamas looks down at his own and the missing couple’s house, from the slope at the back, at the base of which the narrow lane and the stream are. Here the ground rises to form an angled backdrop of sycamores and hawthorns that throw shadows through every back window at sunrise, the earth here deep with zigzagging twigs, green and scarlet berries, mouldy winged samara and rain-rusted leaves lying under the trees like
The Moral:
at the bottom of a fable. The scent of hawthorns in bloom in May is as thick inside the house as out, the air drowsily astir in summer with the weightless seeds of the poodle-tail dandelion clocks.

Yesterday morning—a few hours before his meeting with Suraya—he went into the mosque to consult the cleric about Muslim divorce laws, to see if there was any possible way out for Suraya other than having to marry someone and obtain a divorce from him. The cleric wasn’t in the building, though children were chanting their lessons. Shamas thought he might be upstairs and was moving towards the stairs when he heard a child’s cry from behind a closed door. “Uncle, I don’t want to.” He went into the room and saw one of the junior clerics, a bachelor in his fifties, with his erect penis in a child’s mouth.

Shamas shouted out and grabbed the man. Soon every official of the mosque was in the room and Shamas was told respectfully to go home, that the matter would be handled by the mosque. He left, insisting the man should be handed to the authorities, but by early afternoon, as the time approached for him to travel to Scandal Point to meet Suraya, concerned that the police had not approached him for a statement, he returned to the mosque only to discover that nothing had been done.

He came home and called the police himself to report the assault: he had to wait for an officer to visit the house. He would make it to her just in time, he reassured himself—but when the police did arrive he couldn’t get away from their questioning and procedures.

As the investigative process got under way, other details emerged of previous assaults on children involving the same man. A group of mothers had, two months before, confronted mosque officials, saying the man had assaulted their children, but they were told that the scandal would give Islam and Pakistan a bad name, that the man would be prevented from doing it again, that if the police got involved and shut down the mosque no one would teach their sons to stay away from the whore-like white girls, and that their own daughters would run away from home and wouldn’t want to marry their cousins from back home, that the Hindus and the Jews and the Christians would rejoice at seeing Islam being dragged through the mud. Some of the men had just laughed at the women and told them to go away and get the dinner ready for their husbands; others were even more contemptuous and told them to stop cackling like hens in the place of worship, adding that a woman should be a creature of the home and the night, and had no place outside in the world of men.

The mosque denied any attempt to cover up the man’s activities. “This is the house of God and if anyone had known about it, it would not have been tolerated,” the cleric said to the police. “The females say they complained—but then they get excited over everything and are not very intelligent, they don’t know what they are saying.”

There was no way for Shamas to contact Suraya and arrange to meet elsewhere. It was early evening by the time he was free: and by then it was too late. He tried to telephone her several times but there was no answer: she was either not at home or chose not to answer.

Police were sure that the samples they took from the floor of the room in which Shamas came upon that terrible scene were the assaulter’s semen.

He was devastated that she got his final answer in such a cruel manner, and he has been wondering whether he should try to contact her again today—just to explain his non-appearance. But, surely, a telephone call from him now would raise her hopes for the first few seconds as she hears his voice. And then he’ll have to dash them again.

He doesn’t know what to do. He stands still, unwilling to move any muscles, almost believing himself to be a column of separate parts that would scatter at the smallest movement or vibration.

She had said: “I had to degrade myself with you. In our religion there is no other way for me to be united with my beloved son.” She of course regretted the first thing, not the second: a system conditions people into thinking that
it
is never to blame, is never to be questioned.
We have to
beg,
say the beggars,
the accursed belly demands food:
it is the fault of the belly, not the unjust world that doesn’t allow enough sustenance to reach the bellies of everyone through dignified means.

He climbs down into the back lane, carefully leaping over the stream, and goes into Jugnu’s back garden. The deep blue of a peacock’s neck, a denim jacket of Jugnu’s was washed by Chanda and hung out to dry in May last year: a wren began building a nest in one of its pockets and the garment was allowed to remain on the line, Shamas taking it off only in October, removing from the pocket the small bowl constructed of one dead leaf each of maple and sycamore, one of elm, which he recognized due to its lopsided nature—one-half bigger than the other—and three leaves from the apple foliage; there were dandelion whiskers, and several consecutive layers of spiders’ web trying to separate which was like pulling apart a sheet of two-ply tissue paper or entering a well-starched shirt. There was a piece of the purple thread that Kaukab had used to sew a
kameez
a few months earlier. The earth around him was covered with yellow leaves being dropped by the trees, the edges of everything giving out pulses of sunlight because last night the glint-slippered frosts were abroad. Berries, like chewy pearls, were everywhere. And no one knew where Chanda and Jugnu were.

