Maps for Lost Lovers (34 page)

Once the family has found a girl they’ll send them both to the police station. Finding a girl is proving more difficult. It’s usually men who leave for other countries, being stronger, bolder, the world being slightly easier for them to negotiate than it is for women.

The shop’s door opens. The child standing in front of the shop door, munching a just-bought bar of chocolate, his mouth and gums coated with sweet mud, is brushed aside by a group of women. “Who are you, the door man?” one says, and enters the shop without waiting to hear his “I am just waiting for that tower block on that hill in the distance to fall down—it’s derelict and empty and is gonna be blown up this afternoon.” The women are outraged that he has failed to apologize for obstructing them. But they dismiss him and enter, because: Children? Who is happy with their children? Who? A hand is waved in the air to challenge the others to produce an example from the whole world. “No one. That’s who. Look at the poor Queen and what her children are doing to her.”

“Dragging her through dirt is what they are doing to her, sister-ji.”

“Dragging her by her
feet.
”

“By her hair.”

“Through dirt and through mud. And she a woman who rules the
country.
”

“Making her a laughingstock.”

There follows a few minutes of silence in which the flowers on the fabrics fume hot and angry at the irresponsibility of the young. And then the women spread out across the shop, between the rows of free-standing shelves that fill up the floor space, stopping instinctively to tidy up a row of fruitcakes that are yellow and full of dark raisins and sultanas which make them look like blocks cut out of leopards. Here and there, there are baskets of fruits and vegetables, apples with the red cheeks of Japanese babies, mangoes, guavas, foot-long sections of sugarcane imported from Pakistan, the few sticks perfuming this enclosed air the way the cane crop can perfume the air of an entire village when it ripens. Eggs are usually here, next to the fruit, but in summer they are moved elsewhere because otherwise the customers say their omelettes turn out to be papaya- and pineapple- and melon-flavoured.

Over the next half hour the shop becomes so busy—women arrive to be served at the fabric counter too—that Chanda’s sister-in-law has to call her mother-in-law down for assistance, the customers asking each other about whether this deep red linen would suit my dark complexion, whether this shop stocks the print they saw Shamas’s wife, Kaukab, wearing last week, whether this stripe-covered georgette was the same as the one they saw hanging on the washing line on Jinnah Road . . .

Suraya, examining a packet of Multani clay to be used as a face mask, looks up on hearing Shamas and Kaukab’s names, and looks towards the fabric counter. The clay, from the Pakistani city of Multan, is also used to clean the marble façade of the Taj Mahal; she replaces it on the shelf and crosses over to the fabric counter and—while wondering why the woman behind it gives her a second glance as though she’s trying to recognize or place her—points to the material that apparently Kaukab wears. She remembers being a girl and becoming extremely fond of a teacher at the Muslim school just because she saw her wearing the same print as her mother. Now she wonders whether at some deep level Shamas’s affections would be roused on seeing her in the same material as his wife.

His wife when she was younger.

But couldn’t it also remind him of Kaukab in another way: renewing his love and sending him back to her, repentant of his infidelity.

She looks at the fabric indecisively. He has told her about the sometimes-vague sometimes-sharp antagonisms within his marriage to Kaukab, and she hasn’t let on that she’s more on her side than his. She sounds like an Allah-fearing woman, and Suraya has begun to wonder whether she would eventually be able to appeal directly to her, reminding her that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had had more than one wife.

“It would look beautiful on your skin tone,” the woman behind the counter—Chanda’s mother?—says as she asks her to measure enough material for a
shalwar-kameez.

“Thank you,” she says as she takes her package and turns away, the shop suddenly noisy with children’s toy spaceguns. These are imported from the East and their
bleeps
and
peows
are much louder than the ones that are manufactured here in England, deafeningly so.

A group of middle-aged women are already on to the life-intoxicated boys who are pulling the triggers of the spaceguns—and suddenly everything is markedly silent. Wearing wronged and martyred expressions, the boys are now brought to the relevant mother and made to stand still with threats and pinched looks.

