Maps for Lost Lovers (5 page)

She sank back into sleephood almost immediately and the moths moved out to the elder boy’s room, having first made sure at the open window that the summons was not coming from out there.

The thirty-eight eyes painted on the thirty-eight red wings blinked in the darkness as the insects then fluttered into the room shared by the two younger children, and here they tried to pass through a circular opening only to discover that others were trying to emerge from it just as frantically—it was a mirror.

A slippery spew of Indian movie magazines was at the foot of the girl’s bed.

Through the open hatch in the ceiling of this room, the Great Peacock moths entered the attic that was embraced on the outside by the back garden’s purple beech, and in a blur of near-misses they went into the space above the adjoining house, bought newly by Jugnu, the two hatches open for his stored possessions to be zigzagged across from here to there and then handed down. A number of his belongings were still scattered about the house: these included the hatbox containing the nineteen chrysalises. It was left in the blue kitchen till tomorrow because everyone had decided to leave things as they were when night fell and they realized that they had been working without a rest for ten hours, helping Jugnu move.

Like kites whose strings have been cut, the moths swooped down out of the attic into the room wallpapered with twisted leaves and tiny indigo berries.

Here, the Great Peacocks ignored the sleeping Jugnu even though his hands weren’t covered by the blanket, the hands that had the ability to glow in the dark. No moth could resist being drawn to his hands, but that night the interior was noisy with another call that only they could hear— that of a female moth. It had hatched the day before and hung in the cage Jugnu had constructed by knitting copper wire around a bottle and then smashing the glass.

The female was motionless except when it swished its wings gently to disperse the odour that had gradually flooded the two houses with the faint electricity of a yearning inexpressible any other way, undetected by the humans but pulling the nineteen males towards its source slowly at first and then hand over hand a yard at a time as they learned to distinguish truth from lie and arrived to drape the entire cage in reverberating velvet.

A BREAKFAST OF BUTTERFLY EGGS

Walking home from work at the end of the day, with
The Afternoon
under one arm, Shamas hears the echoes of his own footsteps on the snow as though he is being followed.

For almost a week now the country has been draped in daisy chains on the television weather maps. During the nights, the condensation on the windowpanes has frozen into sparkling patterns of bird feathers, insect wings and leaf skeletons, as though each home contains within it a magical forest, tangled with fables and myths, the glittering foliage growing pressed against the glass. Each street has become a row of books on a shelf.

Shamas no longer feels the pain in the fingers that he wounded the other morning, scrabbling for half-penny coins in the snow on the riverbank. He no longer feels the wasp-sting soreness. The skin is mending itself fast. Under the hard scabs on his fingers, the new skin has the fine buffed sheen of mother-of-pearl. Pale pink. Jugnu—the lepidopterist— said that because there are no pink butterflies in nature, the ones that were released into the air during the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park in July 1969 were in fact white ones dipped in pink dye.

Shamas doesn’t know what led the police detectives to name their investigation into the disappearance of Jugnu and Chanda “Operation Ivory.”

The officers who came to the house that morning to inform him officially of the arrests said that the two men were being held separately—to highlight inconsistencies in their tales—and he has visited the police station twice since then, talking first to the Detective Chief Inspector and then to the Detective Superintendent, both of whom are in charge of the case. The Detective Superintendent said that the lack of bodies is a stumbling block but it will not prevent the team from battling on to secure a conviction. He has been told that the trial will be in December. There are numerous legal precedents in which the murderers who thought they had covered their tracks had been brought to justice. As long ago as 1884 there were cases in which the courts were prepared to bring in convictions without a corpse: that year, two seamen who had eaten cabin boys while drifting for hundreds of miles at sea in an open boat, were found guilty of murder. A more recent case concerned a wealthy woman kidnapped for ransom, and although she was never found, the police had charged two brothers with her murder. The court heard that she had probably been fed to pigs.

Suddenly he understands why the investigation was called “Operation Ivory”: the police knew that there was every possibility of there being bones to gather up.

Language can provide some refuge from terror, as when the words “lethal injection” are employed to refer to “poisoning”; to “send someone to the electric chair” means to “burn them alive”; and to hang is to “strangle.”

The rumours concerning the missing couple—he must try to think of them as dead now—are many (they had turned into a pair of peacocks!), but these are the facts. Last summer, Chanda and Jugnu went to Pakistan for four weeks. It was the last week of July and they were expected back in August. Chanda—the daughter of a nearby grocery-shop owner—had moved into Jugnu’s house back in May, against her family’s wishes. They did return from Pakistan—the passports and luggage were found in the house, the documents showing that they had come back a week earlier than expected—and were murdered sometime over the next few hours or days. Neither Shamas nor Kaukab saw them arrive, nor were they aware of their presence in England—right next door.

Inside Chanda and Jugnu’s house, there are numerous glass-topped cases containing moths and butterflies of every colour, from the dull and inconspicuous to the glossily enriched, the visual equivalent of a nightingale’s vibrant note, the long pin impaling each body reminiscent of the shaft that passes vertically through the wooden horse of a carousel.

Button-shaped or bottle-like, truncated cones or spheres full of spines like sea urchins, or domed as though intended for the roof of the smallest mosque imaginable: sometimes the eggs of butterflies are laid on tree bark, in neat groups like vases in a potter’s courtyard, and sometimes they are positioned on the surface of a leaf, as far apart as the tastebuds are on a human tongue, or they may run around a twig like a spiral staircase. They come in as many colours as contact lenses, as disposable cigarette-lighters, and possess a similar translucence. They may be left exposed, glued to the selected base, while the females of some species cover theirs with a blanket of hairs which they free from their abdominal surface.

