Maps for Lost Lovers (4 page)

His father worked in Lahore and came home to Sohni Dharti, on the banks of the river Chenab—Pakistan’s moon river—only on Saturday nights, walking his sons to school on Monday morning before catching the train to Lahore where he was the editor’s assistant at
The First Children
on the Moon,
an Urdu-language monthly for children that had a Bengali sister-publication in Calcutta and a Hindi-language one in Delhi. Shamas has two brothers—one elder, one younger, Jugnu—but Jugnu was fifteen years younger than Shamas, so Shamas had only one sibling during his school days. “Solve this riddle,” their father would say to the boys as they walked: “
Twelve
or so princesses deep in conversation in their palace, huddledin a circle.
What’s the answer?” He still remembers his delight at being presented with such puzzles. The eye that in the adult sees the rough material for metaphors and similes all around it, comparing one thing with another, that eye was already half open in the child. “An orange!”

Shamas wants to get to the Hindu temple as quickly as he can but the snow makes for hard walking, the air itself an obstacle to be overcome, and he fears he’s catching a chill, having heard himself coughing in the night. A mass of dislodged snow slides rapidly down the tiles of the St. Eustace roof, burying with a subdued thump the beehives that are standing apart from the rest, perhaps waiting to be mended. During June and July, the bees work the many thousand flowers of the lindens that are dotted around the churchyard, and under whose fissured bark Humming-bird Hawk moths may be hibernating now—immigrants from Southern Europe that arrive in vibrating clusters each summer to breed here; their wing-beats are said to produce a sharp-toned noise audible only to children, whose ears can still register the higher pitches.

He goes past Kiran’s house and the house that belongs to the woman who may be a prostitute, continuing along the road with the wild cherry trees, towards the river where the Hindu temple is situated. Someone had once asked him if the prostitute was Indian or Pakistani. She is white: had she been Indian or Pakistani, she would have been assaulted and driven out of the area within days of moving in for bringing shame on her people. And so had Chanda brought shame on her family by living with Jugnu: Chanda and Jugnu—the two missing bodies that were not found in the lake when it was dragged, the lake where the many hearts carved on the poles of the xylophone jetty enclose initials in Urdu and Hindi and Bengali as well as English, and where the colour of the waves is that particular blue grey green found on the edge of a sheet of glass, that bright strip of colour sandwiched between the top and the bottom surface.

In another few hours the surface of the snow would harden to a fragile layer of ice that would give out a knife-on-toast scrape when stepped on, but for now it is still powdery.

He comes to the end of the road through the wild cherry trees and begins to walk along the wider road it gives on to. On its way into the town centre, this road—planted with mighty horse chestnuts on either side, its surface patched like a teenager’s denim jeans with lighter and darker triangles and squares of tarmac—leaps over the river. The temple, dedicated to Ram and Sita, is on the riverbank where in early summer the reeds and flag irises stick out of the water in tight bunches as though being held in fists just below the surface.

Just at the place where the road briefly becomes a bridge, the double-helix of a metal staircase drops down from the footpath to give access to the riverbank thirty feet below. A lepidopterist by profession, Jugnu, keeping himself alert with a flask of the coffee into which he had dropped a curl of orange peel and two green cardamoms, had spent many nights here, standing on the riverbank up to his waist in yellow daisies, calling the moths out of the darkness with his upraised hand, the fingers closing around each creature like the collapsible petals of a flower. They were unable to resist the pull of his raised hand and more and more would arrive out of the black air to spin around it like planets bound to a sun through gravity. Sometimes the three children accompanied him on these nocturnal gathering trips; and during the day the children were often sent out to collect specimens from around the town and across the surround ing countryside, guided by exactly sketched maps, the precisely worded instructions removing every possibility of error.

. . . The greenish-grey twigs of the Guelder Rose tree are angular and
smooth, and the leaves are covered with a silver down. I had pointed one out
to you during the drive to see the beached minke whale last year, so you will
remember the flower heads . . .

