Maps for Lost Lovers (11 page)

She waited for Jugnu to come home from work that night. “I may only be a woman and not as educated as you, but I won’t stand by and let you damage further that already-damaged girl. Have you considered the consequences for her when her family finds out about this? You men can do anything you want but it’s different for us women. Who will marry her again when people find out that she has been engaging in intercourse with men she’s not married to?”

Chanda moved in with Jugnu a few days after that.

Over the coming weeks Kaukab began to time her trips outdoors in order to avoid the girl, because that was what Chanda was, a girl. Instead of the drawstring that adults use, she used elastic in the waistband of her
shalwar;
Kaukab could see her clothes hanging out on the washing line between two of the five apple trees. She sensed the girl’s own reluctance to let her gaze meet hers.

And it was by that washing line that Kaukab, having crossed over into the adjoining garden, had eventually told the girl to move out of Jugnu’s house.

Chanda tried to pull her arm back but Kaukab tightened her hold: “If truly offered, repentance is honoured even on one’s deathbed and wipes out a lifetime’s worth of sins to deliver the sinner into Paradise along with those who led virtuous lives. Only on the day that the sun would rise out of the west, the Judgement Day, would the gates of forgiveness be barred shut.”

The girl freed her arm with a jerk, her green eyes igniting. “There is no alternative. He says he’ll marry me but I am not divorced and my husband cannot be located.” She flicked the dripping
muhaish
-work
kameez
back on the line—like flipping a giant page—and went back into the house, but not before stopping at the doorstep to say to Kaukab: “We love each other deeply and honestly.”

Kaukab had looked her directly in the eyes: “I care about what it is, yes, but also about what it looks like.”

“And I care only about what it is.”

It was Kaukab’s first and last conversation with Jugnu’s lover. His own visits to the house were already dwindling. It was a sin to offer food to a fornicator, and Kaukab—the daughter of a cleric, born and raised in the shadow of a minaret—stopped soaking that third glassful of rice and peeled two aubergines instead of three. And then on a July afternoon heady with the pine-soup heat of the lake, Jugnu and Chanda left for Pakistan for four weeks, and Kaukab busied herself with trying to arrange a marriage for Charag.

After the hopelessness and despair that resulted from the disclosure about the vasectomy had settled a little (she had startled herself by abusing her father-in-law, that loving and beloved man, he who was so good that when he visited a saint’s shrine the holy man’s hand was said to have emerged from the grave to shake hands with him) and, stunned and repentant at her thoughts, feeling Allah’s spit land on her soul because she was so evil-minded, feeling so small in her own eyes that she would have had to fight to subdue a beetle, she had told herself that she must try to accept the world’s realities; it was almost time for the couple’s expected return to England. By complete chance she ran into Chanda’s third husband in the street and told him he had to release her by divorcing her: “Immediately contact her parents to tell them that that is what you plan to do. Allah will never forgive you if you don’t. If not out of the fear of Allah, then do it out of gratitude towards the girl who made you a British citizen.”

Chanda and Jugnu could now get married!

She propped open the back door with the lobster buoy from Maine to keep an eye on the activity in Jugnu’s back garden: the front door of his house was always locked because
The Darwin
filled up his front garden. The boat’s actual price was £3,000 but he had bought it, a battered wreck, for £650 in 1985, and then spent the following few years renovating it with the help of the three children. It lived at the front like a huge clothes iron and so the back door was how everyone always entered the house.

As the days passed without the couple appearing, she telephoned Pakistan and was told that they had left a week earlier than planned. She asked a boy in the street to climb the purple beech in the back garden to look into the upstairs bedroom. She then dragged a ladder and put it to the upstairs windows at the front. Were they in England or still in Pakistan? Perhaps they had left the house in Sohni Dharti and gone butterfly collecting around Pakistan? The boy she had sent up the ladder shouted down that he could see open suitcases through one of the windows.

