Maps for Lost Lovers (45 page)

And he is not sure whether he will ever be able to confront or compel her to admit the truth.

They are trapped here with each other—locked up together in solitary confinement—and there is no release.

HOW MANY HANDS DO I NEED TO DECLARE MY LOVE TO YOU?

I begin this action with the name of Allah,
Kaukab whispers in Arabic. It’s midmorning and she’s begun preparing the evening meal: this house—so full of disappearances for so long—will have people in it tonight. She wonders if she had been smiling a little in her sleep last night—the daylight hours still numb from yesterday’s verdict.

Magpies, chuckling and cackling woodenly, dart in and out of the hedge outside, their markings panda-like, their tails turned up like a spoon in a glass.

From a carrier bag she takes out the
karela
s: the six-inch-long bitter-gourds, pointed at either end, the skin covered in tough green sine-waves like backs of crocodiles cresting the surface of a swamp. She counts the gourds and they are ten. A sufficient number: one each for the six adults, and one for the little grandson in case he wishes to experiment. And that still leaves three to prevent embarrassment and regret in case someone wants a second helping. She begins to prepare each gourd in turn. Feeling drops of moisture exploding in her face like fistfuls of rain hurled by the wind, she scrapes off the tough ridges onto the flattened carrier bag, and then carefully introduces a long cut into the skin of the gourd by running the tip of the knife from top to bottom. Inside, the seeds are large, square, and scarlet, embedded in white flannelette pulp. Her thumb gouging the vegetable delicately, she removes the seeds so that the gourd is empty. Each lime-coloured purse is to be filled later with half-cooked mince meat, wound about tightly with a yard of thread to prevent any spillage, and then cooked until the skins have softened and the mince inside fully ready. She drops the skins into a bowl and sprinkles salt over them to draw out the bitterness.

A little dance of rhythmically raised and lowered arms always accompanies this dish: one end of the thread has to be located and pulled out, the vegetable spinning on the plate like a kite-flyer’s spindle. Kaukab has never
stitched
the openings shut with a needle as some women do: she knows some metals can be poisonous and doesn’t want the risk.

The perfect hostess, she makes a mental note to put out a saucer on the dining table just before the meal begins, to receive the oily threads.

In a large pan the size of an elephant’s footprint (as Jugnu used to refer to it), Kaukab soaks some basmati rice.
Bas
—scent;
mati
—earth. She inhales the scent of Pakistan’s earth deep into her lungs. She washes the starch out of the grains by gently rubbing them until the water is no longer milky and the rice looks like little stones at the bottom of a clear rain-fed stream.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice, singing Allah’s praises, fills the air from the cassette player on the refrigerator. Nusrat is gone, leaving his songs behind, the way when a snail dies its shell remains.

The three cassettes, Pakistani imports, had cost £5 from Chanda’s parents’ shop two years ago; these twenty or so songs would have cost about £45 from white people’s music shops in the town centre, Nusrat being famous among them these days too. Kaukab had shuddered at the price when she was told about it: tonight’s lavish meal—stuffed bitter-gourds, grilled chicken, mutton-and-potato curry,
pilau
rice (in case someone doesn’t feel like eating chappatis), chappatis (in case someone doesn’t feel like eating
pilau
rice),
shami
kebabs, cauliflower-and-pea curry, fruit salad, sweet vermicelli decorated with edible gold leaf, all spiced and flavoured with the finest and freshest spices—will cost just over £39. It would feed six people and a child tonight and the leftovers would be consumed by Kaukab and Shamas over the next day or two.

Islam is said to forbid music, Kaukab remembers as she marinades the chicken breasts with natural yoghurt mixed with Australian wildflower honey and the juice of two lemons, puréed onion, grated ginger and garlic, but she has always reminded herself that when the holy Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had migrated to Medina, the girls there had welcomed him by playing the
duff
drums and singing
Tala’al-Badru
‘alayna,
which is Arabic for
The white moon has risen above us.

From the cupboard under the sink, with its dark light of a forest floor (Jugnu again), she takes out the packet of desiccated Arabian dates that she had hidden there: hidden there from herself, dates being a weakness of hers. She steadies herself against the counter as she straightens—the bending has resulted in a spike of pain in her lower abdomen.

