Maps for Lost Lovers (8 page)

If her children were still living at home, or if Shamas was back from work, Kaukab would have asked the matchmaker to lower her voice to a whisper, not wishing her children to hear anything bad about Pakistan or the Pakistanis, not wishing to provide Shamas with the opportunity to make a disrespectful comment about Islam, or hint through his expression that he harboured contrary views on Allah’s inherent greatness; but she is alone in the house, so she lets the woman talk.

“I’ll bring the veil back the day after tomorrow,” the matchmaker says as she leaves around five o’clock and Kaukab gets ready to cook dinner. “Shamas-brother-ji would be home soon from work—from this year onwards he’ll be able to put his feet up now that he’s sixty-five and retiring from work.” She laughs. “No retirement age for us housewives though, Kaukab. Anyway, I must leave you alone now because if you are anything like me, you too can’t bear another woman watching you while you cook.”

Mung dahl.
As she washes the
dahl
she recalls the disastrous evening with Jugnu and the white woman, the
dahl
in the shoes, and she begs forgiveness from Almighty Allah yet again for having wasted the food that He in His limitless bounty and compassion had seen fit to provide her with, a creature as worthless as her. But the fact of the matter is that she doesn’t really remember doling out the portions into the shoes and carrying them to the table; she remembers coming to her senses only once all the actions had been performed and she was standing in the room with Jugnu and the white woman staring at her, aghast.

Kaukab can remember the evening as though she is reading it in the Book of Fates, the book into which, once a year, the angels write down the destiny of every human being for the next twelve months: who’ll live, who’ll die, who’ll lose happiness, who’ll find love—Allah dictates it to them, having come down especially for one night from the seventh heaven to the first, the one closest to earth.

Allah gave her everything, so how can Kaukab not be thankful to Him every minute of the day when He had given her everything she had, how could she have not tried to make sure that her children grew up to be Allah’s servants, and how could she have approved of Jugnu marrying the white woman, or later, approve of him living in sin with Chanda? For the people in the West, an offence that did no harm to another human or to the wider society was no offence at all, but to her—to all Muslims— there was always another party involved—Allah;
He
was getting hurt by Chanda and Jugnu’s actions.

She sets the
mung dahl
on the cooker and adds turmeric, salt, and red chilli powder, shaking her head at how that whole affair with Jugnu’s white woman turned out. After the dinner that night, Jugnu didn’t come around to Shamas and Kaukab for about two weeks, though they both heard through the walls the sounds of arguments between him and the white woman, and Kaukab once saw the white woman emerge from the house in tears. Several weeks of silence followed, and she knew Jugnu had broken relations with the woman, but he still refused to come see Kaukab; she gathered all the information from Shamas. Ujala had recently moved out of the house (forever—she would realize as the years passed), after yet another argument with Kaukab, so Kaukab only had Shamas as her source of information about Jugnu. And it was Shamas who told her one day that Jugnu and the white woman were back together again, and it was Shamas again—his face drained of blood, his voice full of panic—who told her a few days later that Jugnu was in hospital with glucose drips attached to his arms and painkillers being injected into his bloodstream every few hours.

“That diseased woman, this diseased, vice-ridden and lecherous race!” Kaukab hissed as she sat by Jugnu’s bedside at the infirmary. Apparently the woman had decided to go on a short holiday after breaking up with Jugnu and had one night drunkenly slept with someone who had given her a disease, a prostitute’s vileness which she had unknowingly passed on to Jugnu when she returned to England and got back together with him. The disease was found in Jugnu’s manhood but also in his throat, and Kaukab tried to control her nausea when she realized how it must’ve got there. Such accursed practices, such godlessness! That disease was surely Allah’s wrath and punishment for such behaviour.

Jugnu had to stay in hospital for eight days and Kaukab nursed him back to health when he came home, bedding down on the floor next to him at night in case he needed something. She could do nothing about Jugnu’s insistence that the news of his ailment be kept from Ujala: the boy hadn’t visited the house even once since he moved out, and a small part of Kaukab—may Allah forgive her!—had been secretly pleased that Jugnu was so severely ill; surely that would bring the boy home to his beloved uncle immediately. But she had to respect Jugnu’s wishes in the end, and told him that the first thing he had to do after his recovery was to locate and bring back Ujala.