And then Kaukab suddenly knew what had happened: the couple had returned from Pakistan and gone straight to Chanda’s family’s shop to ask for their forgiveness. The decadent and corrupt West had made them forget piety and restraint, but the countless examples in Pakistan had brought home to them the importance and beauty of a life decorously lived according to His rules and injunctions, Pakistan being a country of the pious and the devout, a place where boundaries are respected. She rushed to the shop, absolutely sure that Chanda and Jugnu had gone there in repentance and—Oh, the miracles of Allah!—Chanda’s parents had in turn told them that the girl’s third husband had been on the telephone recently to say he was ready to divorce her. But when she got to the shop Chanda’s brother told her bluntly:

“Stop bothering us with all that, auntie-ji. As far as we are concerned, that little whore died the day she moved in with him.”

She returned, shocked by the vehemence. All the way there she had been thinking that the family would have forgiven the couple, that the parents would have remembered that everyone loved someone before marriage, love being a phenomenon as old and sacred as Adam and Eve. Women joked amongst themselves: “Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It’s for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past—‘you were born and then I married you’—but men are fools.”

The size of a matchbox, the old piece of cooked fish in the fridge is stiff with the cold and ought to be thrown away but Kaukab wraps it in a slice of bread and eats it, bending forward at the second bite because she has neglected to check for bones. It’s like a metal hook in her throat. She coughs and splutters, gasping for air, and manages to swallow, her throat raw. She takes a glass of water and sits down to steady her nerves, the danger passed, her mind returning to what she was thinking about earlier.

Love.

Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love. And, said the True Faith, it did not even begin with humans and animals: even the trees were in love. The very stones sang of love. Allah Himself was a being in love with His own creations.

In their youth Chanda’s parents themselves must have loved someone other than the person they were married to now, for Kaukab certainly had, she who was the daughter of a cleric . . .

But it seems that the danger from the fishbone has not passed: she leans forward and watches in horror as a small wrinkled kerchief of blood issues from her mouth and spreads on the table before her.

Before she has had time to realize what is happening, Shamas has called for a taxi to take her to the hospital, another small pool of blood on the stairs as she goes up to the bathroom, feeling faint.

Suspicious at first, she lets Shamas hold her hand in the taxi as she presses the bloody tissue-paper to her lips with the other.

She is examined and X-rayed and it turns out to be only a minor injury. “Nothing to worry about,” says the white doctor. “Date of birth?” he asks her, flipping through the forms before him.

Shamas looks at her to be reminded of it, and she whispers it. It hurts her to speak.

“On your birthday you should have had trouble with swallowing cake not fish,” the man laughs good-naturedly.

“It’s your birthday?” Shamas asks quietly.

“You didn’t know?” The doctor looks at him, amused.

“I didn’t remember myself,” she interjects. She scrutinizes Shamas’s face. Surely, he is more embarrassed about what the white man is thinking of
him
than upset that he’d forgotten the date, that
she
would be hurt by it. But then she drives the wicked thought away.

Back home through the snow-covered roads and streets, she wants him out of the house so she can ring Ujala’s voice, but he is reluctant to leave her and go to the bookshop as had been his plan. She pretends she is in less pain than she really is. There is also the fear in her that he might become amorous again, this time in repentance for having forgotten the day, as though she cares in the least about frivolities like birthdays.

The trip to the hospital had taken more than an hour but it had passed blankly for her: there’s nothing for her out there in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, to notice or be interested in. Everything is here in this house. Every beloved absence is present here.

An oasis—albeit a haunted one—in the middle of the Desert of Loneliness.

Out there, there was nothing but humiliation: she’s hot with shame at what the white doctor would now think of Pakistanis, of Muslims—they are like animals, not even remembering or celebrating birthdays. Dumb cattle.

