Maps for Lost Lovers (24 page)

He panics as though he’s been caught stealing. “Yes, the shop wasn’t open yet,” he tells her abruptly.
I look forward to seeing you this afternoon
at the shop
—she, Suraya, had said just before they parted.

No, he won’t go to the shop today. He cannot believe he has just lied to Kaukab, and he doesn’t understand
why
he has done it.

Kaukab moves towards the stairs. “I won’t move to Pakistan. What would my life be then? My children in England, me in Pakistan, my soul in Arabia, and my heart—” She pauses and then says: “And my heart wherever Jugnu and Chanda are.” Her eyes fill up with tears as she declares this last, knowing the look on Shamas’s face is saying “Really?” She knows no one will believe that she misses Jugnu and prays for his safe return constantly; she would have been overjoyed had he made his union with that girl Chanda legitimate in the eyes of Allah and His people. The only way, it seems, she can convince the others of her loss regarding Jugnu is by renouncing Allah and His injunctions, by saying that what Chanda and Jugnu were doing next door was
not
a sin. But how can she renounce Allah?

She goes upstairs, and Shamas lowers himself into a chair. He tries to bring Suraya’s face before his eyes. Doesn’t she look a little like a younger Kaukab, the Kaukab he married when he himself was that young poet in Lahore? He wonders whether he had given her his name after she had introduced herself. And now he feels ashamed at this absurd train of thought. This is madness. But it was as though she herself had wanted his company. He sees other women, other women he finds attractive, during the course of his daily life, the way all men do, but, after he has registered that fact, remarked on their beauty, nothing comes of it because nothing can—they are not interested in him. Why would they be? He would have ignored this morning’s encounter similarly, but
she
seemed to want to be near him. He wishes he had shaved before going out this morning. No, no, this is insanity. Surely this is how teenage infatuations are born—he must act his age. She is much younger than him, by twenty-five or so years at least—she was probably born around the time when he was in his mid-twenties, writing those love poems. He takes a deep breath and tells himself to pull himself together. No, he won’t go to the
Safeena
this afternoon.

Relieved at the decision he’s just made, he lets out a small laugh at the madness of what he has just been thinking, and the weight of the world is suddenly off his shoulders. In one of Jugnu’s butterfly books, he had last year secreted a prostitute’s telephone number copied from the classified columns of
The Afternoon;
he gets up and finds it now, but then, filled with wretchedness, tears it up. He flicks through the book for possible distraction and comfort.
There is a butterfly called Sleepy Orange . . . In the
woods of Siberia and the Himalayas there is a Map butterfly, and an Atlas
moth in the islands of south-east Asia . . .
And other names, even stranger:
Figure of Eight. Figure of Eighty . . . One of the rarest gems on the planet,
there is a butterfly in the wooded hills around Sikkim called Kaiser-e-Hind
—
the Caesar of India . . .
The thought of the magazines glimpsed in the newsagent comes to him, and he wonders whether he should take a bus to a shop in a faraway area and buy a few. If Kaukab ever discovers them he’ll say they must have been lying hidden since the time when the boys were growing up. But what if she checks the dates on the cover? And he burns with shame as he remembers that two or so years ago, his flesh aching with eager longing, he had found himself going through the things his teenaged sons had left behind in their rooms, lifting up the carpet, feeling for a loose floorboard, sending an arm out under the mattresses, hoping one of them had forgotten to throw away a magazine.

HIRAMAN THE ROSE-RINGED PARAKEET

The lake has the subdued glow of antique satin. Suraya stands on the xylophone jetty and looks at the names and initials lovers have carved on the wood in Urdu, Hindi and Bengali as well as English. The gouged dots and full-stops are the size of dimples on a doll’s knuckles. The wood is so skin-smooth that as she touches it she has a feeling of being stroked by it in return.

