Maps for Lost Lovers (55 page)

Having let himself in with the key, he went upstairs and found Kiran naked on the bed with another man. He staggered down the stairs, shouting, and was out of the house before she could dress herself to follow him. Her father heard the noise from his bed of affliction in the room downstairs and added alarmed calls and enquiries of his own to it.

Chotta made it back to his house but this time he didn’t go in: he went into the back garden and began to dig out the pistol he knew was lying buried there in a box, the pistol that he and Barra had acquired around the time they went into that heroin-smuggling deal. He put the loaded pistol in his waistband—it was too big for the pockets and he hadn’t known how to carry it but then he had slipped it there because he remembered that was the way it was done in the movies. He was on his way back to Kiran’s house, saying “bitch” and “whore” to himself repeatedly, when he changed direction and found himself going towards where Chanda and Jugnu lived; what he had been saying had changed to “bitches” and “whores” some time ago.

He went around the back, cleared the stream in one leap, and climbed the slope with the hawthorns and sycamore trees. He didn’t know what his next step was going to be, and he fell asleep sitting in the darkness, the empty vodka bottle rolling quietly down the grassy slope and shattering on a stone jutting out of the stream. He didn’t wake up at the noise. The flock of peacocks rushing up the hill—after they had been shooed out of the way by the man on his way to the mosque because the cleric had just collapsed—roused him an hour and a half before dawn, just as it did Jugnu. He saw Jugnu appear in the window of his bedroom soon afterwards.

He sat and watched as Jugnu came out of the house wearing nothing but bed linen around his waist, a reminder that he had been lying naked beside his sister all night.

He watched him dig up the onion.

He watched as Jugnu unsuccessfully knocked on the back door of his brother’s house. And after Jugnu had gone out of the lane (he stopped briefly to push away with his foot those shards of the broken vodka bottle that were lying in the middle of the lane), Chotta approached the back door, tried it but found it locked, and it was when he turned around that he saw the message Jugnu had left for Chanda in the dew on the grass: The Vision—they shone a clear green in the sea of dark diamonds.

He went up the slope, knowing a way over the hill that would get him to the path that led to The Vision quicker than the roads and streets Jugnu would be taking. He had to hide beside the path for ten minutes before he saw Jugnu walking towards him in the distance.

He brought him to the ground with two blows of his fist, but when he pulled the gun out he discovered that he couldn’t decide where to shoot: the gun was pointed one moment at Jugnu’s face, the next at his heart, the next at his groin. Jugnu had recovered somewhat and, rolling over, was soon on all fours, trying to get up. He was hit several times in quick succession at the base of the skull with the gun’s handle, and the blows stopped only when Chanda’s brother realized that his hands were wet with blood. The blood was phosphorescent, glowing the way Jugnu’s hands did.

Chotta was so taken aback by this fact that it was a while before he realized that Jugnu was no longer moving. He didn’t know what to do about the corpse, and dragged it into the bushes. Leaving it and the gun there, under the foliage, he rubbed the bright liquid off his hands with some soil. He needed to talk to his brother and ran towards the neighbourhood.

As he neared the shop, Shafkat Ali, who was coming from the direction of the mosque, saw him and shouted to him that cleric-ji had just died. “Only the very fortunate people die on a Friday: it’s not for the likes of us sinners,” Shafkat Ali said; and in addition to that he casually told him that his brother Barra was in the gathering outside the mosque.

When the two brothers arrived at the narrow birch-lined path and went into the bushes, Jugnu’s body was not where it had been left. The elder brother could smell alcohol on Chotta’s breath.

“The thought came to me that there was no corpse, that it was just a drunkard’s hallucination,” he would say later, during his confession in Pakistan. “But then we found the gun. It was covered with blood—though it wasn’t luminous: I thought that that
was
the alcohol talking. But then I saw that the grass was dotted with bright spots of light here and there.” That too wasn’t shining blood: the bright flickerings were in fact the fireflies about whose presence in Dasht-e-Tanhaii there had always been much speculation, many sightings.

It was obvious that Jugnu hadn’t died: he had recovered and had wandered off somewhere. The two brothers thrashed through the August leaves, flowers, and branches as they followed the drips of real blood. Barra went over the places Chotta had already searched, knowing he was drunk, saying, “In your condition you couldn’t find a mosque in Pakistan, or prayer in the Koran.”

