Maps for Lost Lovers (40 page)

“Now,” says the second new man, his face pitted around the mouth, scars from the beard of acne he must’ve had as an adolescent, “is it fair that you wish to deny
other
families the service your
own
family contemplated using not long ago? Why are you trying to blacken our name, asking awkward questions through your office? We are but humble slaves of our community.”

The more the man talks the more terrible it is for Shamas. Once again, and for an instant, he thinks this isn’t really happening, that his total disbelief will presently set reality straight and make these men vanish. He looks at the talking man’s empty hands as they are balled into fists that are now being aimed at his face, his head, his ribs. The newspapers fall from his grip. The other men join in with blows of their own. When he cries out in pain, they hit him harder, on the kidneys and belly, and he does not know where to put his hands. A metal finger ring grazes his face and the pain is as though a line had been drawn on his face in sulphuric acid.

The blows came harder and faster but then, as though he is being hit by a single person, they begin to come after measured pauses, the men deciding, calculating carefully where to hit him before doing so—they are obviously people who understand the reality of violence and inflicting pain.

He can no longer breathe through his nose and as he lies there, the newspapers, torn or whole, scattered all around him, he feels a mouth draw close to his face and say,

“This is just a mild warning. Next time we’ll deal with you in a Pakistani way. Watch out or I’ll crush you like this”—he makes a fist and squeezes it tighter—“and lick you off the palm of my hand.”

“And don’t go to the police about this—unless you want people to find out about what you have spent the whole summer doing with that whore of a woman at the bookshop.”

Another voice adds, “In that small room it must’ve been hot as a pistol that’s just been fired but, no doubt, the sweat these two worked up kept them cool.”

“He said earlier he had to be somewhere. Maybe the dirty shameless bitch is waiting for him over there as we speak, her fat tits at the ready, the knot of her
shalwar
’s drawstring loosened.”

There is the sound of laughter. “Perhaps we should go and see.”

“Look at him. He’s trying to growl at us. I think we are hurting his feelings by talking about her in this manner. She’s obviously so pure that angels can use her clothing as prayer mats. In fact that
is
why she’d take off her clothes and put them on the floor—to let the angels praise Allah on them—while he shoved his cock in her mouth or got her arsehole ready with fingers dipped in oil.”

One of Shamas’s eyes is looking into the ground and the men vacate the second eye’s view, moving away. There is a red pricking in both his eyes, both have caught a fresh glimpse of the humiliations Suraya went through with him in order to be united with son and husband. How she must have loathed him during the hours she spent with him, he who was under the impression that she was with him out of her own choice, had yet to be told the truth about her circumstances by her!

He lies there with an ear pressed to the ground (down there where Chanda and Jugnu are turning into clay) as though trying to listen out for something, as though he’s a traveller in a fairytale who’s heard someone call out to him while he was crossing a forest, someone buried alive by a sorcerer who will be freed and jump out of the hole when the traveller digs deep enough.

He feels the sun creep up on him. Someone with a stick-crazy dog will come upon him soon, he reassures himself; those animals and their masters are constantly taking each other places, the dogs’ fur covered in inch-long bits of grass like wrong-coloured stitches on a garment; the dogs wrapping their leads around their owners, revolving and describing circles like a lighthouse’s beam. Or one of those figures he always sees from a distance, busy with a boat and its triangular sail at the edge of the water, their legs spread like a wishbone, ripples of breeze running across the material of the sail like the flank of a cow twitching away flies, in Pakistan.

Shamas lies on the grass after the voices of his assailants have receded into the distance, the newspapers rustling around in the descending silence, touching his skin, a ripped-up piece dyed crimson red with blood—his, for he can taste the salt in his mouth. He cannot keep his eyes open and feels very sleepy all of a sudden, very tired, eyes heavy and unable to focus. He makes an effort to move his legs but is unable to and closes his eyes . . .

And then with a great lunge of effort, like a hosepipe whipping into an arc of frenzy as water enters it at great pressure, he makes his body stand upright in tearing eagerness, jerking his head up away from the ground with a burst of energy: in a congestion of tender impulses, he tells himself that they are definitely on their way to harm Suraya—she who is so gentle and careful that she touches everything as though it were a part of her— and he must stop them.

Suddenly life matters again.

He can see the three of them walking towards the car and is surprised that he hasn’t been lying here for longer. He limps after them in enthusiastic dizziness, everything a blur and everything perfectly clear. His progress wavers because he cannot walk in a straight line. He has to alter his direction every other second to bring them to the centre of his vision. They slide in and out of view periodically, in unexpected directions and diagonals. He drops and picks up again the torn bundle of newspapers that he had obviously felt compelled to collect and bring with him, not wishing to waste them, not having any memory of the time he made the decision to gather them up from around him before setting out. Perhaps he has vomited—his breath smells—but he has no memory of that either.

He steadies himself and moves towards them like a bubble flowing helplessly towards a drain. His heart clubbing away inside, he is not sure whether he is groaning but they do become aware of him eventually and stop and turn around.

AUTUMN

IRIS’S WINGS

Kaukab feels herself being watched from above.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that whenever a man’s earthly wife makes difficulties for him, his seventy-two houri wives—waiting for him up there in Paradise—sigh regretfully. If ever her man wishes to copulate with the earth wife and she makes excuses or shuns him, the houri wives curse her all night.

