Maps for Lost Lovers (49 page)

“It is not a feast,” Mah-Jabin says quickly. “As Mother explained to me earlier, and as I explained to Ujala not long ago when he asked me the same question beside the lake, Mother just decided to cook the next few days’ food in one go. She happened to be in the mood.”

Kaukab looks at Mah-Jabin with gratitude. “I’ll freeze them in silver-foil containers.”

Stella nods. “It’s a good idea.” She points to the eight-year-old: “He asked me recently, ‘Why is Grandma Kaukab always cooking?’ ”

Kaukab is moved that the boy had noticed her, had paid enough attention to her to have identified a trait of sorts. She wants to kiss and nuzzle him but stops herself in case the whites have come up with a theory about
grand
mothers and
grand
sons too.

“It would be a feast if I were making something special: these foods are everyday.” She has found another reason to bolster the lie Mah-Jabin has told to save her. She wants to make a humorous comment at this point: “But, yes, being a housewife
is
difficult. I sometimes say to myself that if I had studied medicine I would have had to take the exam just once and be respectfully called a doctor for the rest of my life, but in domestic life you have to take and pass exams
every
day, and even then appreciation isn’t guaranteed.” She is in the process of mentally translating all this into English to be able to tell it to Stella, when Ujala returns.

Head drooping like an elongated sunflower, he seems as gaunt and withdrawn to Kaukab as before when she dares to take a quick peek at him, but he joins in with the tasks and even carries and lifts up the eight-year-old to the cooker to let him look into the pot in which the bitter gourds are sizzling. “What are they?” he asks the child.

“Starfishes!” the boy exclaims on seeing the plump pointed gourds that have browned on cooking and now do look like dismembered starfishes.

“That’s right. We are having starfish curry,” Ujala says.

Over the next hour—while December’s darkness falls outside—the kitchen is animated as voices rise and hang in the air for short periods—a mouthful of food taken directly from the pot resulting in a bout of praise for Kaukab; the grandson spitting out a mouthful of half-chewed M&Ms like coloured gravel; Charag smiling and telling Mah-Jabin to finish the apple she has left to brown on the table (“Apples don’t grow on weeds, you know—as Mother always told us”); the threat of a tantrum from the child, followed by a counter threat of punishment from one of his parents, a fawning taking of the sides by the grandmother, the young uncle, the aunt—but these are short lived and the air becomes tense and subdued quickly: yesterday—with its verdict—is like a colossal block of ice that’s still too near, breathing chilly air on everyone’s skin. The house, as it floated through time, has arrived at an iceberg, and no one is sure whether it will ever move away from it, leaving it behind. Now and then, to relieve the silences, Kaukab says, “Allah is great!”

When she goes upstairs to the bathroom immediately after Charag has been there to wash his face, she notices that the linoleum is warm where he had been standing just now, and she has to steady her heart with joyful fingers—her cold cold house is full of her children again. There’s warmth in unexpected places.

Shamas comes home just as Kaukab is telling Stella about a woman in the neighbourhood both of whose identical-twin daughters became pregnant at the same time: one of them has had the baby in the seventh month, and now the news has to be kept from the other in case she too fails to carry the pregnancy to full term; luckily the still-pregnant girl lives in America so it’s easier to hide the truth. Every time Kaukab has spoken to Stella, she has surreptitiously breathed into the hollow of a hand and sniffed it to see that her breath isn’t stale, and she has missed the sarsaparilla root that is thrown into the brass or earthenware containers which hold a household’s drinking water in Sohni Dharti, to sweeten the water so that its scent will freshen the mouth when the water is drunk.

Shamas realizes that the grandson is about the same age as Suraya’s son. He tries to drive the thought away.

He knows he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.

