Maps for Lost Lovers (10 page)

Gently, Kaukab shakes the metal tray containing the heap of
masar
seeds until she has lined the surface evenly in a layer the thickness of one grain. Clearing an arc on this doll’s beach with the back of her fingers, she begins to look for insect damage, pieces of real stone, and millimetre fragments of chaff. She surveys the room, eyes going on brief sorties along the various surfaces and returning to the tray where something unusual is being kept in sight. She gives up at last and stretches out her hand: “One second, please.”

Shamas lowers the newspaper and looks over its top edge that is serrated like a carnation petal, and at the flicker of her fingers he takes off his spectacles and passes them on to her.

During the weekends they like to settle in this room whenever they can, leaving it and returning to it, each going about his or her own habits at the periphery of the other’s consciousness. The disorder of the day’s living is tidied away at night and the pink room—filled with books in five languages—is made immaculate once again as though all the slack strings of a musical instrument have been pulled tight.

“Look what I found,” she removes the spectacles, her inspection complete. “A
ravann
seed. Here.” In the palm of her hand is a shiny blue bead, the outer skin flaking away to reveal the ivory within. “The packet said
Product of Italy.
That probably means they grow
ravann
in Italy. Is Italy somewhere quite close to Pakistan?”

As she passes it to him, he holds her hand without looking at the grain. He smiles at her, trying to catch her eye, and strokes her wrist with the other hand, sending the fingers up under the sleeve.

She is shocked by the overture, and knows she mustn’t look at him from this point onwards—but he holds her hand suggestively and tries to bring it closer to him, while she tries to pull it back decisively. There was a time when in the mornings she sometimes stood over him and twisted her wet hair into a yard-long rope, letting beads of water fall onto his face, waking him with her body scented with the dawn bath, eyes glittering with mischievousness. His “beautiful wife,” he called her, “the heroine of the story of his life.”

But now? No, no. It’s too late in life to be rutting like animals. Kaukab had heard that to go to Shamas’s house in Sohni Dharti was to often find his parents in bed together, lying next to each other contentedly or talking, joking, the door open, in full view of the children playing out in the courtyard. Well,
she
was born and bred in a mosque, and that wasn’t the norm in her household.

Shamas releases her with a soft groan, barely audible, and then they sit in silence, too ashamed, embarrassed, and distressed, the both of them.

The blue grain is discarded into the glass that contains the other debris from the
masar.
“Your father-ji, may he forever rest in peace, used to love
ravann,
with a corn-flour chappati thick as cardboard.” She is trying to convince herself that his holding her hand just now wasn’t a request for intimacy: she’s relieved that she had managed to avoid the look in his eyes. The open rattle of seeds in her lap is given a final little shake and deciding glance before the tray is placed on the carpet. She adds a little tea to the dregs in Shamas’s cup, swirls and empties it out into the glass of
masar
debris, and refills the now-clean cup. No it wasn’t a sexual touch. There is a burst of sandalwood from the tray where the warm teapot has been resting. “Have the police found out who left that . . . that . . .
thing
outside the mosque last month?” She stirs milk into the cup and subdues the whirlpool with a little counter-circle of the spoon.

He answers only after a while. “It’s not difficult to guess who it was but there is no proof.” An English girl had converted to Islam in December and had been given shelter in the mosque because her family was hostile towards her decision to change her faith.

Kaukab sips her tea in silence. Unable to understand the lovers’ mysterious vanishing, she has wept over Jugnu’s absence (perhaps the reaction with which his love for the girl was met has made him take her somewhere and start a new life?) and she prays for their safety after each of the day’s five prayers (perhaps something dreadful
has
happened to them?) but she refuses to believe that Chanda’s brothers had anything to do with it.

