Maps for Lost Lovers (42 page)

As soon as he is well enough to walk (the doctors say it could take several weeks), he’ll go to Suraya’s house. He has failed to show up twice for a meeting with her. What happened to her that morning? Did his assailants make it to the
Safeena
while she was still there? He feels nausea.

What has Suraya done about their baby? He hopes, for her sake, that she isn’t pregnant after all, that the pregnancy test was inaccurate. His liaison with her has complicated her life needlessly.

Chinks between the blankets are letting cold air in. He can hear Kaukab moving about downstairs, it being a small house, so little that all the doors slide into walls: Kaukab, mixing up English expressions, had said once, “There is not enough room in here to swing a door.” He can’t remember what he had been thinking about before falling asleep but now he does: Suraya had said she would welcome death, and now he’s afraid that she might try to kill herself—perhaps she already has. Suddenly he is convinced she has committed suicide; and he wonders whether he himself hadn’t died by the lakeside that morning. The two ghosts that are said to be roaming the woods near the lake—surely they are he and Suraya, their baby glowing inside her womb, his hands burning, giving out light, from the newspapers he’s carrying, the searing pain of the world? No, no, he must stay lucid: he must get up immediately and try to obtain all
The Afternoon
s for the days he’s been bedridden—to see if a suicide has been reported. He must get up immediately. He tries to fight the drugs and stay awake but, like a doll that must shut its eyes whenever it is horizontal, he cannot help but sleep. Yes, yes, he tells himself as he drifts off: he’ll find her the way Shiva had found Parvati when she had walked away from him after a quarrel: he’ll follow her footprints on the ground, a row of paisleys—like the ones on her jacket.

Kaukab looks out to see if she can find someone on their way to the shop, to ask them to get a packet of pistachios for her. All ears, Adam’s apple, and brittle vanity, a teenager goes by but he is going in the opposite direction; he is smoking and she resists the urge to tell him like a good aunt that he should be fasting.

Kaukab shakes her head to drive away the smell of food from her head, the smell of Shamas’s lunch—it has mostly evaporated but the tip of its long tail is trapped under the lid of the enamel pan in which the leftovers lie. An Eid card has arrived from her father in Pakistan, full of pop-up doves in flight and minutely detailed palm fronds and jasmine garlands: it is impossible to open without risking a rip to the various tines and frills that stick to each other like eyelashes after sleep.

She goes to the window and looks out and sees a newspaper photographer taking a picture of the vicar outside the church; it is typical that the white people are treating their holy man as though he is ridiculous for having stood up against the moral vacuum of this obscene and degraded country. For once she would like to go from her house to, say, the post office without being confronted by the decay of Western culture.

Jesus Christ must be spinning in his grave.

Why is she stranded at a point in life where just about everything has stopped making sense? She begins to cry, wondering how what He does to humans can be called justice. Why has He chosen this life for her, written down such things under her name in the Book of Fates? May He forgive her for these thoughts. Yes, His justice cannot be defined by human terms. Let’s imagine a child and an adult in Paradise who both died in the True Faith. The adult, however, has a higher place in Paradise than the child. The Child shall ask Allah: “Why did you give that man a higher place?” “He has done many good works,” Allah shall reply. Then the child shall say, “Why did you let me die so soon that I was prevented from doing good?” Allah will answer: “I knew that you would grow up to be a sinner, therefore, it was better that you should die a child.” Thereupon a cry shall rise from those condemned to the depths of Hell, “Why, O Master, did You not let us die before
we
became sinners?”

It does seem unjust to us humans but we cannot fathom His ways, she tells herself. Stella, her ex-daughter-in-law, once told her that her middle name—Iris—comes from a beautiful girl of Greek and Roman myths who had iridescent wings, but lack of sufficiently varied pigments had meant that she is rarely depicted in paintings from ancient times. This is a little like how things are with Allah. We humans just don’t have enough shades and tints at our disposal to make a picture of Him. Here Kaukab is, away from her children, away from her customs and country, alone and lonely, and yet He tells her to have faith in His compassion. And that is what she should do uncomplainingly, reminding herself that she is not lost, that He is with her in this strange place. And yet she doesn’t know what to do about the fact that she feels utterly empty almost all the time, as though she has outlived herself, as if she has stayed on the train one stop past her destination.

