Maps for Lost Lovers (28 page)

“You think I have a heart of stone, that I wasn’t terrified when I saw the extent of his injuries. And I couldn’t believe what you said to them, that they must tell you the truth about what happened to Chanda and Jugnu. ‘Your father won’t tell me the truth so you must.’ ” He shakes his head. “I know you think I’ve hidden something from you, that I know what happened to Chanda.”

“I don’t think that,” she says quietly, from the other side of a dark forest of suspicion that lies between them.

“What has happened to you has happened to me too. I swear to you on my salvation and the verity of Islam . . . I want my daughter back, and I want my sons back.”

“I don’t know what to think, but I don’t doubt you. I won’t doubt you if that’s what you’re asking me to do.”

“You mean, if I didn’t ask you to, you would think me capable of deceiving you? So up until a moment ago I was . . . in your eyes . . .
involved
in whatever it was that happened? The only thing I have kept from you is my grief so as not to upset you.” He looks up at her with eyes that are round as sea pebbles. He presses the handkerchief to them and gives a little laugh: “Scoundrel tears! We’d heard the English were courageous Empire-builders, but even some of them burst into tears when they lost the World Cup five years ago. Smith did, and I think Stewart also. And the Pakistani players cried because they had won.”

“No, I don’t know what to think anymore,” she says quietly. “May Allah forgive me, but I’ve even caught myself thinking it was unimportant that they were living in sin, so what if it goes against His law, that if I could do it all again I wouldn’t break all ties with her over this matter. As I was passing by the marriage registry office one day last year I looked at the list of upcoming weddings on the notice-board and saw that one Pakistani girl was going to marry a white boy, and just for a moment I said to myself our girls are doing all sorts of things these days, so what if my Chanda was living in sin.” Her face pale, she is shaking rigidly, a dead light in her grey-and-caramel eyes. “How do I know they will be safe in prison from now on?” A Pakistani teenager, twelve hours away from having completed a three-month sentence, was found dead in his cell last week: a white inmate has been charged with his murder. His parents were given the news of the death as they planned a welcome-home party. “Twenty black people died in police custody last year.”

“Another bus should have come along by now.” He is suddenly aware that they are on the outskirts of the town, alone and exposed, in an unfamiliar place—away from their neighbourhood. Women walk close to their men in other parts of Dasht-e-Tanhaii but allow themselves to dawdle on entering the familiar streets of their own neighbourhoods, falling behind without care. Although even there he had witnessed—just two days ago—two white men shout loudly and repeatedly, “Sieg Heil!” as they walked by a group of women and children outside the shop. He looks at her: “How do you know about the number of black deaths in police custody?”

“I happened to hear it on the radio.”

They fall silent, both of them entangled in the same fear. But then she is suddenly visited by inspiration: “We should have them transferred to another prison. We’ll ask Shamas-brother-ji to help arrange it.”

He shakes his head, astonished.

“Yes. He’s a good man. He’ll help us. I’ll talk to him myself,” she says animatedly, and looks in the direction where her husband had seen Shamas earlier: “I’ll talk to him right now! I won’t let my sons be in danger longer than they have to.”

She looks as though she’s about to set out to look for Shamas. He grabs her by the upper arm. “No.”

“He’ll tell us which forms to fill, where to go, who to see. We don’t understand the procedures, and with our lack of proper English we’ll probably make mistakes filling up the forms, causing useless delays.”

“No. I know we have to find a way to ensure their safety—I am not blind, I saw how badly beaten up he was. But you are not approaching Shamas again. Just
think
about what you are saying!”

She nods, defeated, so that he releases her arm. She inhales deeply to compose herself. “I wanted to ask my sons so many things today but my English isn’t very good. That prison guard kept telling me not to talk to them in ‘Paki language’ each time I felt like saying what I truly feel. ‘Speak English or shut up,’ he said.”

“Your English is better than mine,” he says.

She waves a hand dismissively. Dressed in blue, she stands under the cherry tree with him beside her: the immortal rocks and boulders watch them from across the road.