And if Kaukab was puzzled one brightly hot summer morning as she came across her three children intently licking off tiny beads from their hands and arms, she was appalled on being told that they were butterfly eggs, her eyes narrowing critically, her endurance reaching its limit when Jugnu told her, in all seriousness, that there was no cause for anxiety because he had made sure that the eggs were safe. “Some butterfly eggs do contain poisonous chemicals as protection against predators, especially those species which lay their eggs in clusters and produce brightly coloured eggs . . .” Such information was second nature to him and he often forgot that he could not assume a similar learning in others. “. . .And nor is there any need to worry that the children may jeopardize a species by eating its eggs: these came from the butterflies that scatter them during flight, the Skippers and the Browns. They had no chance of hatching any way, so don’t worry—”

He stopped there, having noticed the look on his sister-in-law’s face.

One of the children said: “They landed on us while we were out by the lake.”

After that morning Kaukab tried on a few occasions to prevent the children from going out to the hills with Jugnu to collect butterflies and moths, but her wish proved a net of weak threads.

Paper turns yellow over the years because it’s burning very slowly due to contact with the air. Stacked chronologically, the photographs of Jugnu in the various boxes in the house the police had termed “the house of death” would form a spectrum of pale browns.

The earliest photograph, showing the gentle nineteen-year-old boy their mother always said was Allah’s way of compensating her for the daughter she had always wished for, dates from 1966, the year he arrived in Moscow to study at the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University. Learning Russian and obtaining a bachelor’s degree would take him five years; and afterwards he would return to Pakistan briefly, shortly before their father died. There followed a few months in a damp cold house in England with Shamas and Kaukab, and then he moved to the United States.

“Who is this green woman in a sari?” Kaukab had held up the Statue of Liberty postcard he had sent from New York, a short note informing them of his safe arrival and asking about the seven-year-old nephew’s tuberculosis, with love to the baby niece—the girl who would try to contain her laughter in a decade’s time, when he had returned to England, as she asked him to explain the large moustache a photograph showed he had grown during his six years in the United States.

On the day she spotted a bottle of whisky in one of them, Kaukab had had all the photographs sent up to the attic, away from the impressionable eyes of the three children in the house, and they would remain there until Jugnu moved out to live next door.

On the road with the chestnut trees he hears footsteps behind him on the snow, but there’s no one there. There have been moments over the past few days when he has felt that it is he who has died and been buried— and he hears his own footsteps as though someone has come to find him and dig him out.

Two months after Chanda and Jugnu disappeared, the police had contemplated extending their investigation to the United States but the passports of the two lovers were here in England, in the house next door to Shamas’s.

From Tucson to the orange groves of California and then on through Oregon towards Washington, the journey Jugnu made during his first three springs in the United States with migratory beekeepers took him two whole months, stopping along the way to let the bees pollinate the crops. As he drove, the truck hummed with the three-million bees in the back and he reeked of banana oil long into each year. He painted radium dials in a clock factory one winter and it was there that a spillage had left his hands with the ability to glow in the dark, making them irresistible to moths.

He had briefly married an American woman whose trade it was to marry illegal immigrants and divorce them after they had been granted legal status. He never knew how lonely he was during those six years until the news of his mother’s death reached him in Boston where he was working on a doctorate. The following year he flew to England.

It was 1978, and the cry in Britain was that immigrants should be sent back to the countries they had come from:
Just look in the telephone directory:there are thousands of them here now.
He was thirty-one; and the children whose spirits he began to revive immediately upon arrival were thirteen, eight and four. “The droppings of a moose look and smell the same as deer droppings,” he told them, “and if you try you’ll find that they taste the same too.”

Perhaps the most recent photograph in the bundle which was consigned to the attic is the one that shows the three children sitting cross-legged beside a beached minke whale, its pink corduroy belly resting on the wet packed sand, the reflection of the setting sun stretching like a golden path from the sea’s edge to the horizon, the sky above them a combustion of emerald feathers that were, perhaps, the tattered outer-edges of the thunderstorm that happened to be raging here in this inland valley town that afternoon. As evening passed and night descended, Shamas and Kaukab had looked out of the rain-lashed windows of their house with rising panic:

Lightning strikes without caring whose nest it burns: Shamas and Kaukab were terrified that the four of them would not make it home in time before the pubs shut and the streets were full of drunk white people.

On the road through the cherry trees, Shamas enters a sphere of street-light like a day and emerges from it as though into night, again and again. He turns into the sloping side-street between the church and the mosque. Verses from the Bible translated into Urdu, especially those extolling the virtues of Christ as saviour, are regularly pinned to the noticeboard in the churchyard and they are torn down in the middle of the night just as regularly.

From the incline between the church and the mosque, Shamas sees the faint shimmer of heat haze clinging to the roofs of all but one of the houses in his street—Jugnu’s.
The Darwin
—Jugnu’s Sheridan Multi-Cruiser speedboat—is still there in his front garden, covered by a faded tarpaulin.

As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka. Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had re-christened everything they saw before them. They had come from across the Subcontinent, lived together ten to a room, and the name that one of them happened to give to a street or landmark was taken up by the others, regardless of where they themselves were from. But over the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they themselves are from—Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. Only one name has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii.

The Wilderness of Solitude.

The Desert of Loneliness.

IN DARKNESS

Kaukab looks out of the window and watches a little boy climb the sloping side-street lined with the twenty maples. The six-year-old is on his way to the mosque and his grandmother has just telephoned Kaukab from three streets away: “Keep an eye on him, sister-ji. He won’t let me walk him to the mosque anymore. He is becoming independent and wants to go alone. I am telephoning everyone I know along his path because you have to be careful—every day you hear about depraved white men doing unspeakable things to little children.” And the woman rang off with a sigh: “We should never have come to this deplorable country, sister-ji, this nest of devilry from where God has been exiled. No, not exiled—denied and slain. It’s even worse.”