Maps for Lost Lovers (57 page)

He is lost. His hands are trembling with the cold and as he puts them into his pockets he discovers a matchbox in one of them. Charag had put the coat on to go outside into the cold for a smoke. He takes the matchbox from his pocket but there isn’t any strength in the fingers for a forceful-enough strike: he just sheds a little three-dimensional constellation of orange sparks at each attempt. He achieves a flame successfully with a deafening hiss the sixth or seventh time, and raises the light in the air to see where he is. The oval flame colours the smoke that feathers out of its circle of light. Further match-heads unfurl a path of light along the soaked frost-singed grass for him. He is shivering. He decides not to screw the lid back onto the bottle after he’s taken a mouthful. It’s hard to believe even in the existence of the sun at an hour like this.

He stops: there, ahead of him, is movement in the darkness.

He stands still—there is a throb of expectancy in the air, a slight quiver. He walks towards where the movement had been and the boy turns when he hears him approach. It’s the Hindu boy whose lover was beaten to death whilst she was being cleansed of the djinns. The whites of his eyes are shining in the moonlight: he looks away in the direction he had been earlier, enraptured by something.

Shamas stops where he is, not wishing to frighten him by moving towards him.

“Can you see her, uncle-ji? She’s there, look.”

“What are you doing out here at this hour?”

He points into the trees. “Can you see her ghost? I am with her too. Both of us there.”

There is of course nothing there. The boy has become unhinged. “Ghosts? People said it was my brother Jugnu and his girlfriend Chanda. Jugnu’s hands glowing as always. Chanda’s stomach glowing brightly because of the baby she’s carrying. Three ghosts. Two adults and an unborn baby.”

The boy shakes his head. “I heard about that. But it’s not them. It’s me and her: her stomach glows because that’s where on her dead body my letter was placed, the letter I wrote to her on the day of the funeral. And my hands glow because of the orchids I am carrying for her.”

The boy is hallucinating perhaps, or sleepwalking. “You should go back home,
put.
It’s cold.”

“I know you don’t believe me, uncle-ji. But it is the two of us, over there.” He is far away, staring blankly.

Shamas moves closer and manoeuvres his face in front of the boy’s face until their eyes finally engage: “You are not dead, you are alive—standing beside me. Come with me, I’ll walk you home. Remind me where you live?”

The boy looks around to find his bearings, and then sets off, Shamas accompanying him in silence, knowing he mustn’t leave him.

They emerge onto a lakeside road, the boy having led him out of the forest he had got lost in. The boy motions with a hand towards a house on the other side of the road: “She was married to the man in that house. He is obsessed with the idea of having a son but so far none of his wives have given him a boy.”

It’s beginning to snow.

“He married again not long ago.”

Shamas looks up at the house. And there standing in the upstairs window is Suraya.

She withdraws as soon as their eyes meet but he is sure it’s her, her eyes emitting a light stronger than the moonlight, than the falling snow. Tears? She was wearing her yellow jacket. Paisleys. The paisleys that Parvati’s footsteps formed when she hurried away from Shiva after a quarrel.

Wasn’t there a curve to her belly—or is he mistaken?

He turns but the boy has disappeared from his side.

Shamas looks at the number of the house and, walking away, reads the name of the road from the sign at the corner. “Neela Pathar” Road. The snowflakes are settling on him, a thick crust of them growing on his shoulders. Does Suraya know that the man she has married has no intention of divorcing her soon, that he wants to see if she can give him a son first? Perhaps she didn’t tell him why she wanted to marry him beforehand, thinking he would refuse to marry her under those conditions. She herself has no intention of bearing a child for him—she just wants him to divorce her so that she can marry her original husband again, to be with her son again. But the man has married her solely because he wants her to have a child. He must be forcing himself on her every night, taking her violently. What is she going through?

