Maps for Lost Lovers (20 page)

She begged forgiveness from Allah for her charade of piety over the previous two years, and now, addressing Him in her prayers, said that she would put to rest all her doubts about His existence if He were to perform a miracle and make her his bride, see to it that she was rowed across these turbulent waters.

But miracles came from faith, not faith from miracles.

Kaukab had never lost faith that Allah would find a way of helping her widower brother-in-law—a man whom she loved and respected like a blood-brother, difficult though he was—and she was pleased when Mah-Jabin unexpectedly agreed to marry his son and settle in Sohni Dharti to run the house and look after her ageing, grief-stricken uncle. Things had worked out for everyone, and in the girl’s silent fantasy of the past two years—her silent and extravagant fantasy, misguided, innocent and unbounded—Kaukab saw the proof of how Allah blinds His creatures when He needs to further the designs of destiny.

It’s stopped raining so that out there everything that can sparkle is sparkling. Mah-Jabin lowers her ear to the opening of the conch shell that is a one-third open orchid or lily in bone, a stone vulva, a book warped and soaked double by rain, and listens to the sea that is not there with her eyes closed.

The henna has imparted a reddish darkness to her hair, a tone of black found on photographic negatives. Each night the stars seem a little further away. This house is almost not a building but an emotion; every last surface here bears scars of war. Through glass and water-beads she looks down at the front garden, the lilacs bathed clean, the roses newly shattered like china in the rain, the front gate where on arrival she had smelled a cloud of the perfume her mother always wears, the vapour of jasmine telling her that she was out here only moments ago—and now she knows how her mother found out about her planned trip to the US; she had told the taxi driver about it, and he must’ve called and told his wife, who had then stopped by to tell Kaukab that her daughter was on the way, calling her out to the gate. The Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers are known for spreading news to all corners of Dasht-e-Tanhaii through their radios— who was seen when and with whom and where—and she always avoids a conversation with them, letting them listen to their Hindi music or taped sermons of Muslim clerics, but today a song whose lyrics are meant to be misinterpreted had come on—

Choli ke pechay kya hai, choli ke pechay?
Chunri ke nechay kya hai, chunri ke nechay?

What are you hiding behind that blouse?

What is being kept covered under the veil?

The flustered driver had switched off the music to begin a conversation with Mah-Jabin, not allowing the singer’s question to be answered by the other singer in the lilting duet—

Choli me dil hai mera,
Chunri me dil hai mera:
Yeh dil main doon gi mere yar ko, pyar ko.
The blouse contains my heart,
The veil conceals my heart:
The heart which I’ll give to my lover, to my beloved.

She lowers the conch shell onto the table surface, and remains there, recalling how as a child she had wanted to fish in the sea that she heard surging within the red petrified folds and ruffles freckled with archipelagos of white stains, giddy at the thought of the fantastic creatures to be found down in the depths below the waves that weren’t there, in the coves that edged its slow silver, the illusory sea that is the equivalent of the sky in a cupped-handful of water.

She leaves the room, her forehead burnt by the thoughts in her mind.

Outside, a male starling is carrying a flower in its beak to decorate the nest it has built for the female somewhere, and in the empty room the sea and all that it contains sloshes and echoes silently in the shell’s red cone.

LIKE BEING BORN

Charag steps into the lake, naked, and scoops water onto his head, bending his neck to let the falling drops flatten his hair. The water reaches the scalp and begins to pour down the face, getting into the eyes where the rich brown irises are an arrangement of suede-splinters—like the gills of a mushroom. A good deal of the light from the moon seems to be reaching the earth but without first lighting up the intervening sky and air— the earth is as though glowing itself. It’s half an hour or so to dawn, and in the predawn light the world appears as though newly formed, softer on the eye, as exalted as a vision. Leaves float around him as he swims in the lake, one or two curled at the tips as in botanical illustrations, the oaks lobed like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. His clothes lie on the shore among the stones while he moves through the water that is a skin trying to contain a deep-blue light which seems to come to the surface from somewhere down below, the colour of the blue vein on the pale inside of his elbow.