She smiles. She’ll tell Shamas about these boys this afternoon. She has noticed that he loves talking about his children’s childhood, the things they did and said. He won’t be drawn on the subject of them as young adults, or much on what they are doing now. It is clear to her that their growing up was a time of strain and tension for him: there must have been arguments with Kaukab about how they should be raised, so that now he prefers to think of them as young children.

When he mentioned that his elder son, Charag, was an artist, she had wondered whether he could be the same young man she had met beside the lake back in spring, but then he said that Charag doesn’t live in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and hasn’t visited this year.

She moves among the shelves, elated by the sights and the smells, picking up small boxes and jars, mesmerized by the pink, the blue, the red, the green, the orange, the yellow, the silver, the gold, unscrewing and sniffing the small roll-on vials of perfume, sandalwood, saffron, jasmine, rose. It’s like being a young girl again.

She suddenly wishes she had a little daughter—to dress up, to buy beads and dolls for.

In a state as close to bliss as she has been able to capture during the past few months, listening to the women’s voices all around her, she finds herself melting into a sweet lethargy. One of the things she misses most about being in Pakistan is the company of her women friends and acquaintances, lying on the veranda under the ceiling fans and talking about inconsequential matters, laughing, trying on bangles from the dozens arrayed on the floor between them like the Olympics logo for a planet that has more continents than Earth does, contradicting each other (and their own selves too, saying, “My Allah, do we women ever know what we want!”), shrieking at double entendres and innuendoes, and making lewd remarks about husbands (how often, and how fast, and, praise be to Allah, how slow?) and fiancés and about other men of the area too (having caught glimpses of them walking by in the street, she remembers whispering to her friends about the breathtaking beauty of the men of the family with which her in-laws had the feud; the women had agreed and then, dying with laughter, someone said she’d heard one of those handsome god-like men urinate in an alley while she was nearby, and— Allah!—the sound had startled her: “After he was gone, I couldn’t resist looking and saw that he’d made an enormous crater in the ground the way horses do”).

Smiling, she looks around but is suddenly reminded of the fact that her mother-in-law—a woman not unlike these very ones—is scheming to destroy her life even now, the witch who had said on the phone that, “You didn’t even produce a child until you were in your late twenties, and even then after thousands of rupees’ worth of hormones and injections that we had to pay for, my poor son having to visit you in the hospital morning-noon-and-night after you had miscarriage after miscarriage.” Suraya had wanted to shout, “I wasn’t lounging about on the hospital bed just to spite you and your son, you crone. I had needles stuck in my arms every waking hour, and my groin was all bloody and butchered after the operations.” But she had kept quiet lest the witch double her efforts to find a new wife for Suraya’s husband.

“I’d heard England was a cold country but it’s so hot today,” says a young woman who’s standing next to Suraya. She moves her bangles up her arm to scratch her wrist. She’s wearing one of those lockets which contain miniature Korans a third the size of a matchbox.

Suraya smiles politely and makes a non-committal sound.

“It’s my first summer here. I came from Pakistan last November.”

“A cousin born here in England went back to get married to you?”

The young woman replaces on the shelf the tub of cream she’s been examining. “I am not married. I came to England on my own.” She lowers her voice. “I am an illegal immigrant.”

Suraya nods.

“I need somewhere to live for a while. You don’t know any place, do you?” The girl points over her shoulder, through the shop’s glass front. “Do you see that tall tower block in the distance? It’s completely empty so me and a friend broke in last night and are staying there. He’s nineteen and is almost like a brother to me, reminds me of my own, in fact.” Her eyes begin to smile at the mention of the boy. “And that impression has got stronger over the past few days because he has been very ill of late and I have to take care of him, the way I used to take care of my brother when my mother and me were trying to wean him off heroin.”

Suraya looks at the distant tower—no bigger than the locket around the woman’s neck—and nods.

“He was in pain all night and nodded off at dawn. I think it’s TB. When I left he was fast asleep. I’ll take home some fruit for him this evening.” She turns and looks at the tower. The smile escapes from her eyes and settles on her lips like a butterfly.