. . . Do not be tempted to help the butterfly out of the chrysalis, should you
find one that is about to emerge. It would come out grey if you do. The effort
to split open the chrysalis forces the blood into the wings, imparting colour
and pattern . . .

Once a week, the information about the county’s butterflies and moths was typed up and one of the boys bicycled with the pages to the offices of the local evening newspaper—
The
Afternoon
—where it ran as a column with India-ink illustrations by the elder boy. The typewriter—the keys arranged in rows one above another always reminding Shamas of faces in a school photograph—was bought by Shamas when he arrived in England all those years ago, with the thought that one day soon he would write poetry again, but it had remained unused on the whole until Jugnu came from the United States and began producing his pieces for
The Afternoon.

The river is black as tar against the surrounding snow, a rip in the white scarf tossed down by the sky. Miles downriver, beyond the outskirts of the town, the river passes the ivy-clad ruin of the abbey where the Sikhs ceremonially cast the ashes of their dead into the water; when the practice began a decade or so ago, the inhabitants of the nearby all-white suburb had been outraged, but the bishop had settled the matter by saying he was delighted the site was being put to a spiritual use, rather than the open-air dog lavatory he was sorry to say those who were now complaining had turned it into.

Filled and concealed by snow, a depression in the earth has swallowed his left leg up to the knee, and in pulling himself upright he disinters segments of rowan leaves and red berries, the limb bringing them up to the surface as it emerges from the ground, and there are some blue fish scales, each resembling a boiled sweet sucked down to a sharp sliver between tongue and roof of mouth.

Shamas can see the large pea-green hut that is the Hindu temple, a simple structure set beside the river like something in a join-the-dot book belonging to a very young child, the pine trees reaching towards the sky behind it. Wooden steps lead to the water’s edge from the door.

Nothing untoward appeared to have occurred here.

Icicles are dripping brightly at the edge of the roof, drilling holes in the snow the size of half-penny coins. The pipes must have frozen during the night because Poorab-ji is collecting water from the river to wash his hands, leaning from the lowest step and selecting a wave before holding the lip of the shiny brass
garvi
vessel in its path to let it swirl home. It’s more a wooden path to the river’s edge than a series of steps: wide square treads with very short strips of verticals in between. From there Poorab-ji lifts one earth-covered hand at him in greeting. “I have just buried a goldfinch, Shamas-ji. It broke its neck on that windowpane. See if you can spot where.” Delicate in visage, he is soft-lipped and has a long neck, and like a large number of middle-aged men from the Subcontinent he dyes his hair a startling pure black.

The canopy of each rowan tree growing along the river is perfectly spherical, like a firework exploding in the sky.

“Here.” Poorab-ji has approached and pinpoints the tiny notch the bird’s beak had tapped out on the glass. From his pocket he takes a clumsy rhinestone and fits it into place on the pane, holding his palm under it in case it falls out. “I found it in its beak.”

As an explanation for this unusual visit Shamas relates all that has transpired at the mosque, but Poorab-ji tells him that there has been no incident here since the vandalism back in October which Shamas already knows about. The feuds of the world. The feuds of the world.

And now, suddenly, in a gesture of intimacy Shamas is not prepared for, Poorab-ji gently places his arm around his shoulder:

“This morning I saw a mass of snow that had slid off a roof and was lying in a heap on the ground, and from the distance I thought it was Chanda and Jugnu’s bodies. You cannot know how sorry I am, but at least now we know the truth about what happened to them.”

“The truth?” The steel trap around his heart springs shut.

“You don’t know yet, Shamas-ji?” Poorab-ji’s face over the next few instants is a mirror reflecting his own confusion and dread. “Am I to be the first one to tell you? The police obviously haven’t informed you.”

Shamas looks down and his feet appear far away. “The telephone lines are down.” He has a specific desire to stretch out on the white snow.

Poorab-ji is talking fast: it appears that the police have arrested both of Chanda’s brothers, charging them with the double-murder of their sister and Jugnu.

The almost five months since the lovers disappeared have been months of a contained mourning for Shamas—but now the grief can come out. He is not a believer, so he knows that the universe is without saviours: the surface of the earth is a great shroud whose dead will not be resurrected.