He is still undecided about whether he will visit his parents. He has driven all night to be back in Dasht-e-Tanhaii but now isn’t sure why he has come.

He was the elder son and, throughout his boyhood, was always accompanied by the sense that the family’s betterment lay on his shoulders. Nothing was ever made verbal but this expectation had been inhaled by him with each breath he had taken during those early years. His parents wanted to return to Pakistan: he would become a doctor and go back with them—this was understood by him. They—all of them—would be free of England when he finished his studies. He was troubled by the guilt of truancy every time he did something he enjoyed, every time he picked up his drawing pad. His art teacher came to the house one day when he was fourteen, to plead with the parents to let him continue with the subject. She had secured a place for three of the paintings in the little art gallery above the public library in the town centre, and his photograph had appeared in
The Afternoon.
The art teacher’s letters had been ignored at home—the mischievous attempts of the whites to lead the boy astray, said Kaukab, an attempt to prevent the Pakistanis from getting ahead in life, encouraging them to waste time on childish things instead of working towards a position of influence. When the teacher came to the house Charag had felt humiliated, screaming at her inside his head to go away, wondering whether the parents thought he had asked her to come, that he had betrayed them somehow.

He had to concentrate on sciences, spending his time in the laboratories where the microscopes slept like hawks under their dust covers. The science teachers advised him to simplify the diagrams that accompanied his essays, concerned that it would become a habit and he would lose valuable time during exams. But the diagrams were the only sketching he could do without furtiveness and guilt at home.

Everyone at home was, of course, aware of his talent. Kaukab sometimes brought him a bar of perfumed soap so he could sketch the vignette indented at its centre for her to embroider it in rows on her own or Mah-Jabin’s
kameez
s
.
And she asked him to convert the vines and geometric designs from the borders of the paper kitchen-towels so that they could be traced on the hands in henna, reducing it to fit the fingers, enlarging it for the palms. She saved the sketches in a folder that lived in her sewing hamper and they were often lent to other women around the neighbourhood. Whenever she couldn’t find her tailor’s chalk she asked to borrow one of his colouring pencils.

His grades at A-level were not high enough to get into medical school. Putting aside the feeling of guilt and disgrace and failure, he told his parents he would not be retaking the exams next year to improve his grades for medical school, nor would he go to university this year to read the many other science subjects for which his grades were good enough.

He planned to go to art college.

But he changed his mind when from the dark staircase he heard his mother slap the thirteen-year-old Mah-Jabin in the kitchen and say, “Who would marry you now?”

The year he went back to repeat his A-levels was a year enclosed on all sides by loneliness. Everyone he knew had gone away to university. He sat alone on the bus on the way to the school that was a low long building among the hills, made of gleaming glass and greyness and as windy as a harmonica, and in the classrooms he found himself unwilling to make contact with the new batch of students. Things had changed at home also: his failure had been a cruel dashing of his parents’ hopes, and a cloud of something anaesthetizing hung over his brother and sister who had witnessed his commitment to his studies all their lives—and, having failed despite all the hard work, he had made them afraid of their own books and schoolwork; the event had injured their confidence in their own abilities.

Early in October a pain opened in his back and legs, and the doctor— after checking his reflexes by trailing and wafting a tissue paper along his naked body—had wondered if he would like to be referred to a psychiatrist since there seemed no organic cause for the severe ache. His mother said it was out of the question: a young girl in the neighbourhood had been sent to a psychiatrist by the doctor and had within months rebelled against her parents and left home.

The months passed. He lost the pain somewhere along the way, working hard on his studies, but again did not make the required grades. He went away to university in London to do a BSc in Chemistry: there was one last path open to medical school still—if he managed to do well in his degree finals he could apply for entry then, in three years’ time.

But during his second year in London, everything changed: one night, drunk, he found the courage to speak to Stella. “I am never wrong about colour,” was one of the first things he said to her.

“Are you wearing contact lenses?” he shouted over the music. “No one with hair that colour has such blue eyes. I am never wrong about colour.”