Shamas crosses over into his own back garden, thinking about Suraya waiting for him at Scandal Point, beside the
Safeena,
holding the Koh-i- Noor pencils in her hand. Years ago at the
Safeena,
while he was sitting in convivial geniality with the shop’s owner, both locked in a habit of concentrated silence, a recently read paragraph or poem always in their heads like tealeaves releasing flavour in two cups of hot water, Jugnu had come in with a butterfly net to ask if there was an Urdu-language
Ulysses:
“A moth circles the light in the brothel sequence. I wonder which Urdu word for moth they would use—
parvana
or the more prosaic
patanga
?” Shamas said he remembered a path by Browning
where lichens mock the marks on
a moth, and small ferns fit their teeth to the polished block,
but he didn’t recall a moth in the Circe chapter of
Ulysses.
“Are you sure you are not thinking of the kisses that flutter about Bloom in Nighttown?
He stands
before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers, fly
about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.
” Jugnu joined in with a laugh of pleasure: “
They
rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks,
silvery sequins.
Yes, but there is an
actual
moth in that chapter also. Bloom wears the Koh-i-Noor diamond on the fingers of his right hand at one point in that chapter.”

“I cannot think of anyone more appropriate than him to have that jewel,” Shamas had said.

And now he goes into the kitchen through the back door, and moves towards the pink room in order to consult the Urdu
Ulysses.
“
Parvana
or the more prosaic
patanga
?” he mutters and looks up to discover that Suraya is sitting in there with Kaukab.

They are looking at a photograph of Ujala, and Kaukab has obviously just told Suraya something about the boy, because Suraya says, “I wish I could say something to make you feel better.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kaukab says. “My wounds aren’t the kind that heal easily.”

They hear him come in and both stand up, Suraya looking him squarely in the eyes.

“And this must be your husband.”

Kaukab smiles at Shamas. “This is Perveen. I saw her admiring my roses from the footpath and we ended up talking. We have been sitting here for about an hour and a half, finishing off the strawberries I bought yesterday.” She indicates the two bowls on the coffee table, swirled pink and white with the cream and berry juice. “We even said our prayers together.”

Perveen. Shamas had told Suraya that her name was the Persian word for the constellation of Pleiades, the Seven Sisters: “As is the other common girl’s name—Perveen.”

“She just moved into the area two days ago,” Kaukab tells him.

“Now,” Kaukab turns once again to Suraya, waving Shamas away, overexcited by the company she has found unexpectedly this afternoon, “I must tell you about Mah-Jabin. She’s sitting over there in America as we speak, wearing immodest Western clothes, no doubt.”

But Shamas remains where he is, trying to understand what she is doing here. His heart beats so loudly he fears his eardrums will split.

“You said earlier that you had sent Mah-Rukh, sorry, Mah-
Jabin,
to Pakistan to marry. Why?”

“Well, I feel I can tell you these things, Perveen, but you must promise not to tell anyone. What happened was that Mah-Jabin fell in love with a boy when she was young, and when he married someone else, well, she insisted on being sent to Pakistan.”

Suraya lifts her eyes towards Shamas for the briefest of moments, and then looks back to Kaukab: “You are right: it
is
complicated.”

“Such a nice boy she married, but she abandoned him.” Kaukab’s eyes fill up with tears. “He wrote to her earlier this year, but when she came home for a visit, way way back at the beginning of spring, she threw the letter away—unopened. Imagine, Perveen! I must show you a photograph of his. I used to keep it here in this room but then I put it away upstairs because it pained me too much to think how my daughter had pained him.” And now suddenly she turns to Shamas: “My Allah, Shamas, we forgot to tell you that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has just died. Perveen just told me.”

“Yes,” Suraya says to Shamas. “A woman went by, weeping out in the street, and I asked what the matter was.”

Is she lying? Is “Nusrat’s death” a coded way for her to refer to their first night together and how nothing came of it eventually? Is she here to torment him?

“And Meena Shafiq rang me just now to let me know,” says Kaukab.

The news is genuinely devastating: “Who will sing about the poor, now?” he whispers in shock.

“And about the women,” says Suraya—his whispers are audible to her.

“And in praise of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him?” adds Kaukab.

Shamas looks at Suraya: “How did it happen?” He is troubled by how familiar she already is to him in the surroundings of his house. He shifts his gaze to Kaukab: “How did it happen?”

“In a hospital, hooked up to a dialysis machine.”

“Probably unsterilized equipment,” he thinks out loud. “The hospitals there . . .”

Kaukab is immediately indignant: “I knew you would find some way of badmouthing Pakistan in all this.” She turns to Suraya: “See, Perveen, this was what I was talking about when I said he had turned my children against me.” She stands up, almost in tears. “I’ll go and get that photograph of Mah-Jabin’s husband. You’ll see for yourself how handsome he is, Perveen, and then you’ll agree with me that it was totally unreasonable of Mah-Jabin to leave him. I’ll let you decide.”

Shamas enters the room the moment Kaukab goes into the staircase: “What are you doing here?”

“I had to see you.”

“Are you sitting here making fun of her, a foolish old woman?”

“I don’t think she’s foolish in the least. Do
you
?”

She takes a step towards him but then they both hear Kaukab’s voice from the stairs: “I have just remembered that the photograph is actually down there, hidden in one of the books.”

In the time it takes for Kaukab to re-enter the pink room, Suraya quickly hands him an envelope—the faint rattle tells him that it contains a small box of Koh-i-Noor pencils. He pockets it and she whispers, “Come to the
Safeena
at dawn tomorrow, please.” Her voice glows with emotion, a voice reeling with contrasts, at once caressing and corrosive.