She smiles. “Yes, in a month, when the mangoes begin arriving, we’ll see if we are allowed to take some to them. Brazilian mangoes are available now but I don’t get any music out of them.” Plum-stone, peach-stone, apricot-, mango-, cherry-: when the children were younger, each year at the beginning of autumn when she cut back the rosebush that grew in the corner under that window she found a heap of soft-fruit stones they had dropped there from above during the summer, the earth directly below the two boys’ bedroom.

Seeing that he hasn’t said anything in response, she places her hand on his shoulder. “You mustn’t let your heart ache too much. Let’s trust Him to help us out of this predicament.”

Where are you? You don’t even have the safety of a grave, lying somewhere
exposed to the wind and the rain and the sun and snow.

The sons say they didn’t do it but they are certainly said to have boasted of it. One said, “I’ll admit to anyone that I did it while wearing a T-shirt saying I did it with a picture showing me doing it.” And the other that, “They were sinners and Allah used me as a sword against them.” Chanda’s mother wants to go into their souls with a lighted lamp to look for the truth. People say they admitted to having done it, but people also say a lot of other things.

“The bus is here.”

Though the sky here is a taut blue now, it must be raining somewhere in that direction because the vehicle is wet. Climbing aboard, they exchange greetings with the Pakistani driver, pay, and take their seats. The group of boys that had been fishing on the riverbank up the road are occupying the back seats, giggling and talking noisily in a huddle, smelling of grass and mud and moss, rods and hoop-nets leaning at various angles between them. Chanda’s father knows the reason for their noise and the laughter they are trying to suppress but failing to, the shoulders shuddering like someone operating a road drill: they are looking at the torn pages of a pornographic magazine they had found scattered on the bank, assembling or rotating the pages, tilting their heads. They were looking at them earlier when he had walked up to them, and what he had mistaken for a butterfly was not a paper aeroplane—as he had claimed to his wife on returning to her, having backed away from the boys in shock and embarrassment—but a coloured scrap from a page that the wind had snatched from a hand.

The bus driver lives not far from the shop; his wife had told Chanda’s mother that Chanda’s father had said to him his daughter had died for him the day she moved in with Jugnu, that he would allow no sinner near him were she hundred-fold his daughter, that she—shameless baggage— may have gone missing but she was not missing from
his
home, and that he was proud of his boys for what they had done. She has not confronted him with this. The neighbourhood is a place of Byzantine intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds. And so it is possible that the bus driver had lied, that his wife had, and also that Chanda’s father had actually said those words or something similar, helplessly, to save face in judgemental or belligerent company, implied these words with expressions or uttered them explicitly with the tongue, feeling himself encircled; “Yes, yes, what had to be done was done. Now leave me in peace.”

There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn’t want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world.

She rubs the glass of the window, and it seems to him that she is trying to erase the outside world. He begins to read the Urdu newspaper, and therefore they are both occupied when the bus stops and two new passengers come on board and begin to make their way to the upper deck.

“That was Shamas!” Chanda’s mother whispers, tugging at her husband’s sleeve. “And there
was
a woman with him!”

He lowers the paper. “Where? Do you think it could be one of his secretaries. A white woman?”

“No: one of ours. The very one you must’ve seen. What would he be doing out here with his secretary? They’ve gone upstairs. She was wearing a Kashmiri jacket, and he was holding a green feather. Looked like a parakeet’s.”

“Are all the sons of that family like that—defying conventions, doing what they please?” Chanda’s father says with quiet indignation. “They can do what they like with white women—we all know the morals
they
have— but at least leave our own women alone. You would think it was their mission to corrupt every Pakistani woman they come across.” And he adds decisively, “In my opinion they are still infected with their father’s Hinduism.
Lord
Krishna and his thousand girlfriends, indeed! And they jeer at our Prophet, peace be upon him, for having just nine wives!”

She sighs: “Maybe we are both mistaken. May Allah forgive me for thinking badly of others. Perhaps they were not together. I didn’t see any contact between them; did you, earlier?”