A wet late-spring dawn, Sunday, an emerald-and-grey hour, and nature is at its most creative. She should have come here yesterday afternoon, to visit the
Safeena,
as she promised that man on the bridge; but in the end a feeling of wretchedness had overpowered her. She is ashamed still of how she had approached the young artist here a few weeks ago. It had been her young son’s birthday the previous day, over there in Pakistan, and she had become desperate to change her situation, to fly and be with her son and husband. She had wept through the night, overcome by fear, doubts, and self-pity, with short nightmare-filled bouts of sleep, and just before dawn had entered the chilled waters of the lake.

The scent from the pine trees saturates the web-soft air. The solid world seems to have dissolved, leaving behind only light and atmosphere—a world made from almost nothing.

She walks over to where she had forced the young man to have a conversation with her. There are bits of his orange peel, nearly dried up and curling, on the shore, their brightness muted for now. Colours have long and slow births on such spring dawns.

The matchmaker has shown her no one she finds suitable. A number of them are illegal immigrants or asylum seekers who want to marry her to get official residential status in Britain. And amongst the legitimate citizens, not many are willing to go through a temporary marriage; and those who do, almost salivate when they see her, happy that they would be allowed to paw at her soon like a prostitute bought for a short while.

The matchmaker tells her not to lose heart: “Have you seen the way men look at you? Indian, Pakistani,
and
whites, and the
blacks
—ha,
they
can dream. They all cannot resist a second glance. And, no, you are not too old. Some white women of your age aren’t even married for the first time yet.”

She approaches the water and washes her hands. She has just been to her mother’s grave with a bag of potting soil and two dozen tulips. Her mother had contracted meningitis last autumn during the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and Suraya had left Pakistan to come and nurse her. The divorce was still weeks old then, and her husband had decided that she should stay on in England after the mother’s death: “Marry and divorce someone there, and then come back. I’d feel humiliated if you married someone here, because I don’t want to see another man touch my wife, the woman I love.” She had resisted the idea because she had missed her son, but in the end she had relented. She lives in the house she inherited from her mother.

Allah has decreed that a man can marry any woman who is not his close blood relation. And so under Islamic law, the punishment Suraya’s husband must receive—for getting drunk and for not taking the matter of divorce seriously enough—is that he can have any woman
except
one. One woman is barred to him, as she is not to other men—that’s his torment. But—such is Allah’s compassion towards his creatures!—she is not barred to him permanently: if the woman who has been recklessly divorced can fulfill the requirement that Suraya is having to fulfill, then the original husband can possess her again. Limitless is Allah’s kindness towards his creation.
Allah is not being equally compassionate towards the poor woman
who is having to go through another marriage through no fault of her own
is a thought that has occasionally crossed Suraya’s mind, along with
It’s as
though Allah forgot there were women in the world when he made some of
his laws, thinking only of men
—but she has banished these thoughts as all good Muslims must.

She wonders when the tulips will bloom. It was her mother’s wish to have tulips on her resting place: she did tell Suraya the reason for the request but it seems to have slipped her mind completely. She planted all but one of the bulbs in perfect rows because her mother used to say that only Allah is perfect and that we should acknowledge that fact when performing a task, that we should introduce a tiny hidden flaw into every object we make. “The Emperor Shah Jahan had made sure that there was a built-in imperfection in the Taj Mahal—the minarets lean out by three degrees,” she said.

When she set out at first light, there was an insubstantial rain—it was more a misty drizzle and there was no patter on the drumskin-tight nylon of the umbrella—but now even that has diminished; were she to look up, only one of her eyes would receive a droplet. The lake is girdled by concentric bands of many-coloured sands, pebbles, and, higher up the shore, pine needles; and the water’s edge is softly gnawing at them. She turns and moves towards the hut that stands surrounded by maple trees. Across a part of its side, ivy grows in every direction as though a large can of green paint has been splashed on the wall. This is the Urdu bookshop. She looks in through the window. What was the name of the man she met on the bridge yesterday? Was he a Muslim? The sign above the door is painted in a red as deep as dolphin blood: it depicts a small boat with a pair of oars lying next to each other inside it like man and wife.

