Maps for Lost Lovers (9 page)

It was a Tuesday in April. The jackals and wolves in the nearby jungles had howled throughout Sunday night, roused by the smell of warm human blood that the winds brought to Gujranwala from forty miles away, and by dawn on Monday the news had spread to the human population also: hundreds of men, women, and children had been gunned down at the Jallianwallah Garden in Amritsar.

Enraged by the news, the inhabitants of Gujranwala had stoned a train and set fire to railway bridges, and several buildings along the Grand Trunk Road which passed through the town—the telegraph office, the district court, the post office, and an Indian Christian Church—were reduced to ashes. The white superintendent of police was attacked and escaped with his life only when he ordered his men to open fire on the rioters.

Today, Tuesday, there was no smoke in the air but it was still unsafe to be outdoors. Lacking clear facts and news, the women who had relatives in Amritsar had kept up their wails of assumption all night last night. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had forgotten their differences and rioted together and the British knew from experience that such amnesia meant only trouble for them.

The path forked ahead and when Aarti told him that they would be taking the left branch, Deepak placed his hand on his chest—the easiest method of distinguishing between left and right was to remember that the heart was located on the left.

As they walked past a blue house with three
peepal
trees in the courtyard he attempted to insert his fingers into his sister’s grip because he had ventured only so far from home previously and would be in un-explored territory beyond this point. Soon Aarti too was in alien terrain and linked hands with Deepak to receive and offer courage in a two-way transfusion.

Now and then as they moved forward they consulted the guidebooks of stories and hearsay (without realizing that they were getting closer and closer to the pages of history).

They arrived, but in the place where the
dak
bungalow was said to be situated, up a path lined with stones painted a bright green, they found nothing but the perfunctory sketch, charcoal on sky: only the framework of the building had survived yesterday’s conflagration; the walls and roof had fallen to the ground in a black heap. The outline reminded them of the drawing of the house their father had made on the floor with a piece of coal, the house he said he was building for them, the house that was wrested by their father’s family from their mother as soon as she was widowed, leaving her homeless with no alternative but the brutal charity of her sister’s husband.

Deepak and Aarti circled the remains of the
dak
bungalow, Deepak attempting hard to contain his disappointment. The women with tails had been so real during the journey that he had expected footprints around himself as he walked but now the apparitions had vanished.

Aarti saw that he was close to tears, and since she could not propose raiding the orange grove—men could be heard digging water-ditches just over the wall—she tried to distract him by constructing the
dak
bungalow from the clues scattered around the site. Up there had been a balcony splashed by a hibiscus vine, and down here there was a tiled veranda with a frangipani tree at its edge, the leaves the shape of a ram’s ears. Bride-red, indigo, emerald—the place glittered with fragments of stained glass. Violence unleashing violence, the fire had liberated the hundred deadly edges each pane had contained harmlessly within it when whole. In the heat breathed out by the burnt debris, the clarified butter smeared on Deepak’s skin gave off a pungent smell. He had lubricated himself before setting off on the adventure to maximize his chances of escape in case of discovery: before entering a house or a train, thieves and robbers greased themselves similarly to become as difficult to hold as fish, as melon seeds.

Smallpox had pockmarked Deepak’s skin during infancy and as he stood in the kitchen applying the clarified butter to himself, Aarti had joked that there wouldn’t be any left for her. She had only just begun to grease her arm when they were discovered by their uncle. The beating woke the two women from their nap but their appeals for moderation were ignored. Instead he imprisoned the two sisters in the back room by trapping their long plaits in a trunk lid, locking it, and pocketing the key, a smile of vengeful delight on his face on seeing both these women in torment as they sat tethered on the floor, one of them dark, the other pale— the first he was married to, the other he had
wanted
to marry but had been deemed unworthy of because only a wealthy man was good enough for such a pale-rinded beauty, but now that the rich man had died
he
was burdened with having to clothe, feed and shelter her and her children— that bitch daughter whom he intended to hand over to the first toothless man to ask for her hand in marriage, the poorer the better, no matter that she was as pale as her mother who dreamed of educating her bastard son when it was clear to everyone that the only education that street-loving loafer was ever likely to acquire was the skills of a pickpocket.