They saw movement in the distance, in a thick patch of wildflowers— one of those little places of extreme beauty that Dasht-e-Tanhaii hugs to itself—and when they approached it, their nerves taut, they found two teenagers making love. The lovers ran away into the foliage, gathering clothes, shoes, underwear, stopping now and then to pick up a dropped belonging, protectively shielding each other’s naked flesh, turning around each other like two leaves brought together by autumn wind.

It was twenty minutes past five o’clock—twenty minutes till dawn— when they realized that the trail of blood led back to the lovers’ house. Jugnu had taken the shortcut over the hill—the very shortcut that Chotta had taken earlier—and gone back home, to Chanda.

As the brothers went up towards the crest of the hill, they passed several peacocks that were displaying their tails, the huge fans shimmering in the pale darkness.

The two men climbed down the other side where the sycamores and the hawthorns were and when they arrived in Jugnu and Chanda’s back garden the message in dew was still there, the drops each carrying a piercingly bright highlight. The door was open. They went in tentatively and heard footsteps coming down the staircase.

“Where is he?” Chotta asked Chanda when she came down.

“He’s upstairs,” she replied quietly after the initial shock.

She had awakened shortly after Jugnu left for The Vision and, coming downstairs, she had opened the back door to fill her lungs with the early air of a summer-dawn. She saw the words in the dewdrops and knew Jugnu had gone to buy breakfast. She left the door ajar and began to attend to the suitcases, carrying them upstairs and taking things out of them. Because they had left Pakistan unexpectedly, she had had to pull some of her wet clothing from the washing line in Sohni Dharti and put it in the suitcases still wet. She took out the damp garments—the
shalwar-kameez
s
,
the see-through head-veils, the chadors and wraps of thick cotton—and brought them down to spread them on the line strung across the room next to the kitchen: the washing line in the back garden had been out of use since spring because of the wren nest in the denim jacket that hung from it. She filled the room with the colourful garments and the long swathes of brilliantly dyed fabric. When the brothers came in, she had been oiling her hair upstairs, pouring the fragrant liquid onto the scalp as though she were adding oil to a curry—generously. She had used the same brand all her life, the same one as her mother’s. It smelled more beautiful than the fabled roses of Quetta, which she had had the chance to smell during her visit to Pakistan: she had gone to that mountain city with Jugnu in search of butterflies—they had seen the famous silhouette of the dead girl that appeared in the vast Koh-e-Murdar range of mountains outside Quetta at sunset, her dishevelled tresses, her face in profile, her torso with conical breasts.

Her brothers dragged her back up the stairs but Jugnu wasn’t there. “Where is he, girl?” Barra shook her. The younger spat on the bed she had shared with Jugnu, the sheets awry, and said: “Where is he hiding?”

She had lied to her brothers, of course: Jugnu still hadn’t returned from The Vision, but she thought they would be less abusive towards her if they knew her man was upstairs. “Get out,” she said in an even voice when she saw Chotta spit on the bed, “or we’ll call the police!”

“Are you threatening us, you shameless whore?” said Barra as he slapped her.

“You think the world is heart shaped?” Chotta said. “Some people aren’t as lucky as you, and have problems. Tell us where that Hindu bastard is!”

The brothers checked the rooms but couldn’t find Jugnu. “Oh fuck!” Chotta exclaimed suddenly. “I don’t think he’s here. He’s still outside, bleeding. For all we know he hid behind the fans of the peacocks when he saw us and we walked right past him.”

“Bleeding?” That her brothers had had a violent encounter with Jugnu somewhere out there was now obvious to Chanda and she was about to shout in panic when they all heard a sound from the gate at the entrance to the back garden. The horror of what might have happened to Jugnu earlier was clear to Chanda when Chotta pulled out the gun and held it to her head. “Shut up!” he whispered. A milk van went rattling by at the front of the house.

After the noise receded, Chanda said: “Tell me where Jugnu is.”

They told her they didn’t know where he was, that they hadn’t seen him since he left for Pakistan three weeks ago.