She mustn’t despair at her predicament, she tells herself; this is not the end of her life: it’s a chapter.

Shamas is walking towards the
Safeena.
The drizzle has stopped completely. There is a small clump of reeds on the edge of the lake, and caught in this wet light the blades give out a diffused green gleam: each blade is a giant grasshopper wing. The bookshop is painted a rich brown, the colour of warm spices. In the early days—twenty years ago—it consisted of nothing more than a few boxes of books. It was all spiders and exposed wiring but then it was slowly cleaned up and a wallpaper that was a jungle of flame-of-the-forest sprigs and pairs of deer with powder-puff tails was put up. The walls had had holes in them before that and brightly dusty wedges of sunlight would be found in the interior in the afternoons as though someone had strung geometric paper lanterns everywhere. The roof leaked like a sponge sometimes.

But the owner was passionate about books and people would joke that given enough time he would track down even a signed first-edition of the Koran for you.

He looks up at the sky. Today will be one of those late English spring days that have no independent temperature: it will be hot out under the sun but the body will feel cold if taken indoors.

The owner of the
Safeena
went to Pakistan at the end of last year to untangle various financial matters concerning the money he had been sending his nephews for over a decade to buy land and property, and he died there, the relatives telephoning the widow here in England with the news three days after burying him. There is a possibility that he had been poisoned: there have been a number of cases recently where a person who had gone from Britain to sort out financial affairs had been murdered and buried by family members and business partners who had been misappropriating, siphoning off, or embezzling the money they were being sent.

The widow gave Shamas the keys to the
Safeena
when he said he would open the shop for a few hours each weekend until the existing stock sold out; she could then sell the hut. She had waved her hand resignedly, “All I need, brother-ji, is a place to spread my prayer-mat.”

The sun is pale, dripping silver. Fuses lit at random, the lemon-yellow dandelion flowers will be everywhere within the hour. The air smells of morning, of moist sunlight. He approaches the
Safeena
and stops. Someone—Suraya—is looking in through the windows, that red scarf still holding her hair in a bunch, the blue lozenges along its edge glittering in the morning air like unpurchasable gems, alive with reverberating pigment.

“I am sorry I couldn’t come yesterday, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .” She must try to find out his name, in order to be able to tell what religion he is.

“I am Shamas.”

Muslim. She looks at the marriage finger: there is no ring, but that is no proof because the wearing of marriage rings isn’t really a strict custom in the Subcontinent.

She must try to keep him here, to find out more about him. “Tell me, do you think it was here that the police found a human heart some weeks ago? I overheard some little girls in a shop saying that when the children who chanced upon it had poked it with a stick it had given a few beats. What imagination the children have!” Perhaps he will now make a comment about his own children?

“No, it was closer to another shore, closer to the river where we met, nearer the area where there is a beekeeper from whom the Sultan of Oman bought forty queen bees, chartering a plane to fly them home. He had tasted their honey in a London hotel.”

She nods. The dawn surrounds them both with its green-and-blue, the deep sky above and the almost-luminous new growth of leaves below it. He is surely too aloof and dignified to be interested in her. He is obviously not a factory worker or taxi driver because his hands are soft-looking and almost pink.

“Yes,” he is continuing, “the heart was found in the other direction. A young white man was responsible. It was his dead mother’s and he stole it from the hospital just because he didn’t want it to be transplanted into a black man’s body.”

The information is shocking, and Suraya feels it as such, but she is aware that for several months now she is a little numb to the world, the news about it—no matter how monumental or significant—coming muffled by her own difficulties. Nor can she remember the last time she felt pleasure, genuine gladness that plumbs the soul, as she did when she embraced her son, pressing her nose and mouth into his soft neck, or when she tussled with him on the floor, glad that he was not a girl because you couldn’t be that rough with girls: she remembers her mother stopping in her tracks and sharply telling her father not to play too enthusiastically with his little daughter lest he cause “irreparable physical damage to her private areas,” having warned him many times before that, “If a flower loses a petal it doesn’t grow back!”