He dragged the children across the courtyard and shut them out of the house while the voices of the two women continued to plead for clemency from back there because it was dangerous for the children to be out on the streets today.

Their fear was not misplaced. There were disturbances across the province as the news of the Amritsar killing spread farther and farther. All the urban centres in the Gujranwala district were on fire—Ramnagar, Sangla, Wazirabad, Akalgarh, Hafizabad, Sheikhupura, Chuharkana, and the rebellion had also spread north along the railway line into Gujarat and west into Lyallpur.

Requests for help from Gujranwala had left the governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, in a predicament: he could not send large numbers of troops without severely depleting the garrisons in Amritsar and Lahore where the army was already overstretched. He turned to the Royal Air Force who made available three First World War BE2c biplanes, each armed with a Lewis machinegun and carrying ten twenty-pound bombs.

They were under the command of Captain D. H. M. Carberry who had flown the reconnaissance mission over Amritsar for General Dyer on Sunday, pinpointing Jallianwallah Garden as the location where a public meeting of natives was taking place. This afternoon, Tuesday, his instructions were that he was not to bomb Gujranwala “unless necessary,” but that any crowds in the open were to be bombed, and that any gatherings near the local villages were to be dispersed if they were heading towards town.

Aarti and Deepak—and the men working in the orange grove on the other side of the wall—heard the drone of the biplane engine and the tension singing in the strut-wires before they saw the machine itself, gliding steadily at an altitude of three-hundred feet, the wind of oxygen in its propeller igniting a few hidden embers in the sooty rubble around the children.

It was a
vie jaaj,
a ship-of-the-air, Deepak understood immediately.

He had heard about these flying vessels from his Muslim and Sikh friends whose fathers had gone to fight the War in France for the King.

It grew in size as it approached them and began to diminish once it had gone over them. The four flat projections—two on either side of the body—were the ship-of-the-air’s horizontal sails, the crisscross of wires the sails’ rigging. He wished it would drop anchor so he could examine it carefully but it had gone as quickly as it had come.

A species prone to turbulence at the merest provocation, the crows were filling the air with their noisy uproar.

Drops of sweat slid down Aarti’s arm and moved across the one stolen stripe of clarified butter, above the wrist, in the same curvilinear lines they described on the untreated areas but faster this time, like a cobra leaving coarse ground to swim across a river.

The shadow of the returning biplane poured itself down the
dak
bungalow’s boundary wall and advanced like a sheet of unstoppable black water undulating along the ground’s gentle rise and fall.

It had lost height and made Aarti feel she had grown taller in its absence.

Perhaps, she thought, the metal bird was about to flex two gracefully-aligned legs like a stork and alight on the
dhrake
tree which was now suddenly on fire.

A red lily grew out of her arm.

The sharp images blurred like a carousel gaining speed and suddenly she was so tired she had to sit down against the wall she found herself against and close her eyes.

Uprooted, lifted high onto the contours of expanding air, Deepak saw the ground rushing under him and smelled oranges being cut open before he forgot everything, the last sensation being the flesh-eating heat of his hair on fire against his scalp.

The bomb, like a foot stamped into a rain puddle, had emptied his mind of all its contents.

Shamas looks out at the snow lying on the street outside, hearing Kaukab at work in the kitchen.

In most minds, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the governor of Punjab at the time, carried the ultimate responsibility for the Jallianwallah Garden Massacre of 1919. He was shot dead in London in March 1940 by Udam Singh, who had been wounded in the Massacre as a child; he was hanged in Pentonville for the murder.

But one of the stories that began with the RAF’s bombing of Gujranwala two days after the Jallianwallah Massacre would take considerably more than twenty-one years to find an ending of sorts, an ending equally brutal.