While Chanda and Jugnu were away in Pakistan last year, Kaukab had asked Charag to visit Dasht-e-Tanhaii. He and the white girl were no longer together and Kaukab had had several meetings with the matchmaker with the thought of finding a girl of Pakistani origin for him. Thirty-two, he was still young—a mere boy—and it wasn’t unheard of for Muslim men to marry white girls and then divorce them quickly upon learning how difficult and shameless they were, and then having an arranged marriage to a decorous and compliant Muslim girl, preferably a first cousin brought over from back home. Her Allah told her to be optimistic: let the rope of breath snap, but never the thread of hope. Charag had no suitable first cousins in Pakistan, but Kaukab had made a list of four girls from amongst the three dozen the matchmaker had told her about. She planned and dreamed for weeks and she had the photographs of the four beautiful girls in her hand as she telephoned Charag to ask him to come home the following weekend because she missed him. (“It’s not a lie,” she told herself, “I do miss him!”) And it must be said that a part of Kaukab was somewhat relieved when Jugnu and Chanda had decided to go to Pakistan for the summer: she didn’t want any interference from the uncle when she suggested a second marriage to Charag.

“A vasectomy! You’ve had a vasectomy!”

It was against Allah and everything the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said. He had mutilated himself. Unmanned.

“My Allah! When did you have it done?”

“A while back. I don’t want another child. Ever. I can’t even look after the one I already have. I resent him sometimes when I want to paint but must look after him instead.”

“That’s what a wife is for! Looking after the children is the
woman’s
job while the man gets on with his work.” A man, a man—she lamented in her heart—something you no longer are! If that white girl had done what a woman is supposed to do her son would still be a man.

“I slapped him once when he moved some of the drawings I had laid out on the floor. No, I didn’t slap him—I
hit
him, hard.”

“So? Parents are supposed to hit children.”

“I remember.”

“What do you mean by that remark? Parents are
supposed
to hit children, disciplining them. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that when you send a camel out to graze, make sure one of its legs is doubled up and tied securely with a rope, so it can’t wander too far. Too much freedom isn’t good for anyone or anything.”

A marriage to a Pakistani girl was now an impossibility—who would want a neutered husband for their daughter?—and Kaukab was to be denied the ally the Pakistani daughter-in-law would have proved to be.

“How could you have made such a big decision without first consulting me and your father?”

“What?”

“If you don’t want any more children, then why couldn’t you have been just careful, instead of doing something as drastic as that?” She couldn’t believe she was having to conduct this conversation with her son.

“You can never be sure. That first time was an accident.”

“Really? It wasn’t planned? I
have
sometimes wondered whether that white girl hadn’t trapped you by deliberately getting pregnant.”

“I am sorry, but I can’t listen to any more of this.”

Charag went back, leaving her alone with the four photographs and her thoughts. She kept having the same dream every night: she was hanging from a noose and also standing beside the scaffold. “I can’t help wondering it’s all my fault,” said the corpse. “Stop wondering,” said the executioner-self. But during the waking hours, as usual, she could find no one other than the old culprits for this new disaster that had befallen her. Shamas. Jugnu. England. The white race. The vasectomy was a Christian conspiracy to stop the number of Muslims from increasing. Her parents were responsible for marrying her to an infidel. Her in-laws were Godless. Afflicted with loneliness and maddening fury, she finally accused Shamas of not being a Muslim at all, the son of a Hindu, whose filthy infidel’s corpse was spat out repeatedly by the earth no matter how deep they buried it the next day—a phenomenon which she had up until then ascribed to the angel of death regretting his action in having removed that most-virtuous and -loving man from the world, a man whom she loved as much as her own father.

Chanda and Jugnu were staying in Shamas’s parents’ olive-green house—and were pretending to be just friends during their stay there; and it was to that olive-green house that Kaukab made a telephone call after Charag’s departure: she could talk to the people in the house and tell them they had two sinners under their roof.

She hasn’t revealed this fact to anyone, not even Shamas.

Her telephone call was probably why the pair had returned to England earlier than expected: they had been asked to leave. They came back to England and . . . disappeared.