She began to weep, aware that they were lying, and she made a lunge for the stairs, managing to get to the ground floor in a few seconds but they were soon beside her again, blocking her path to the outside door. She shouted that she would ring the police. To stop her shouts Barra blocked her mouth with his hand as they dragged her towards the cellar door. “We had to keep her there and go out to look for Jugnu. One minute she was struggling with us on the steps,” Chotta would say later in Pakistan, “the next she suddenly went limp. I didn’t connect this to the crack I’d heard only a moment ago. I couldn’t understand what had happened and thought she had fainted. But then I saw that her neck had a small protrusion. Barra had broken her neck.”

“What’s done is done,” said Chotta after the next few moments had passed in silence. “Let’s stay calm.”

Barra nodded, letting go of Chanda’s wrist. The limp hand fell to the floor beside her where she was lying. The girl’s eyes were open, their colour changing from second to second, very fast.

“He’s out there somewhere,” said Chotta. “He could have called the police, and they could be on their way here.”

There was a sound from Chanda’s mouth at this moment, the weakest of groans. Barra leaned to her face and said, “If you can hear me, beg Allah’s forgiveness for your sin before dying. And beg pardon from us and your parents for all that you put us through. And don’t forget your husbands, ask forgiveness for the times you may have overlooked their concerns and comfort. The soul will leave the body easily if you repent before dying.”

“She’s gone,” said Chotta who’d been looking for signs of life in her body. “What do we do now? I don’t want to go to jail.” He shook and opened the canister set on a shelf in the cellar, and giving it a sniff he discovered that it was motor oil, used to power
The Darwin.
There was another one of petrol because the Sheridan Multi-cruiser ran on an equal mixture of oil and petrol. He would say later in Pakistan that, just at that moment, he was overcome by the enormity of what had happened, the great difficulties that still lay ahead: “I felt like a spider caught in its own web.” But, as it turned out, things went their way. Barra would say, “What appeared to be an impossibly huge mountain from the distance, turned out to have paths all across it once we got closer.”

It was just as the sun was rising above the hills that Barra left the house, to search for Jugnu, the sky turning the blood-red of anemones in the east. Chotta stayed behind in case the wounded man turned up, Chanda lying on the cellar floor, the two cans set beside her, still full. “I thought the police had arrived when I heard the door open twenty minutes later,” he would say in Pakistan. Barra would interrupt him and say, “But it was only me, coming back. I didn’t find him but while going by our shop I saw that the newspapers had been delivered, and I picked up two batches of them where they had been lying on the doorstep, and carried them to Jugnu’s house, to wrap up her body.”

The message in the dew was already beginning to evaporate.

They decided to leave her in the cellar until that night: they’d bring the van and carry her out to the woods by the lake.

Chanda’s mother telephoned the newspaper delivery people when she opened the shop at just after six-thirty, to complain that they had got their order wrong, that some of the papers had not been delivered that morning. Both Chotta and Barra were back in the shop by then. Barra stayed at the counter to help his mother because his wife—who was the one who usually stood at the counter with the woman at that hour—was in hospital, recovering from the abortion.

Chotta went to bed. They were both agitated all day, and Chotta was eager to go to Shamas’s house to deliver the bag of chappati flour Kaukab had ordered over the telephone. His mother told him it could wait till the next day when he would be making the door-to-door rounds in the van to deliver the sacks of rice, potatoes and onions, but he went anyway, despite the fact that the shop was busy with the people who had come to say the funeral prayer of the cleric-ji.

Chotta would say in Pakistan that he had hoped Kaukab would tell him if anything was suspected, if Jugnu had turned up during the day.

“But the woman didn’t say anything unusual, just took the delivery of the flour. She was kind and very courteous towards me because she sided with us when it came to the whole affair.” So Jugnu was still lost out there somewhere. As planned, at around one o’clock that night, they took two of their butcher knives and a cleaver, a saw, two hammers, a large box of black bin bags, a shovel and a Chinese-made Diamond Brand axe—one of the thousands imported each year and selling in hardware stores for £4.50—and went back into Jugnu’s house.

They were in the woods until five, using the implements, digging, burning with the help of Sheridan’s fuels, dismembering and burying her changeable eyes, her hair, the flesh orchid of her womb.