He shakes his head in a quick no, because he is still angry: “I am not sure I would accept his help even if he offered it. His brother corrupted my daughter! All this mess—it’s their fault.”

The bus stops after twenty minutes and the driver, leaning out of his seat, asks the young anglers at the back to disembark. The amount they paid on boarding doesn’t buy them the distance beyond this stop.

Every other passenger looks back briefly, including the man who had got up to leave at this stop.

With their riverbank-odour of moss, soil, young leaves, and the smell of the river water in which two of them had been swimming earlier, all five of the children have fallen silent and are frozen in the attitudes in which they had been caught by the driver’s demand.

The driver unbolts the little metal door next to his seat and comes out into the aisle that is littered with used tickets bearing marks of footprints, like cancelled stamps on a letter. “Get out, please, or give more money if you want to go more. I remember how much you paid.”

The boys, their clothes a fruit-bowl of colours, protest ecstatically and state their destination. They are testing life to see what they can get away with, and how.

“Show tickets, please.” He walks past the man standing before the open door and goes down the aisle towards them, their voices becoming louder. The stationary vehicle is slashed by the sun’s rays and it is like being inside a diamond.

The tickets are produced and he is right: “Please give 25p more, each.
Haram-khor!
No, no, then out please! You make trouble for me. Or 25p more, each. I ask nicely.
Behen chod.
” All six are speaking at once and it is an equally matched quarrel: each side finding a fitting arrow to return to the other’s accusation.

“Oi!” The man standing at the front of the bus shouts, startling everyone. “Oi, Gupta, or whatever it is you call yourself, Abdul-Patel. Mr. Illegal Immigrant–Asylum Seeker! Get back into your seat.”

The driver looks back, stunned. The boys’ protests fall to a murmur, their exuberance sinking like suds.

“Get back now. Come on, quickly,” he points to the driver’s seat and jerks his finger as when an adult orders a child. “Stop wasting everyone’s time.”

“But, please, I lose my job if inspector comes suddenly now . . . ,” he wheedles. “Each need to pay 25p more after this stop . . . please . . .”

“Come here.”

Whipped, the driver takes a few steps. “I lose my job . . . They make trouble for me . . .”

They look at each other, a border lying between them.

“I’ll pay you—here—how much?” He opens his wallet. “Come here, I said.”

The driver returns to his seat without another word, is paid, and the man gets out ostentatiously after saying, “Show us some respect. This is our country, not yours.”

The white passengers continue to look out of the windows. Chanda’s mother’s heart bangs hard and painfully against her chest. Her face and, inside her clothing, her body is burning, her blood flooded with heat.

“I hope the driver won’t take his humiliation out at home later today,” says Chanda’s mother as the bus moves on, “lashing out at his
own
children, and the wife.” But the bus suddenly halts now on the side of the road and the driver comes out once again into the aisle, avoiding the eyes of the passengers. He opens the door and goes out. One minute, two, three, four and then five pass, the passengers becoming restless, and then a few of them get up to go to the front and notice that the man is sitting by the roadside, on a rock beside a flowering shrub, with his head in his hands. There are several quiet “Excuse me”s to attract his attention but he won’t look up.

No one knows what to do. “Please come in, dear,” a white woman tentatively sticks her head out of the door and says, but he does not respond. She stands with her hand pressed to her mouth, and then Chanda’s parents watch as Shamas comes downstairs with a puzzled look on his face, still holding that bright green feather. He goes out and they watch him talk to the driver and a few minutes later the man comes back in. “There
is
something you can do about it. Report it to your superiors,” he tells the driver in Punjabi. “Report it and then ask them to begin a record of racial incidents on the buses, racial abuse towards drivers. Come to my office tomorrow. We’ll also take up the matter with them.” The man nods and gets back behind the wheel.

Shamas glances at the other passengers and then he goes back upstairs.

“Do you think he saw us?” Chanda’s mother asks.

“That woman in the paisley jacket was standing in the stairs, waiting for him. But it could be just another anxious passenger. No?”