And she told him squarely that she didn’t believe him when he said that the white woman had picked up the disease in Tunisia. “She’s lying,” she said firmly. “Tunisia is a Muslim country. She must’ve gone on holiday somewhere else, a country populated by the whites or non-Muslims. She’s trying to malign our faith.”

She attempted to keep any neighbourhood women from entering the house during Jugnu’s convalescence, lest a careless word by someone in the house led to the disclosure of the true nature of Jugnu’s affliction.

The neighbourhood women. Kaukab stands at the kitchen window now and looks out, and she can hear them all around the neighbourhood, this neighbourhood that is noisy: it manages to make a crunching sound when it eats a banana and its birds bicker like inter-racial couples. Speaking up is a necessity because the neighbourhood is deaf after thirty years of factory work, and it stirs its tea for minutes on end as though there are pebbles at the bottom of the cup instead of grains of sugar. But the neighbourhood is also quiet: it hoards its secrets, unwilling to let on the pain in its breast. Shame, guilt, honour and fear are like padlocks hanging from mouths. No one makes a sound in case it draws attention. No one speaks. No one breathes. The place is bumpy with buried secrets and problems swept under the carpets.

Kaukab hears the women. One is cursing the inventor of the wheel and ruing the day she came to England, this loathsome country that has stolen her daughter from her, the disobedient girl who doesn’t want to go to Pakistan for a visit because males and females are segregated there, “Everything’s divided into His and Hers as if anyone needed a reminder of what a great big toilet that country really is, Mother; no wonder you get the shits the moment you land.”

The women are dreamers. No, their sons certainly can’t grow up to become footballers for Manchester United. If they are
that
interested in the team, they can become the team’s doctor.

Kaukab, a picture of loneliness, waiting for Shamas to come home, remembers how the Tannoy announcement at the bus station always makes her think she’s in Pakistan and a Friday sermon is being conveyed over a mosque loudspeaker, and the other women tell her that it’s happened to them too. One woman tries to hold back her tears because she’s beginning to realize that she would never be able to go back to live in her own country (she has started monthly payments for funeral arrangements at her mosque near her house), a country that’s poor because the whites stole all its wealth, beginning with the Koh-i-Noor diamond. And though the heart of every woman in the neighbourhood sinks whenever there is an unscheduled “newsflash” on TV, making them think the government is about to announce that all the Asian immigrants are to be thrown out of Britain, just like they had been expelled out of Uganda two decades ago, and though the women’s hearts sink for a moment, they plan to put up a fight and say they’ll go back with pleasure as soon as the Queen gives back our Koh-i-Noor.

And, yes, as she waits for Shamas to come home, Kaukab can also hear the women talk about herself and Shamas, about how Shamas has insisted on remaining in this neighbourhood even though he can afford to move out to a better area. The whites were already moving out of here by the end of the 1970s, and within the decade the Hindus became the first immigrant group to move out to the rich suburbs, followed slowly over the next few years by a handful of Pakistanis. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers—all have moved out of the neighbourhood and gone to the suburbs by now, leaving behind the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, and a few Indians, all of whom work in restaurants, drive taxis and buses, or are unemployed.

Only the good Shamas-brother-ji has remained—thinks a woman preparing the dinner—despite the fact that he works in an office and can no doubt move away ten times if he chooses but he is not the kind of man who believes you see through your window what you deserve because
nobody
deserves this rundown neighbourhood of one suicide attempt a year, twenty-nine people registered insane, and so many break-ins a month that the woman unplugs the video-recorder that had cost twoyears’ savings and brings it up to bed every night, and when she isn’t lying awake waiting for the sound of a window breaking downstairs, she is lying awake wondering where her two boys are because more and more of the burglaries are being done by the sons of the immigrants themselves, almost all of whom are unemployed.

Next door, this woman’s neighbour wonders why her children refer to Bangladesh as “abroad” because Bangladesh isn’t abroad,
England
is abroad; Bangladesh is
home.