DARD DI RAUNAQ

Ki pata-tikana puchde ho—
Mere sheher da na Tanhaii ey
Zila: Sukhan-navaz
Tehseel: Hijar
Jeda daak-khanna Rusvaii ey.
Oda rasta Gehrian Sochan han, te mashoor makam Judaii ey.
Othay aaj-kal Abid mil sakda ey—
Betha dard di raunaq laii ey.

The words of the Punjabi song come to Chanda’s mother as she prepares to open the shop, the yellow leaves of early November scraping on the road outside because they are being blown about by the breeze. Fossilized dragonflies: there are faint marks on her cheeks and temples from the creases on the pillow where she had lain awake most of the night.

You ask for my address—
The name of my town is Loneliness
District: The Relating of Tales
Sub-district: Longing
And its post office is Condemnation and Disrepute.
The road leading to it is Devoted Thought, and its famous monument is
Separation.
That’s where Abid, the writer of these lines, can be found nowadays—
There he sits, attracting everyone to a lively spectacle of pain.

She stacks the shelves with items taken from brown cardboard boxes. It is forty minutes till opening time, when the shop will at once fill up with little children ready to buy sweets and chocolates by the handful, it being Eid today. In ten or so minutes she will be able to track her own little granddaughters above the shop as they thump the floor, running about to put on their frocks and veils stitched with sparkling
gota
and
kiran.
All dressed up, bespangled and a-clink with toy jewellery and glass bangles, they will come downstairs to get a blessing from their grandmother on the happy day.

A woman, smiling, knocks on the glass of the entrance door, and they exchange Eid greetings as she lets her in—the woman has run out of honey to marinate the chicken for tonight’s dinner.

As Chanda’s mother is pointing towards where the jars of honey are kept, another woman enters and gives them both her Eid greeting: “Though, of course,” she continues, “what is the point of Eid in this country—no relatives, no friends, no going up to the roof to see the Eid moon the night before, no special Eid programmes on the TV, no balloon sellers in the streets and no monkey-wallahs with their monkeys leaping about dressed up like Indira Gandhi in a sari and a black-and-white wig? In short, no
tamasha,
no
raunaq.
”

Except
dard di raunaq
—thinks Chanda’s mother, remembering the Punjabi verses from earlier. A spectacle of pain.

The woman with the honey agrees with the newcomer. “We are stranded in a foreign country where no one likes us. I heard someone say only yesterday that our poor Shamas-brother-ji was beaten up by, who else but, white racist thugs.”

“By the whites?
One
of the rumours I have heard is that the people from the mosque had him beaten up, to stop him from testifying against the man who he is said to have seen abusing a child.”

The new customer has come to pick up the mince meat which she had ordered over the phone and which Chanda’s father had prepared last night and placed in the freezer. “This
is
cold. I feel for poor brother-ji’s frozen hands. Why don’t you hire a full-time assistant?”

“Sister-ji, don’t be inconsiderate,” the woman with the honey says. “Why should they hire an assistant? Next month there will be a trial and then, Allah willing, both the boys will be back here and take over the reins of the business from their aged mother and father.”

The other woman looks ashamed and says to Chanda’s mother, “Forgive me, sister-ji, I didn’t mean to imply that your sons would never return. They are going to be acquitted, of course they are. And from December onwards, brother-ji would never have to touch these hatefully chilly pieces of meat. Allah will deliver both your boys to you safely. Just you wait. But when I referred to a full-time assistant, I was thinking of that boy I saw here three days ago. I thought it was someone you had hired part-time, to relieve the load a little.”

Chanda’s mother takes an invisible blow to the stomach and holds her breath. “I don’t know who you are talking about,” she manages to say in a tiny voice.

The other customer joins in with a frown. “I saw a boy here last week too, sister-ji, at the back. No?”

Chanda’s mother has become a reed that’s sounding the plaintive note. “It must have been a customer who had wandered back there. We haven’t hired anyone.”

