Maps for Lost Lovers (41 page)

And then suddenly everyone had their mental activity arrested for a few seconds because they had seen Shamas standing at the bottom of the garden, past the lilac tree, his face and hair bloody, clutching torn newspapers to himself. The women sat as if painted in a picture, wonder settling on them in layers. There were a dozen or so flies around his blood and wounds. And then Kaukab, her tongue feeling dry down to its very root, rushed to the gate and opened it to let him stumble in, the others running forward to assist or staying behind to clear a path for him through the bowls and platters of onions and chillies and potatoes and spinach, the sparrows flying away where they had been pecking away at the peels and the discarded coriander leaves.

Someone ran into the blue kitchen with its yellow tables and chairs to call 999 in rudimentary English, speaking to a white person for the fourth time in her life, wondering whether she should add the word “fuck” into her speech now and then to sound more like a person who belonged to this country, because she had seen her English-speaking children use that word with great confidence, whatever it meant. Kaukab hadn’t been apprehensive at Shamas’s absence from the house: she had gone to sleep after reading the Koran until one o’clock the previous night and she had slept through the alarm that should have awakened her for the pre-fast meal and the dawn prayers. She woke up at ten minutes to nine and saw that Shamas had bathed and gone out. She hadn’t missed him at all, it being a habit of his to spend time in the town library on Saturdays, or take a bus out into the woody areas of the county, or go into his office to do some work—sometimes do all three.

Kaukab cannot find any pistachios in the cupboard. Of course, to make rice pudding without the avocado-green and hot-pink of the pistachios is like making the children wear clothes without colours and sequins on a festive occasion, a festive occasion like Eid which everyone in Pakistan must already have started preparing for, the way people here start getting ready for Christmas weeks beforehand, almost everything in the year planned with that festival in mind.

Pain shoots between her legs, and so she needs to hear Ujala’s voice on his answering machine and moves towards the pink room where the telephone lies; but there is a knock on the door and she finds a neighbourhood woman holding a bunch of roses wrapped in a newspaper, the strong thorns sticking through the paper here and there.

“I have just pruned my roses, Kaukab, but I didn’t want to waste these blooms. I thought they would brighten brother-ji’s room, may Allah give him health. How is he? Be careful, they are sharp.”

Kaukab exclaims with delight and takes the spiky package from her. “He’s resting. But isn’t it a bit early to cut back the rosebushes? I don’t do mine until the middle of October.”

“It is early, but the builders are coming to do some work at my house and I don’t know if I’ll get a chance later on. You know what they say about builders and djinns: once they’ve entered a house they are hard to get rid of.” Instead of a gardener’s leather gauntlet, she is wearing oven gloves for her pruning task, and the cloth they are made of looks Pakistani to Kaukab: a web of embroidery studded with little mirrors like dewdrops. She must have made the gloves herself because there is no home oven-cooking in Pakistan and so no oven gloves of any kind have been conceived.

Kaukab remembers from her childhood the cakes that Shamas’s father used to bake with live coals heaped around the pan, may he rest in peace, remembers how the vanilla perfume would roam through the winter streets of Sohni Dharti and find all the children like someone expert at hide-and-seek.

“I would like to smell these roses,” Kaukab says, “but I won’t. Rose essence is used in several sweetmeats and I am afraid Allah might think me a conniver, think I am smelling the fragrance of these roses just to get closer to food during my fast.”

The woman is sitting at the table and, having taken off the oven gloves, is helping Kaukab remove some of the leaves from the rose stems and arranging the flowers in the vase of water. “Allah is compassionate, Kaukab, and in any case He knows everything in our heart.”

“He dictated it all to the angels who jotted it down in the Book of Fates.”

“I was just thinking of that Book earlier in the morning, Kaukab. I thought if only I could get a look in its pages I’d know how long I’ll have to wait for any news of my son, or I could flip back a few pages to go into the past to see what happened to him, where he is.” She breaks off and twirls a rose in her hand, blinking fast to prevent tears.

Gently, Kaukab rubs the woman’s shoulder. “You mustn’t despair. Allah will come to your aid.”