He looks at Kaukab when she is otherwise occupied, to see what kind of a day she has had. The last few days—if not the last few months—have been devastating for her, he knows. Each day after the trial he came home and told her the details of what happened at the court, and she had been inconsolable. Last night he wondered whether he should add to that story of Chanda and Jugnu’s last few hours on earth what Kiran had told him on the bus, weave that dark thread into the already-dark tale. But he feared how Kaukab would react—she would see Kiran’s secret affair with Chanda’s brother as proof that she was a woman of loose morals, that her family had been right in the 1950s when they refused to let her marry her brother; perhaps she would accuse Kiran of lying about her brother’s secret visit to Dasht-e-Tanhaii—? But, he must admit, he had also envisaged the opposite reaction: that she would insist Shamas not reveal to anyone the details of Kiran’s love affair with Chanda’s brother or the night she spent with her own brother: “People would gossip and point fingers at the poor woman. You have no idea how easy it is to ruin a woman’s life.” Now, as he steals glances at her, he wonders which of the two Kaukabs is the real one.

She seems contented, her children around her.

The pots sing on the fire. Dipped in beaten egg, the
shami
kebabs drip like a cow’s mouth from a drinking pail and they are noisy when lowered into the oil which crackles like cellophane. Everyone except Kaukab and Mah-Jabin sits down and eats from the yellow plates arranged on the table in the next room. In the kitchen, Mah-Jabin asks Kaukab to join the others too—seeing as she has been on her feet all day and also has the pain in her abdomen to consider—but Kaukab bats down the suggestion, and then Mah-Jabin tells her that she
will
come to Dasht-e-Tanhaii to be with her when she has to go to the hospital for the operation in January, that she has arranged leave at her work. Kaukab tells her to lower her voice— “There are men within earshot, and this is women’s business.”

The mother and daughter, with a Lakshmi-like abundance of arms and hands, have filled all the plates and, while the kebabs are taken steaming to the table in batches by Mah-Jabin, every other minute a new chappati is ready from Kaukab’s hands. Growing as it does from two whorls at the crown of her head instead of the usual one, Stella’s hair is often unruly, and with a touch of his finger Charag removes the irritation of an escaped strand from across her cheek, an action he—at one time—would perform with his tongue, kissing her face afterwards.

Kaukab asks Mah-Jabin to go join the others when the initial servings are over and the meal enters a more relaxed phase, the food unfolding warmth in the eaters’ bodies.

Shamas unspools the thread from around the grandson’s “starfish leg.”

The spicy cauliflower goes into Stella’s mouth and comes out through her eyes as water.

Tiny beetroot stars—that Kaukab had punched out of the beetroot slices with a cutter—are lined up in a growing necklace where they are being discarded towards the edge of Ujala’s salad.

There are white specks associated with calcium-deficiency on Stella’s fingernails, and Kaukab is privately taken aback when she notices them for the first time as she takes a chappati to the table: she is ashamed whenever these marks appear on her own nails, yet another proof for the white people that the Pakistanis are unhealthy people, disease-riddled, filthy bearers of epidemics like the smallpox they brought with them to England in the 1960s. Ever since Charag and Stella arrived she has been worried that she has forgotten to brush her teeth in time for their arrival, to get rid of any bad odour before the white girl came.

Stella tells them all about the fair she had taken the child to not long ago. Eating from cellophane bags stuffed like pillows with candyfloss, they went into the tent where a Sleeping Beauty lay on a satin-draped bier. The body was a wax statue and, as proof that the princess was dead to the world, the impresario pierced it through the gown with a long pearl-headed hat pin. To approach the sleeping body was to become a child that had awakened from a nightmare and gone into the parents’ room for comfort, or, Stella thought, a thief that had broken into a house with its occupant asleep unawares.

Kaukab says the princess should have had a few scented geraniums scattered about the palace corridors so that the intruders brushing against them would wake her up.

Surrounded by hair as long as a wild horse’s mane, the face on the bier belonged to the woman who was hiding underneath the wax body— and they saw her drunk when the fair closed, staggering about the cobbled square, weeping with her wig in her hand and shouting abuse at passersby.