She opens each date to check that it doesn’t have insect eggs inside, takes out the stone, and then washes the flesh before dropping it in a bowl of hot water. As she discards any insect-riddled fruit, she remembers being a young girl and joking with her friends that they shouldn’t throw away fruit from the sacred land of Arabia just because of a minor impurity, that they should remember the story of the Pakistani man who went to Saudi Arabia to perform the pilgrimage and, in feverish delight at being in the holy land, began to kiss the words written on the walls along the road: Arabic to him was what the Koran was written in—he didn’t know that it was an everyday language too—and what he took to be verses from the Koran was actually an advertisement for hair-depilatory cream. Kaukab sighs as she remembers her girlhood, and only then is she disturbed by the realization that she has just thought of something irreverent if not offensive to Allah.

She shakes her head.

Muslims must be alert against such thoughts: Satan, the Father of Woes, is always around, ready to urinate in your mind through your ears the moment he feels you have let your guard down!

To drive away the Accursed One, she revolves sacred facts about the Koran in her head: the text is composed of 114 chapters, 70 of which were dictated at Mecca and 44 at Medina. It is divided into 621 divisions, called decades, and into 6,236 verses. It contains 79,439 words, and 323,670 letters, to each of which attach 10 special virtues. The names of 25 prophets are mentioned: Adam, Noah, Ismaeel, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Elisha, Jonah, Lot, Salih, Hud, Shuaib, David, Soloman, Dhul-Kafl, Idris, Elias, Yahya, Zacharias, Job, Moses, Aaron, Jesus, and Muhammad. Upon all these be prayer and peace, especially on Muhammad. There are no butterflies in the Koran but nine other birds or winged creatures are mentioned: the gnat, the bee, the fly, the hoopoe, the crow, the grasshopper, the bird of Jesus, namely the bat, the ant, and the bulbul . . .

The dates, cleaned and stoned, will be cooked in creamed milk into which vermicelli—shining like a fairytale princess’s golden hair—will be added. With the potato peeler she shaves a heap of thin waxy crescents from a dried coconut, to be added to the syrupy vermicelli along with rose essence, pink-husked pistachio nuts (and the dates brought back to plump fullness by the boiling water). A square of gold leaf is safe from damage between two rectangles of rough paper: it is to be stuck onto the surface of the prepared dessert. The gold leaf flutters, aware of the slightest air current, when Kaukab lifts the top paper rectangle at one corner for a little peek. It is almost as though there is something not-quite dead between the pages of a book, a brilliant trapped moth.

The food she is making is more than enough for six people, but, who knows, perhaps Allah has written in the Book of Fates that Jugnu and Chanda—safe and sound—are to walk in on the family just as it is sitting down to eat; in that case there won’t be any leftovers for tomorrow or the day after.

She opens the front door to throw the date stones into the rose beds. They might germinate there next year. Tall sky-touching palms, the sons and daughters of trees growing over there in sacred Arabian soil. But she has to close the door immediately because the Sikh woman Kiran is coming down the slope with the maples, between the church and the mosque.

She crosses the kitchen and throws the date stones into the flowerbeds in the back garden. The sycamores and the hawthorns on the slope behind the house are bare. She recalls how, back in spring, the hawthorns’ clotted five-petalled profusion had weighed heavy on the branches like snow. The dangling arm-long sprays had overlapped like feathers on a bird’s body. And thinking about the white hawthorn blossoms, she remarks that their scent is not too dissimilar to a Pakistani beauty soap that, according to the advertisements, was
the choice of nine out of ten film starlets.
The air now smells of freshly cut wood and the sun is a white hole in the sky.

There is a knock on the front door just then—and she is paralysed, absolutely sure that it is Kiran. What does she want? The knock sounds again and she opens the door to find

Ujala.

“Oh my life!”