She looked at him. “My eyes are that colour naturally. How do you know my hair isn’t dyed?” It fell onto her shoulders from beneath a large black hat the rim of which had been turned up above the face, the slice pinned to the crown with a pointy rose made of folded ribbon, also black. His hands were shaking. During the year in which he had tried to improve his grades, he saw many Pakistani and Indian boys and girls— who had been waiting since the beginning of puberty to leave home and find lovers at university—make desperate, clumsy and foolish attempts to pair up now that freedom had been delayed by one more unbearable year. But he had kept his distance and reserve. And upon arrival in London, the sadness was of a different kind: there was no fear of discovery or repercussions here but he was inhibited by incompetence and inexperience, by a profound sense of shame regarding his virginal state.

“Well?” she had now turned her back squarely on the boy she had been talking to when he approached her, and—in the privacy which included him—made a quick male-masturbatory gesture with the looped thumb and first finger of her left hand, to convey to him what she thought of the boy. Shunned, the boy stood behind her for a while and then miserably walked away.

Her confidence filled him with terror. Would she dismiss and denounce him similarly upon meeting the next person? Her lips were red and syrupy like glacé cherries.

“Well, young man, how do you know my hair isn’t dyed?”

“It just isn’t. I would know if it were. As I said I am never wrong about colour.”

She shrugged and smiled: “Hey, listen, I have seen you around the campus. And at the weekend you work at that bar in Soho, don’t you. I have wanted to talk to you for weeks now.”

“My name is Charag.”

“I know. I am Stella.”

“I know.”

They had to lean very close to each other to be heard and as a result could hear each other’s breath. They were in the cellar of a student house in Notting Hill, the space packed with people, and, softly, she took his hand and led him to the edge of the room, the walls that had been stencilled with giant capsules and pills in acidic colours, tumbling and floating, a brightly glowing mural celebrating their milieu’s fetish. There was to be a performance by a band—some friends of the party-givers who had travelled down from Scotland—but the party dispersed when the police arrived, summoned by the neighbours whose extreme dislike of the stu dents and the young they themselves were unable to comprehend, thinking their high-decibel drinking sprees and benders went unheard just as their intense internal storms of confusion did. Charag and Stella lost each other in the crowd that spilled onto the street like a nest of termites broken into.

She came to Soho the following Friday, then again the next night, and asked her friends to leave without her, waiting for the staff to finish the after-work duties. And just before dawn—when the red dots on her bed covers were juxtaposed on the windowpane as though berries hung on the tree outside—he left her room to go back to his own house, burning with longing and humiliation, kicking in murderous rage at the dry plane leaves that littered the footpaths.

He had watched the cigarette in her hands: tiny pink eyes opening and closing, breathing, where the paper burned and sent into the air a brown thread parallel to and distinct from the blue wisp of smoke rising out of the live tobacco.

The anxieties had been many. The sense passed on to him during his upbringing was that the differences between the whites and the Pakistanis were too many for interaction to successfully take place; many marriages ended. The cleric at the mosque had advised the boys to stay away from the “faeces-filled sacks” that were earthly women and wait for the houris of Paradise. He said the boys should handle their members with tissue paper when they urinated, that it was a disgusting appendage. And, of course, intercourse was so dirty that the body had to be made pure afterwards by bathing. Charag had once heard one of the women assembled in the blue kitchen tell the others about how she had had to lie when confronted with the inquisitive innocence of her young son that day because he had wondered why her hair was wet so early in the morning: “I said his little sister had urinated on the bed and I had to purify myself with a bath at dawn to say the dawn prayers.” He heard the women laughing and offering variations of the incident as he sat naked from waist to knee in his room, stopping with an elbow the trembling slippery magazines from sliding off the bed. The jingle of the belt buckle had to be silenced in a fist when the trousers were pulled up afterwards. He had built up and discarded and built up again caches of girlie magazines during his adolescence, the pages crossed with white splintery creases where they had been folded double to keep a combination of favourite images before the eyes during the moment of orgasm. He threw them away in moments of self-disgust, timing this cleansing carefully with the bin men’s visit, so that they may not lie outside the house for days. Each visit to the newsagent for the purpose of beginning again was a defeat: he was weak and corrupt.