On their way out, the two women laugh. “That’s who it must have been—a customer. Anyway, sister-ji, I heard poor Kaukab is having problems with her foetus-container, that it’s slipping out of her. Is it true? They had to pin back mine last year but then I made the mistake of lifting a heavy plant pot in the garden and the whole thing came undone again. I’d better pay Kaukab a visit soon to warn her not to exert herself too much after the operation.”

After the two customers have left, Chanda’s mother bolts the door and has to steady herself against it, feeling as alone as the young Joseph at the bottom of the well.

So: people have seen that boy—the fake Jugnu—here? No one must know that they have had anything to do with him—or have a hand in his version of what happened to Chanda and Jugnu. He will say that he and his lover had been on the run in Pakistan, moving from city to city, town to town, because they had wanted to get married against the wishes of the girl’s family who were hunting them in order to kill them—one of the many hundreds of “honour killings” that take place over there every year.

They haven’t managed to find a counterfeit Chanda. And until they have found a girl, the boy must not be spotted here. They have rented him a room in a faraway street and he has come to the shop on three occasions so that the family can go over the finer details with him.

Under cover of darkness, Chanda’s mother had taken him to Jugnu’s house and pointed out which window belongs to which room, what piece of luggage was found where, which door was normally used by the couple to enter and leave the house.

But from now on, the boy must not come here. The family will pretend to be as shocked and surprised as anyone else by his tale when it is made public. He wants a down payment but they’ll give that to him the day before he (or he and a female) presents himself to the station—while she and Chanda’s father and their daughter-in-law are sitting by the telephone, waiting for a call from the police to tell them of what has transpired.

Falling asleep last night she had had a few monents of panic, thinking about the dead body found under the rubble of the building that was blown up earlier in the year: an illegal immigrant, in all likelihood—what if this fake Jugnu of theirs takes it into his head that the mangled boy is his lost brother and goes to the police to make inquiries, not caring that his true story would contradict the tale Chanda’s family has concocted? She imagines him asking the police to check if the dead boy has a single gold hair amid the black ones on his head. So far he has given no indication that he knows of the newspaper reports—he can’t read English very well and, even if he did, he would think buying
The Afternoon
an extravagant waste of 45p. He is insecure about—if not frightened of—talking to white people, so if he hears about the story it will be from an Urdu- or Punjabi-speaker. From now on they must make sure he doesn’t talk to Pakistanis and Indians. They must frighten him into not contacting anyone about anything:
Some careless word of yours could easily reach the authorities and
have you thrown out of the country
—
without you first having earned the
money our plan will bring you.

She leaves the door to continue the work she had interrupted to serve the early customers, the sound of her granddaughters reaching her through the ceiling as they get up to begin celebrating the festival—this
dard di raunaq,
this Eid of unhappiness. But five minutes later and it’s her daughter-in-law that has come down the stairs, pointing at the shop’s entrance as she rushes towards it, shouting: “She’s outside. Open the door and stop her.”

“Who?” she asks her, but the daughter-in-law—her breathless haste upsetting a stack of Metro Milan joss-stick packets, which tumble to the floor from the shelf in a fragrant primary-coloured heap—is struggling with the door.

“
Who
is outside?” she repeats and then the olive-green boxes of Kasuri
methi
fall from her own hands: Chanda? “My Chanda? Where?”

She runs to the door—murmuring, “My Allah, does Your kindness towards Your creatures know any limits?”—and follows the daughter-in-law outside. The road is empty, and the daughter-in-law is looking around, now rushing to stand in the middle of the leaf-strewn road, now coming back to its edge.

“You saw my
Chanda
? Where? Just now?” Some hours are potent beyond measure, making wishes—uttered by heart or tongue—come true, regardless of whether they are genuinely meant.

Instead of answering, the daughter-in-law whispers to herself: “But she was right here, a moment ago.” And to her mother-in-law she finally explains, trying to keep exasperation out of her voice, “No, not
Chanda,
mother-ji. It was the girl who came here back in the summer. I told you about her. The illegal immigrant.” She goes to stand in the middle of the road again. “Where has she gone? She couldn’t have gone far in the time it took me to come out here. She wears one of those lockets containing a miniature Koran.”