She convinces Shamas to go at last and watches from the window as he walks away between the twenty maples, her husband—who, all those years ago, very nearly wasn’t her husband. Kaukab hadn’t seen a man up close without there being the gauze of her
burqa
between him and her since the age of twelve—she had been made to wear it because it was well known that certain men marked out beautiful girl-children and then waited for years for them to grow up. Her vigilant mother lifted the stamp of every letter that came into the house to make sure no clandestine message was being passed. And then on a certain monsoon Thursday when she was in her twenties, and sitting in the back room working on the articles that would one day soon become part of her dowry, for her parents had begun the preliminary negotiations for her marriage, she heard a short tap on the window. She put aside the fabric she was cutting up into a
kameez
and went to open it, expecting it to be the little boy she had seen through the same window wandering through the street earlier and sent to the shop at the corner with a swatch of fabric the size of a teabag to buy a spool of thread “matching exactly that colour, or I’ll send you back to exchange it. And show me your pocket so I can make sure there’s no hole in it, otherwise you’ll lose my money and come back with a long face.”

Only after he left had she regretted not having told him to get an adult—preferably a woman—to match the thread with the cloth.

She opened the window and recoiled, barely managing to hide behind the casement leaf because there was a grown man standing on the other side.

She was shaking. She heard his voice but it was many seconds before she made out his words: “The newspaper. Can I have our newspaper back?” It must be the son of the family from whom her father borrowed the newspaper each morning, she understood, and felt terror at the thought that someone might have seen her opening the window to him: a woman’s life was ruined as easily as that. People might not believe that she was innocent.

And then suddenly she felt anger at him: how dare he knock on a window during the daytime when there was every possibility that he might catch the daughters of the house unawares.

“The newspaper was sent back at eleven o’clock, brother-ji.”

She was about to close the window when the voice said: “The literary supplement is missing. Could you check that you don’t still have it in there somewhere. I’d be grateful.”

She closed the window and bolted it shut noisily with a “Wait there, brother-ji,” more and more furious at him for neglecting to refer to her as “sister-ji,” which would have decriminalized the glimpse he had caught of her face, and in a panic because she hadn’t checked the date on the paper she had found on the table earlier and had spent the past hour practising the pattern of her
kameez
on it: there it lay on the floor now, today’s literary supplement, cut up into geometric shapes.

She collected the boats and heron’s beaks from under the bed—off-cuts the ceiling fan had scattered—and stood motionlessly, holding all the pieces in her fist, wrinkling the paper further, hoping the stranger would tire and leave. But he tapped again, and she opened the casement just enough for her hand to pass through and handed him his beloved literary supplement, the pages that did not mention the name of Allah or Muhammad, prayer and peace be upon him, even once because she had checked before spreading them on the floor.

“Here it is, brother-ji. I am sorry it is a bit creased but the iron isn’t working today,” she said, as though all he would notice would be the creases and not the chopping up. And she shuddered that a daughter of the mosque was handing over her vital statistics to a complete stranger. There were no limits to the depravity of the world and all this man had to do was to spread the whole thing out on a bed and with a bit of sense put together a cut-out of her upper body like a jigsaw.

He received the pieces and left without another word.

The following Thursday, oppressed by a sense of remorse about last week, she ran the hot iron over the newspaper just before it was due to be sent back, to smooth over the few creases her father had made whilst reading. Somehow she managed not to make a sound when the words
I see the
iron is working today
appeared suddenly along the margin of the literary section. It was a schoolchild’s trick: the sentence had been inscribed with a clean bamboo pen using onion water as ink—upon drying it was invisible to the eye, but the iron scorched it a deep manila, revealing it.

Later that year, she locked herself into the bathroom and wept when her parents informed her that her engagement had been finalized. The instant the first onion-water message had materialized she had ripped it off the newspaper, relieved that no one else had seen it, but she regretted her action during the week because the missing strip was a signal to the sender that his words had been received. Having successfully shunned the literary section for the two Thursdays that followed the first message, she had plugged in the iron on the third and was troubled as to why she felt inconsolable because no message appeared on the paper. And there would be none over the next two months, but, today, now that she was engaged to be married to another man, there was a cruelly mocking,
I
heard the good news. Congratulations.