Suraya says, “You could say that you are keeping an eye on him even from here.”

The girl gives a small laugh. She opens the locket with its hinged lid and shows it to Suraya: hollow inside, it contains—instead of the usual Koran—four strands of gold. “The boy has a single gold hair amid the black ones on his head. He plucks it every other month and I collect it in the locket for safekeeping. It’s real gold. We’ll sell it when we have enough.”

Suraya looks at her wristwatch. “I am afraid I have to go. You should ask the shopkeeper for help in finding you new accommodation.”

She goes out to her car, towards her meeting with Shamas at the
Safeena.
She should try to remember a story about her son to tell to Shamas, some clever observation or humorous comment of his, to make sure it would endear him to Shamas, with the result that, when the time comes, he would feel sympathy and pity for him and then he would want to do anything he can to unite the child with his mother. Yes: this would do—last week he said that snails look like jelly that has come alive in its mould and is trying to escape.

She’s hoping to take the servant girl in the house in Pakistan into her confidence, in order to ask her what her mother-in-law and husband are planning. Turn her into a spy. She should try to coax her on to the line the next time, promising her a gift or two from England, a pink cardigan with golden buttons, perhaps; or bright hair-grips shaped like strawberries, butterflies, daffodils, tartan bows; or high-heeled sandals with rhinestones on the straps.

She must protect her son (and herself) whichever way she can.

Chanda’s sister-in-law puts into a plastic bag the tube of beauty lotion that a woman is buying—a Pakistani import. The lines on a man’s hand foretell how many wives he will have—one, two, three or four—but according to the slogan on the tube,
It’s not the lines on the palm of your
husband’s hand that indicate a second wife
—
it’s the lines on
your face. The woman departs, counting the change she’s been given.

“Are you going to sell those strawberries to me at a cheaper rate, sister-ji?” says a young girl approaching the counter, a beam of light from the window striking the locket around her neck to produce a prismatic flash. Chanda’s sister-in-law is about to refuse politely when the girl continues in a low tone: “I am a poor illegal immigrant, sister-ji, and Allah will reward you for helping me.”

Chanda’s sister-in-law immediately smiles at the girl, but looks around too, because she mustn’t be seen in the company of this young woman— she could prove suitable and their plan won’t work if someone has witnessed them together. Luckily they are alone in the shop. “Help yourself.” She points to the strawberries. “It’s my duty to help you.”

“Me and a man from Pakistan came and said to the people at the port in Dover that we were lovers and that our families wanted to kill us, because I had disgraced them by falling in love with him. We said we wanted asylum. They let us stay while our application was being processed. I ran away from the holding centre and have ended up here.”

“What about your lover?” Chanda’s sister-in-law’s heart is beating fast—she might not want to go back to Pakistan without him.

The girl shakes her head. “Sister-ji! He wasn’t my
lover.
I am a good Muslim. No matter what kind of predicament Allah has placed me in, I’ll never compromise my honour. He was nothing to me: Love was a fiction the agent in Pakistan told us to tell the English authorities. He is still in the holding centre probably. I told him I was leaving—I left Pakistan to make money, not languish in a locked building. Here in England, I’ll be able to make in ten years what it would have taken me forty years to make over there.”

Chanda’s sister nods. “Where are you living at the moment?”

The girls points out the tower through the glass window, the other hand playing with the locket around her neck.

Chanda’s sister-in-law turns around but, on seeing that a customer is approaching the shop, quickly tells the girl to go to the fruit section. A whirlwind of plaits and scarves and balloons with
Freedom for Kashmir
printed on them, her daughters come down from upstairs, ready for the mosque.

She serves the customers, keeping an eye on the girl with the locket, and when the shop is empty again after five minutes she goes over to her, beside the basket of strawberries, a hairy leaf sticking out of the brilliant baubles here and there.

“You should not have left your country,” she says to the girl, who raises her eyes briefly at her, chewing the corner of her mouth, but doesn’t say anything. “Don’t you miss it?”