Kaukab’s anger and distress were beginning to subside somewhat as the time drew closer for the couple’s expected return. But the day of the expected arrival passed. And then another, and another . . . When the police eventually forced their way into the house, the passports revealed that the couple had come back to England thirteen days earlier. A peacock and a peahen burst out of a room and escaped to the freedom of the street—this would eventually lead to the talk that Chanda and Jugnu had been transformed into a pair of peacocks. The corpse of another peacock was found in one of the downstairs rooms, the injuries revealing that it had been pecked to death by the other two. A dozen-strong flock of peacocks had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight or so previously: they had escaped from the menagerie of a stately home on the other side of the lake, and they would be rounded up eventually—the foliage falling from the trees in the coming months of autumn meaning that they would have no groves or clusters of bushes to hide in. For the time being, however, no one could tell where they were from. They roamed the streets, scratched the paintwork of the cars and attacked the cats and sparrows. How three members of the flock had managed to enter Jugnu’s house and how long they had been in there could not be determined. There were sweeps on the dust on the floors, made by the males’ tail-feathers. On a white plate on the dinner table there was a puddle of urine the pale-green colour of gripe water. The hen had laid an egg in one of the open suitcases that lay on the bed upstairs.

Jugnu had put up a framed photograph of a peacock on one wall and for a moment it was as though the live peacock had left its reflection in a mirror in the house.

She finishes her tea and says, “I am soaking some rice for you to eat with the
masar
this evening. I’ll have to make chappatis for myself because there is a little dough left over from Friday and it’ll spoil if not used today.”

“Won’t it keep until tomorrow? The weather is cold enough,” Shamas says quietly; it could almost be a thought being passed into her head from his.

“Perhaps you should have chappatis also. You had rice last night too and it’s bad for the bones two days in a row, especially in this cold country.” She pauses, waiting for him to dreamily say that now that he has reached the year of his retirement they would soon move back to the hot climate of Sohni Dharti, as they had planned decades ago. They have discussed the matter several times over the past few months and each time she has told him he would have to leave without her—she would remain in hated England because her children are here.

“If only Jugnu was here, there would be no leftovers—” She stops, having got carried away with her thoughts, and looks at Shamas, but he doesn’t react. Quietly she turns to the work at hand, and sighs:

Dear Allah, if only things had gone another way. Only the other day the matchmaker was talking about one of the young women she had suggested for Jugnu all those years ago, someone called Suraya, who has now been divorced by her drunk husband and is now looking for someone to marry temporarily. Kaukab shakes her head: she doesn’t remember who that woman was, but if only Jugnu had married her the poor woman wouldn’t be in this predicament, and he himself wouldn’t now be missing. Instead, he took up with white women. Kaukab knew that the few nights a week that he spent away from home were spent in the arms of one of his white girlfriends. Kaukab lived in fear of such contemptible and unforgivable behaviour rubbing off on her three children, but there was nothing she could do. He was discreet and she liked him for that—he was secretly colluding with her, preventing her children from seeing immoral conduct.

Years passed and then one day a little boy stopped her in the street and asked her whether it was true that Jugnu’s “place of urine” was also glow-in-the-dark like his hands. She puts the boy’s obscenity and impertinence down to the corrupting influence of Western society, but within hours she learned what some of the neighbourhood’s adults had known for about a week and its children for about a fortnight. A group of boys had peeped into the upstairs bedroom of Jugnu’s house—where the cage containing the female Great Peacock moth had swayed one night with the passionate wing beats of the male velvet clinging to the wires, the bedroom papered with twisted leaves and indigo berries. Those children had dimly seen the two secret lovers in bed, the light from his hands illuminating her skin.

And, just as the king of Samarkand had come upon his wife locked in the embrace of a kitchen boy and set into motion the
Thousand and
One Nights,
what the five young boys espied through the window that afternoon—when they climbed up to the boughs of the purple beech to bring down a kite—became the starting point of another set of tales.

The children told them to each other, adding and subtracting this or that detail, and it eventually reached the adults’ realm. Kaukab was on her way into town when the boy had stopped her to ask about the light-giving properties of Jugnu’s manhood; coming back from the town centre the bus was crowded so she had to sit next to the white woman who had burnt her Muslim husband’s Koran, but when a few stops later a seat next to a Gujarati woman became vacant, she had moved. The Gujratan gave her the news that Chanda and Jugnu were lovers.