Halfway through the meal, Charag reminds Stella that there is a gift for Kaukab and Shamas in their car, and when Stella gets up to go to the car, Kaukab asks her to remain seated: “It’s too cold outside—cold as outer space. Charag should go.” Stella is wearing a skirt, her legs visible below the knees, and Kaukab doesn’t want anyone in the neighbourhood to see the exposed skin and comment on it: when they were still married, she had asked Charag to tell Stella to not dress in that immodest garment—at least during her visits to this neighbourhood— but nothing happened. She hadn’t expected Stella to begin wearing the
shalwar-kameez
and the head veil (though nothing would have pleased her more; many white women do abandon their old way of dressing upon marrying Muslim men) but she didn’t wish to see female flesh on display.

Charag gets up and goes out to the car, returning with a small brown-paper-wrapped square fastened with a cord. “It’s a surprise, Mother. Open it.”

Kaukab unknots the thread, remembering the first time she had made a knot in something in Stella’s presence: she had suddenly gone numb, wondering if there was a
Western
way of tying a knot—more sophisticated,
better.
Perhaps the way she tied knots was an
ignorant
way of tying a knot?

“I bought all the photographs and negatives from a photographer in town the last time I was here. They are from the ’50s, ’60s and the early ’70s, of Pakistani and Indian immigrants,” Charag says. “I met this woman at the lake who planted the idea in my head that perhaps I should try to incorporate into my art the lives of the people I grew up amongst— examine and explore them.”

“And going through a box, he found this,” Stella smiles. “Extraordinary.”

It is a photograph of the family—Charag and Mah-Jabin, as children, sitting cross-legged on the ornate rug on the studio floor; Shamas standing and looking impossibly young; Kaukab, seated on a reproduction chair, pregnant with Ujala, the stomach swelled out like a bulb, like the middle of a vase. Kaukab smiles as she holds up the framed picture for everyone to see.

“I remember making this shirt for you, Charag.” Kaukab smiles. “You complained the collar was too stiff. The fabric was crisp as a new bank-note.”

“It was completely by chance that I went in, to rummage around but then the photographer said he would be going out of business later in the year. Look at Mah-Jabin’s two plaits! How pregnant were you then, Mother?”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Kaukab frowns. “Later Mah-Jabin would demand I make only one plait, saying, ‘On the way to school the two brothers walk either side of me and each flicks one of them whenever he feels like it.’ With one plait she managed to cut the difficulty in half.”

Shamas can scarcely believe what has occurred. When the photograph is passed to him he, instead of looking at it, asks Charag, “Where are the others? Are they in a safe place?”

Kaukab’s bright glance appeals to Stella against the impossibility of men. “Who cares about the others? Look at the one in your
hand.
”

“No, no, they are an important document,” Charag says. “They are safe, Father. I might want to do a series of paintings based on them.”

“I wanted the town to buy them, but as long as the people in them are celebrated somehow and not allowed to be forgotten it doesn’t matter who has them.” He places his hand on Charag’s shoulder. So the pictures have been saved!

Charag wonders whether his father has so far been indifferent to his paintings because he thinks that his work does not contribute anything to society. Shamas had never encouraged him to become a painter, despite seeing examples of his talent around the house since childhood, despite the fact that his India-ink drawing regularly accompanied Jugnu’s
Nature
Notes
in
The Afternoon;
and Shamas had disapproved when he
did
become a painter. Had Shamas—who had known politically committed artists in Pakistan—thought that the artists in England were engaged in a comparatively trivial activity?

Shamas looks at Charag, a bird in his chest pipping proudly:
My son . . .
My son . . .
He hasn’t known how to read Charag’s paintings in the past— they seem too personal to the boy to hold any interest for Shamas—but now, now that he has mentioned that he might do something with the photographs of immigrants, Shamas knows he is maturing as an artist, becoming aware of his responsibilities as an artist.