“I told him that if he wanted to go on holiday he should go to Pakistan and stay with his uncles. But he said he wanted to go to a different place, telling me that the point of travel was to ‘discover new things’—whatever that means. In the end I was happy that he was going to Turkey, a Muslim country.” The woman stares at the pink roses. “He disappeared almost on arrival in Istanbul a week ago. The police found a body in the Bosphorous yesterday and tests are being carried out to discover the identity. It is possible he was killed for his passport.”

Kaukab nods. She has heard that a British passport can fetch £5000 in poorer countries.

“I know I must have faith in Him, Kaukab, but my heart sinks at the thought of what might have happened. Abdul Haq, from Gulmohar Street, was lucky but will my son be? Haq recovered last year from his fractured skull which he got after visiting Istanbul’s historic mosques. They had drugged him and then bludgeoned him, taking his passport. Accepting the hospitality of a kind local who offered him tea was the last thing he remembered.” The woman lowers her voice to an almost inaudible whisper. “Who knows what has happened? Only yesterday
The Afternoon
said that a rotting corpse has been discovered under the debris of a tower that was blown up back in the summer.”

“We mustn’t allow ourselves to despair of His mercy, sister-ji. Tower, what tower?”

“It was in the paper, but no one knows much about it yet. It was a dark-skinned boy, they say, a Pakistani or Indian or Bengali. It’s possible that he was an illegal immigrant but who can tell?”

“May Allah treat the poor boy’s soul gently,” Kaukab whispers. “He must be known to a few other illegal immigrants in the town, but they can’t come forward to say they knew him because they fear they’ll be detained and sent back.”

The woman sighs and places a hand on Kaukab’s. “You are so good, Kaukab. You have had tragedy in your own family and yet here you are, thinking of others, consoling me. You haven’t forgotten His goodness. And of course the same is true of Chanda’s mother—she’s been so forthcoming with reassuring words too.” She places a rose into the vase. “Incidentally, Kaukab, last night I couldn’t sleep and so, at about three, I decided to get up to read a few pages of the Koran and pray for the safety of my boy. I was in the bathroom, doing my ablutions, and through the window I saw Chanda’s mother standing outside Jugnu’s house.”

“Next door?”

“Yes. The poor woman obviously wanted to see the last home her daughter had had, to stand in front of it and grieve. She couldn’t do it in the daylight hours because people would have found it strange, thinking she was being disloyal to her sons. The things we poor mothers have to do, Kaukab!”

“I don’t think it’s wise for her to be out at three.”

“She wasn’t alone. She had with her that young man who they have employed as help at the shop. She was pointing out various things to him—no doubt telling him little things like which was the room filled with butterflies.”

“I have heard that they have employed someone. I personally don’t go there anymore as you know, but Sadiqa from number 121 said she had seen him a few times but wasn’t sure who he was. She was beginning to think it might be a nephew brought over from Pakistan.”

“Maybe that’s who he is. I don’t know.”

The telephone rings and as Kaukab gets up to answer it the woman gets to her feet too, saying she’d better get back and finish cleaning up the garden.

Someone from Shamas’s office is calling to say that the photographic negatives which Shamas had wanted the town council to purchase from a photographer in the town centre have been destroyed. He had asked Kaukab to telephone his office yesterday about the purchase, saying that the idea had come to him some time ago but that he had forgotten about it due to his injuries. It was a matter of utmost urgency that the photographer be contacted. He hoped it wasn’t too late, that the man hadn’t consigned the whole irreplaceable lot into a rubbish tip. But apparently it
is
too late. A new shop has sprung up where the photographer’s studio was, and he himself is said to be holidaying in Australia after selling the light-fittings and chairs and gilt-frames to a junk shop and throwing away everything else—the backdrops, the pictures, the negatives, the soft toys that distracted little children, the feather boas.

Kaukab carries the vase of roses to the bottom of the stairs and looks up, hesitating, summoning the courage to take it up. Because of her pain, it had taken her a full five minutes to carry the lunch tray up to Shamas earlier, and a full five down. She enters the stairwell which is dark because the bulb died out last week with a small metallic sound and it is situated too high on the ceiling for her to replace—if only her children were living at home. She arrives on the topmost step and, under her breath, tells Allah she loves Him as He’s always taken care of her.