He hears footsteps behind him and, without stopping or glancing back, he knows that Suraya is following him through the falling snow. He should continue, continue, away from this road where someone who knows her might see them talking. He takes the turning and finds himself walking towards the lake, where the giant lies buried below the water, trapped but still alive. He looks back but she is not there—she has not been keeping pace with him. But he continues because she’ll know where to find him. At the
Safeena.
Their
Safeena.
Their Scandal Point. He’ll wait for her there. There is so much he has to tell her. The third time they met they had talked about the fact that the people from the Subcontinent love wordplay, take great delight in language. And a few hours ago he had had cause to remember that: when his grandson—who is the same age as her son—wanted a drink and asked what choice was available, he had been told there was Vimto, but he had pulled a face and said, “Vomit!” Has she been following the details of the murder trial? Did she hear the rumour that Chanda’s parents had paid a young man to go to the police and say that he and his girlfriend had bought Chanda and Jugnu’s passports from them in Pakistan and had entered Britain with them? But that he had taken the money and disappeared, never arriving at the police station? And now there is another rumour that yesterday Chanda’s parents received a package in the post containing the money they had paid him: there was a note saying he was sorry not to have found the courage to do what they had asked but he didn’t want to keep their money.

He arrives at the bookshop and turns around. She is still not here but he knows she’s coming—even if she’s got lost, even if she is unclear about where he is, she’ll know eventually to make her way to the
Safeena,
the way he himself had known back at the beginning of summer that she would be here waiting for him when he left Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s performance. He stands in silence, not knowing what he would say, how he would begin, when she comes. There’s no sound except the waves caused by the heart-beat of the trapped giant, and as he waits the snow intensifies. He stretches out an arm to receive the small light snowflakes on his hand. A habit as old as his arrival in this country, he has always greeted the season’s first snow in this manner, the flakes losing their whiteness on the palm of his hand to become clear wafers of ice before melting to water— crystals of snow transformed into a monsoon raindrop.

And now he hopes she
has
become pregnant by him during the summer, that her new husband—thinking he himself is the father—is leaving her in peace because of it.

Shamas’s child is already saving her, already lessening the amount of pain in this Dasht-e-Tanhaii called the planet Earth.

THE FIRST LOVERS ON THE MOON

As lightly as ermine moths, the snowflakes float around the boy who was to have been the counterfeit Jugnu. He moves through the all-knowing silence of the winter morning.

There is a wind stiff as wood. He hides from its blows in a shop doorway, sitting in a crouching position, the way dead bees and wasps curl in on themselves. Rich as ink, he feels a drop of blood trickle down from the back of his nose into his throat. He dreams of a sun, sending out rays like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

A bright-green rose-ringed parakeet makes a shrill noise as it darts through the snowflakes to the left of him.

He gets up and walks along the streets where the shops are being opened but he stops to look in through the glass pane of the newsagent. In the local paper there is the picture of a Pakistani man who was found dead in the snow by the lake—someone quite prominent and respected, it seems.

According to the Book of Fates,
He’ll look at Shamas’s photograph only for
a few moments before moving on, but this delay will mean that he’ll run into
the Pakistani girl with the locket containing the strands of his brother’s hair,
the girl Chanda’s sister-in-law had met at the shop back in the summer.
Coming along through the snowflakes, her head lowered and neck withdrawninto the shoulders against the cold, she will enter the street from the
far end, the end the boy is walking towards.

They’ll collide at the corner in less than a minute and it wouldn’t have happened had the photograph of the dead man not held his attention for those few moments—she wouldn’t yet have arrived at the corner . . .

She’s walking close to the wall, sheltering against the wind, approaching the corner. She remarks to herself that the snow is as bright as a full moon.

He looks at the face in the newspaper. It is the first day in over a fortnight that he has dared to venture into the town centre, afraid of other people, of being recognized. Someone could follow him and inform Chanda’s family of his whereabouts—they must be deeply angry at him for not having gone through with what they had planned. He hasn’t been able to sleep much and keeps thinking some calamity is imminent, dreaming again and again of rocks and stones being hurled at butterflies. But at dawn today he had told himself to go out into the world again. If a calamity is coming then where else would he rather be than with his fellow humans? What else is there but them?

He moves away from the newsagent’s window and resumes his journey along the snow-covered street.

London—Dasht-e-Tanhaii
October
1991–April 2003

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 2006

Copyright © 2004 by Nadeem Aslam

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Aslam, Nadeem.
Maps for lost lovers / Nadeem Aslam.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Muslim women—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction.
3. Pakistanis—England—Fiction. 4. Murder victims’ families—Fiction.
5. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9540.9.A83M37 2005
823’.914—dc22 2004059428

eISBN : 978-0-307-42678-9

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