The quails injured in the secret fights organized by some Pakistani and Indian immigrants of the neighbourhood are regularly brought to Poorab-ji, who, threatening to expose the illegal activity each time he receives the damaged birds, nurses them back to health, the turmeric powder on their wounds making them appear as though they have thrashed through clumps of Madonna and Easter lilies, the mango-coloured dust-fine pollen of the flowers coming off on the feathers.

“I have two cock birds in there, and when it began to snow at two o’clock last night I left the house to come here to see that they were warm enough . . . I passed the family’s home . . . There were policemen all around . . .”

Official confirmation of disaster has made Shamas nauseous.

The mind rejects the idea and the body joins in so that the stomach goes into convulsions as though it too has been administered a poisonous substance that must be vomited out. His flesh is armoured in plates of searing heat and the hands burn through the snow like branding irons. There is nothing much in the stomach to be expelled since he has had no breakfast, but the body insists on going through the spasms of gagging, each gruesome surge a prolonged slowed-down hiccup.
We’ll drink from
your veins.
When Chanda had moved in with Jugnu next door—leaving behind the home she shared with her family above the grocery shop they owned—the brothers had threatened revenge to preserve their honour.
We’ll make you lick our injuries.
They had broken in and put out a cigarette in their bed.

But after the disappearance they had denied any knowledge.

Shamas now finds himself on all fours, looking for something, shifting fistfuls of snow so that the area around the wooden hut is grooved and churned a pale lilac-blue, as though by the jabs of an aimless rake. The wind stirs a yellow feather stuck in the whiteness, a wisp of filaments—as bright as something to be found in a bazaar—that had belonged to the bird which had died with a diamond in its beak. Each melting icicle drills a hole in the snow the size of a half-penny piece, a coin now discontinued and missed so badly by Shamas in this moment of madness that it now represents all that has gone away never to return, his mind convincing itself that to be able to locate just one of those copper discs small enough to fit in a doll’s purse would solve every difficulty in life. The skin peels away from his fingers in strips of accordioned rice-paper as his hands dig the ground in their urgent search for a worthless bit of metal that has suddenly become the price of sanity.

“I should never have let him out of my sight,” he hears himself say; these were the words of Kiran when she returned dazed from Pakistan all those years ago, having been turned away from Karachi airport. “I should never have let him out of my sight,” he repeats.

Poorab-ji convinces him to be still and he closes his eyes in order to conquer his turmoil and, drained, leans his head against the temple wall, unaccountably thinking about the night that Great Peacock moths had hatched in the blue-walled kitchen, letting himself imagine the likely sequence of events after they had emerged from the cocoons. Their search for a way out of themselves finally over, the nineteen males had hatched in the blue kitchen during the night and, still damp from the chrysalis, fluttered into the adjoining drawing room where the vase Shamas had brought from Pakistan in the 1950s—as a reminder of home—was on the glass table arranged with sprays of yolk-coloured mimosa, the fine layer of dust he had picked the vase out of all those years ago continuing to cry out across the years with an agonised O for it to be put back exactly where it had been set by his mother’s hand.

As large as a bat, with wings made of deep-paprika velvet and a necktie of white fur, a moth looped the thready globes of the mimosa, but food wasn’t what it sought as it had no mouth and was born to die; it alighted on a guava that had leaves and stalk attached to the crown as though it had been picked in a hurry, and then flew out of the strawberry-pink drawing room with its eighteen companions, arriving in the kitchen again.

The absolute darkness was light enough for them and with passionate impatience they floated up the stairwell to the Leningrad-yellow room where Shamas slept beside Kaukab.

Their tufted antennae questioning the air, they lingered indecisively above Kaukab—she who remembers even today the morning a butterfly had tried to lay eggs in her plait, drawn by the scent of the oil she applies to her hair—and she opened her eyes in the darkness for an instant or two, more asleep than awake, and sharply expelled air from her nostrils three times, because the Prophet had said, “If any of you wakes up at night, let him blow his nose three times. For Satan spends the night in a man’s nostrils.”