The child Deepak, having drifted through the provinces for a year, fetched up at the shrine to a Muslim saint where in the courtyards in the evenings the drum-skins would be beaten with such devotion that friction often rose to dangerous levels and set the hands on fire. He was given the name Chakor, because he seemed fascinated by the moon, and
chakor
was the moonbird, the bird that was said to subsist on moonbeams, flying ever higher on moonlit nights until exhausted, dropping onto roofs and courtyards of houses at dawn, close to death. A
chakor
is to the moon what the moth is to the flame.

“You are appropriately named,” his future wife would say, when he met her at the shrine in 1922. “My name is Mahtaab. The moon.”

Shamas moves to the pink room and opens the album containing the photographs of his father and mother. They were great lovers, even in old age, Chakor smiling good-humouredly and saying to Shamas and his elder brother, “Come on, bring your wives here and make them stand next to my woman: let’s see if she isn’t the most beautiful of the three despite being the eldest.”

Mahtaab’s eyes shine blindingly in the grainy pictures—a light reaching the present from the distant years, the way light from long-dead stars continues to arrive on earth.

He puts the picture album away, sliding it next to one of the butterfly books that Jugnu had given to his nephews and niece, the children quoting things from them to each other during the day.

Having gently stroked the spine of the butterfly book for a few seconds, he returns to his seat and takes up the newspaper. He has thought about his parents all morning, due to some dream he must have had last night, and in about an hour it’ll be time for him to go to the Urdu bookshop situated at the edge of the lake, near the xylophone jetty; he spends most of his free weekend hours there.

Kaukab comes in from the kitchen carrying a tray and takes the chair opposite. Flat, round, the size of pebbles on a doll’s beach, a small cupful of black
masar
seeds lies in an uncertain mound in the centre of the tray: enough for two. They are to be cleaned and then soaked for a few hours prior to cooking. These days—less out of loyalty to her own family than the fact that the grief of Chanda’s mother shames and unsettles her— Kaukab has taken to visiting the grocery shop twenty-minutes away on Laila Khalid Road. She feels shame because her brother-in-law Jugnu is partly, no, not partly,
entirely,
responsible for the woman’s distress.

Chanda, the girl whose eyes changed with the seasons, was sent to Pakistan at sixteen to marry a first cousin to whom she had been promised when a baby, but the marriage had lasted only a year and her mother had been devastated by the news of the divorce. But another cousin in Pakistan took pity and agreed to marry her even though she was no longer a virgin. But he too divorced her a few months later and the girl came back to live in England, helping the family at the grocery shop all day. Then they found an illegal immigrant for her to marry: he wanted a British nationality and wasn’t concerned that she had been married twice already. But he disappeared as soon as he got legal status in England. Chanda remained married to him because there had been no divorce.

And then one day last year she went to deliver the star anise that Jugnu—the man with the luminous hands—had asked for over the telephone, an ingredient for his butterflies’ food. She was twenty-five, he forty-eight. It was March and the sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five-hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm, to return to their summer plumage of three-thousand feathers each. The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers. The blossom would be out in May—when she would move in with Jugnu— and both Chanda and Jugnu would be dead by the time those very flowers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would continue to lie in a circle of bright red dots under each tree until the snows of this year’s January.

Jugnu had said he would marry Chanda but since she had not been divorced by her previous husband, Islam forbade another marriage for several years—the number differing from sect to sect, four, five, six. All the clerics she and Jugnu consulted stated firmly that the missing husband had to be found, or they had to wait for that prolonged period for the marriage to annul itself. If the husband did not return after those years, she could consider herself divorced, and marry whomever she wished.

All these consultations were, of course, to gain favour with Chanda’s family and with Kaukab. If only she could obtain a
Muslim
divorce and marry Jugnu
Islamically
—they could cohabit then, regardless of the fact that she was still legally married to someone under British law.