Kaukab hears them gossip about Jugnu, he whom they had all loved from the beginning, encouraging their children to seek his company because he was educated and they wanted some of his intelligence to rub off on them, Jugnu who had lived in Russia and in the United States and had gone on butterfly collecting trips to western China, India, Peru and Iran. He told the neighbourhood children that in Oklahoma he had seen the white funnel of a tornado turn red as this apple as it pulverized a nursery full of geraniums. And the children had wanted to know why he didn’t stick around to see if the tornado passed over a dye factory because they certainly would have.

The women were pleased that the children were spending so much time with a civilized person and they stopped him in the street to tell him how happy they were that he was among them, and to chastise him gently for telling the children that there are no references to butterflies in the Bible because it might make the children curious about that book and become Christians.

That was, of course, before he was seen with white women, long long before he began living openly in sin with that shopkeeper’s daughter, Chanda.

They asked him to secure the shoelace that had come undone or he would trip. And only later—at home—would they smite their foreheads in regret for having made that comment about the children converting to Christianity because the confusion of faiths was exactly what had torn to pieces the life of his and Shamas-brother-ji’s father. Their father was born a Hindu and had lost his memory as a ten-year-old boy and drifted into a Muslim life, remembering his true identity only in adulthood, by which time it was too late.

Yes, the women would nod, among the many things the white people stole from the Subcontinent was that ten-year-old boy’s memory, back in 1919.

Kaukab, having just finished her prayers, hears Shamas’s key turn in the front door, and the sound takes her back to the day Jugnu had brought the white woman home for dinner, and she remarks to herself that it had been a sign from Allah for the electricity to have failed the moment the white woman had stepped in, the house plunging into darkness.

WOMEN WITH TAILS

Shamas doesn’t remember his dreams, but on some mornings, like today, he awakens with a gentle deliberateness to his gestures and from that he knows that his father has managed to infiltrate his dreams, just as a lover long gone and not allowed to surface in the waking thoughts comes to place a flower in the mind during sleep, not settling for being forgotten.

Alone in the blue kitchen, Sunday morning, he reflects on the nature of his father’s drift into Islam, part dream, part nightmare, back in 1919 when he was a Hindu child of ten years and on his way with his sister to witness the wonder of women who had tails.

In the India of the Raj, the clothes the white women wore were an announcement that they weren’t going native. Although it may not have been convenient and certainly was not comfortable, some British women kept firmly to their corsets well into the twentieth century, even after they had passed out of fashion back in Britain. And in the nineteenth century they had insisted on the rigidly swaying crinolines and ruched bustles even during the muddy and humid monsoon, and during the tandoorhot heat of the months preceding it, making the natives wonder about the nature of the secret concealed under the yards of fabric, a belief spreading across the Subcontinent that white women had tails.

It was to see them that two Hindu children walked along the lanes of their Punjabi hometown of Gujranwala one spring afternoon in 1919. The brother was the true child but the sister who was older than him by three years had enough of childhood’s exploratory initiative still in her to have agreed to the expedition.

What kind of a tail does a white woman have? they wondered in excitement. Not dissimilar to a peacock’s, capable of being jerked up to form a giant fan of five-hundred feathers? Or a small twitchy one, resembling a deer’s, needled with white hair? The boy—his name was Deepak but he would have no memory of it or of anything else by the end of the day— wondered if perhaps it was long and packed with powerful muscle for the mem-sahib to lean back on, kangaroo-like, as she lifted her feet into the air to remove her shoes. The girl—Aarti—desperately wanted it to glow in the dark like a firefly—the frilled and ruffled skirts irresistibly bringing to mind a lampshade—and there were two quarrels and three reconciliations between the pair as they made their way to the
dak
bungalow—the rest-house where the white people lodged when they travelled through Gujranwala. It was surrounded on three sides by the groves of blood-oranges for which the region was famous, and the sahibs were said to climb over the boundary wall in the middle of night for an orange to squeeze into their drinks. So intensely perfumed was the air that in winter a single curl of fog plucked from outside the window and stirred into the glass was enough to impart the flavour of six of the fruit’s segments.