A chunk had been bitten out of her life when he walked away from her, away from this house, and with the Ganges flowing from one eye and the Indus from the other, she wraps her arms around him, opening her hands wide to touch as much of his back as possible. When she releases him he doesn’t say anything, just gives a little flick to get his long hair out of his beautiful antelope eyes in that arrogant-seeming gesture of his. She brings him in and wants to take his face in her hands, to kiss him again and again. Get drunk, my heart. Go mad, my eye. But then she remembers what a woman had once told her at the shop concerning the latest Western theories about the bond between a mother and her son: “They say all mothers secretly want to go to bed with their sons. A bunch of people in suits and ties was talking about it on television last night.” Kaukab had felt repulsed, her mind spinning with revulsion at the idea: these kind of things were said by vulgar hawkers and fishwives in the bazaars of Pakistan, but here in England
educated
people said them on
television.
To speak in this manner about a mother’s love! This immoral and decadent civilisation was intent on soiling everything that was pure and transcendental about human existence! Mothers did check that their baby boys’ penises were stiff first thing in the morning but that was nothing more than a parent’s concern for the child, to see that everything about him was in order, developing satisfactorily; and women also quietly began to look for signs of nocturnal emissions in the bed linen and the pyjamas when the sons turned thirteen or thereabouts, and, once again, that too was no different from the eye a mother kept on her
female
children’s development.

She backs away from Ujala, who has yet to say anything.

Eight years!

“You look—” she begins but stops to wipe her tears with her veil.

“How do I look?”

Like a dream
walking
is what she wants to say. “I knew you were coming, but I didn’t know when. I said to myself he should hurry up and get here.” She wants to use the English expression “the sooner, the better” but wonders whether it isn’t actually “the better, the sooner”; she decides not to risk looking foolish in his eyes. With such tiny things is a semblance of dignity maintained, is a liveable life assembled. She moves forward and takes the boy in her arms again but he makes an attempt at release after only a couple of seconds, his head averted a little in discomfort. She lets go, the noise in her head louder than a tin roof in monsoon—thoughts, fears and words appearing and popping like bubbles.

The heavy stone of silence is back on the boy’s lips as he takes a chair.

“Would you have breakfast? No? Tea? I am making vermicelli for you. When you were little you used to call it ‘princess’s hair.’ ” She is afraid he will snap at her, tell her to stop digging up the grave of the time that has passed, the days that have died. But he smiles at her politely, his eyes haunted, his look colourless. One night while she was pregnant with him she had dreamt there was a rainbow in her womb. What has stolen his colours?

“How did you get here?” she asks.

He is silent as though his tongue has become fused to the roof of his mouth.

“A woman in the street told me yesterday she thought she saw you in the town centre,” she says. “Was that you?”

He takes a deep breath and shrugs.

“I told her she must’ve mistaken someone else for you, some nondescript boy who reminded her of
me.
I said to her, ‘Was he a handsome boy? Don’t go by
my
looks, sister-ji. My sons are very very beautiful.’ ” She hopes he will let her look at him to her heart’s content. How long has she waited for him to return, those long years, her eyes painted with the kohl of longing, a glittering sequin of hope stitched onto her drab veil. His face, once round and healthy, looks thin and drawn: the full moon has become the crescent.

“Where are you going?” she says in panic when Ujala makes to get up. “You’ve only just arrived. You can’t leave. By Allah, I won’t let you . . .”

“I am not leaving. I would like to go upstairs and sleep for a while. I have been up since before dawn.”

A shiver runs through her on hearing his voice, the ghost of a reflex from the times she called his answering machine, fearful that he might pick up the phone.

“I’ll come with you and get you an extra blanket. We don’t have central heating so the rooms are cold, especially upstairs. The kitchen stays warm.”

She climbs the stairs ahead of him—red pain shooting up between the legs because of the speed of the ascent. Upstairs, she gets one of her new blankets out of its nylon zipped-up bag from the cupboard. “Warm as July.” She smiles as she hands him the blanket.

“You didn’t go to the trial,” he says abruptly. “They burned parts of the bodies. Now we know for sure.”

“I didn’t go,” Kaukab says. “No.” The scent of naphthalene balls escapes from the cupboard—a protection against Jugnu’s moths. Pointing to the jar full of one-pence coins in the corner, Kaukab says to the boy, as though distracting a child: “That’s yours. Do you remember?”

“I remember. Do you recognize the jar?” he approaches it and strokes it with his hands. And without waiting for her to answer, goes on to explain: “It’s one of a pair. Jugnu knitted copper wire around the other one and then broke the glass with a hammer to make a cage to hold the Great Peacock moth female. She had hatched ahead of the males, and hung in that cage, sending out chemical signals.” Kaukab watches him as he speaks almost as though he is in a trance. “The males hatched and followed the scent to her, flying up through the attic and then down into his bedroom where the cage was hanging.”