The houris reserved for Shamas are cursing Kaukab from up there, because she has just stumbled out of the room where Shamas is lying, a month after his beating. Twenty-five of the past thirty days he has spent in hospital. He still gets delirious sometimes and has attempted to undress her just now, asking her to touch him between the legs, fondling her breasts, wanting her to show him the scattering of moles on her upper thighs that he loves. More than once over the previous weeks while she was visiting him at the hospital, he asked her—in delirium—how she feels about another baby. And several times he called out to someone or something called “Pleiades.” And twice he tried to struggle out of the hospital bed saying, “I have something urgent to attend to at Scandal Point.” The one in Shimla?

She has of course refused him intimacy before, but each time she has pretended—yes, pretended, she admits tearfully—that it was not a sexual advance, a request for access to her body, and has therefore remained relatively free of guilt, and free of the fear of Allah’s retribution, but the recent touches and caresses have been explicit.

Shamas is bruised everywhere on the surface and there are innumerable internal injuries, the doctors saying he is lucky to be alive, and his fae ces has been quite liquid like bird droppings since the attack that he has failed to explain to anyone, not remembering anything about it, some people in the neighbourhood saying that without doubt the perpetrators belonged to Chanda’s family, that it is their revenge for the fact that, come December, their sons are facing a life sentence because of Shamas’s brother.

A woman from the neighbourhood—who recently has been accompanying Kaukab to the gynaecologist because Kaukab has reached that age where her womb is slipping out of her vagina and must be either surgically removed or stitched back to the inner lining of her body—said, “When I heard the news my heart was as a porcelain plate dropped from a high terrace. May these bad times be short-lived and Allah take you both into His compassion once again soon.”

She has just given him lunch and is now bringing the tray downstairs, the plate glowing in the enclosed staircase: it is part of an old set and she knows that bone china is partly bone, and goes yellow with age due to the phosphorus in the bones. That afternoon a month ago, when he came home clutching tattered newspapers to himself, he looked as though he’d been in a room full of glass cases when an earthquake had struck, and that those cases had contained venomous snakes. His face was swollen and when she saw him there was a split-second of confusion as to his identity before she recognized him—by his clothing. He was dribbling as though an egg had just cracked in his mouth.

Her womb—the first dress of her daughter, the first address of her sons—is a constant source of pain these days and she comes down the stairs carefully. She tells herself that she must bear up patiently, that a person is like a tealeaf: drop it into boiling water if you want to see its true colour. She reads verses from the Koran when the pain looks as though it is about to increase.

By the white forenoon
And the brooding night!
Thy Lord has neither forsaken thee
Nor hates thee.

Since midmorning there has been a distant buzz in the air from the grass-cutting machines at work on the meadow-like slopes behind the house. The wildflowers there are receiving their second cut of the year, and, all afternoon, a scent which is a compound of sap and shredded petals has been swirling down the hill, having a leavening effect on the atmosphere.

She’ll make some rice pudding for Shamas this afternoon because he has asked for something sweet, and goes to check that there are pistachios in the cupboard. And maybe she should taste Shamas’s food— despite the fact that it is Ramadan and she’s fasting—to make sure that the things like spices and salts are in proportion. Allah—ever kind, ever compassionate—says that if you are a slave, a servant or a wife, and your master, employer, or husband is a strict man, you are allowed to taste the food you are cooking for him during your Ramadan fast to see that the salt and spices are according to his preference, to prevent a beating or unpleasantness. Shamas doesn’t mind, but—since he is not well— perhaps her violating the fast would fall into the category of wifely devotion and love, and be excused.

There are no pistachios, and she wonders if she should go to the shops to get them, though Shamas’s claw managed to scratch her painfully between the legs before she escaped; as it is, nowadays it’s hard for her to even stand up sometimes.

Kaukab hasn’t informed her children of their father’s beating because she is afraid they would believe the rumour of Chanda’s family’s involvement and do something improper or illegal. Her children are mild-mannered with the exception of Ujala, but that sight upstairs will move anyone to do something drastic. She imagines various horrible scenarios like one of her boys ending up in prison like Chanda’s brothers for having committed a violent crime.

“O just think how that girl Chanda managed to destroy her entire family,” a woman said recently—the day Shamas got beaten up, in fact.

That the man who was equally responsible for the ruin of the shop-owning family was dear to Kaukab did not prevent the woman from saying this out loud in front of her, because everyone knows that Kaukab had disapproved of the two sinners. Kaukab and the women had been sitting in Kaukab’s front garden—which is the sunny side of the street in the afternoons—and peeling and preparing vegetables, discussing various matters. Just then a bird had started to shriek somewhere nearby, so that Kaukab and the others had had to cover their ears; and then realizing that the bird was in the lilac tree beside the garden gate, a woman threw an enraged slipper in that direction. They were stunned when a rose-ringed parakeet—“Here in this country?”—emerged and flashed away, the slipper getting stuck in the branches, a few heart-shaped lilac leaves falling out onto the ground. The bird paused for a few moments on a telephone wire to smooth its plumes, sprang up and then disappeared into the sky. “They were said to be flying about on the edges of Dasht-e-Tanhaii but now they are spreading into town, it seems.”