Shamas’s eyes are closed when she comes in. His forehead is bruised an unlikely green and there is a bump the size of a plum above the left ear. His skin is bleached in several places, the colour of Imperial Leather soap. She looks away from him, as she has frequently done over the past month, sparing herself the sight; it is too distressing to contemplate and yet she is crushed by guilt every time she does avoid it.

“That was Saleemuzzamaan from your office,” she says quietly, to see if he is awake, looking around to find a place for the roses, “on the telephone just now.”

He opens his eyes.

“He said to tell you that they have made enquiries and that the negatives have been thrown away.”

She places the roses on the shelf and stands there, not wishing to move any closer to him, fearing he would become affectionate again, the condemnation and abuse of the seventy-two houris ringing in her ears. Some vulgar people ask that if a pious man will get seventy-two wives in Paradise, how many men will a pious
woman
receive? That of course is the height of ignorance and indecency: a pious woman cannot bear the thought of letting a man other than her husband touch her—so in Paradise, where there is nothing but ease and satisfaction, why would she be put through the torment of being groped and fondled by strange men? In Paradise everyone will have at least one companion, for there is no celibacy in Paradise, and so the pious woman would be happy just to be given an eternal place by her earth-husband’s side after Judgement Day. Kaukab sighs. Allah is all-wise. The couple will become young again and eternally beautiful and purified. There will be no urine, no faeces, no semen, no menstruation; erections and orgasms will last for decades, and men will often hear their earthly wives say, “By the power of Allah, I could find nothing in Paradise as beautiful as you.”

Shamas tries to move his lips to convey a smile to her.

She smiles back, hoping he has not noticed that she is wearing her outdoor clothes: England is a dirty country, an unsacred country full of people filthy with disgusting habits and practices, where, for all one knew, unclean dogs and cats, or unwashed people, or people who have not bathed after sexual congress, or drunks and people with invisible dried drops of alcohol on their shirts and trousers, or menstruating women, could very possibly have come into contact with the bus seat a good Muslim has just chosen to sit on, or touched an item in the shop that he or she has just picked up—and so most Muslim men and women of the neighbourhood have a few sets of clothing reserved solely for outdoors, taking them off the moment they get home to put on the ones they know to be clean. Kaukab has been wearing one of her outdoor
shalwar-kameez
s for five days now because she has to clean Shamas after he has emptied his bowels. One day he had diarrhoea—like an hourglass—and her hands were covered with the filth, but things are better now. She would like to use water to wash the sphincter as prescribed by the Prophet, peace be upon him, but that is impractical, the water hurting the bruised areas, and so she has been reduced to using toilet paper. So each time she touches him afterwards she can’t go past the fact that he is unwashed and unclean.

Shamas calls her to himself and she sits on the bed for a while before leaving—it’s time for the third of the day’s five prayers.

“I wish you could remember who did this to you,” she says from the door. “They say it was probably the work of Chanda’s family. And I don’t mean to cause you pain by saying this, but I blame Jugnu for doing this to us. If he had stayed on the decent pathways of life then none of this would have happened.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with Chanda’s family.”

“How do you know who it was? You say you were grabbed from behind and passed out after being hit on the head with something heavy. You are just defending Jugnu, reflexively, as always, that’s all.”

He can’t tell her the truth. Helplessly, he watches her leave—not knowing what he can do to alleviate her suffering. He closes his eyes. Out of the fog of the painkillers her words about the photographic negatives now come to him but he is not certain what she was referring to.

He does however remember everything that happened that morning and hasn’t told it to anyone lest his attackers reveal the truth of his affair with Suraya to Kaukab. It’ll destroy her.

And he hasn’t wanted the children to know about it because they might come to visit and ask intelligent questions about the events of that morning—why, when, how? Someone might catch him out.

But even if he wanted to tell someone about what happened, he is not sure he would be able to find a voice in which to do it. The very minor fracture in his trachea is beginning to heal but he’s having trouble speaking. He is not entirely mute but there have been bouts when he couldn’t put a sentence together without stuttering or stammering.