Maps for Lost Lovers (48 page)

Kaukab, not believing what she has read, rereads the lines. She realizes now that she is not to blame for the fact that Chanda and Jugnu had left Pakistan earlier than they had planned. But there is little comfort in the alternative, real, sequence of events. “Poor Chanda.” She sits with her hand in her head. “My poor Mah-Jabin.” Suddenly she gets up and, a last attempt at resistance, looks behind the drum of the immersion heater. Could this letter be a trick of Mah-Jabin’s? A forgery to torment her? A plot hatched by Mah-Jabin and Ujala and Charag and the white girl Stella and Shamas to humiliate her, to ridicule her faith? But there behind the drum is the crumpled-up envelope the letter had come in. She recognizes it, remembers that it had arrived back in spring. The stamp portrays a tree ablaze with pink-white blossoms in the distance and in the foreground a sprig containing a ruffled orchid-like flower and a leaf resembling the imprint of a camel’s foot: it is
Bauhinia variegata,
the wording informs along a vertical margin, and horizontally that the stamp is one of the MEDICINAL PLANTS OF PAKISTAN. She drops the envelope and continues with the letter.

We stray but we beg for forgiveness and are pardoned because we are
good. The world is lit only with the light of our love for Him, we, the men
who were submissive to Allah, and the women who were submissive to
their men.

The book of History is recording everything, and He is making a list of
the believers and a list of the unbelievers. Try thinking about which list
your name is going into, Mah-Jabin, and be afraid. What kind of End
awaits you after this short life of fifty or sixty years?

Having read to the end, Kaukab picks up the tattered envelope from the floor and places the folded sheet of paper into it. She sits there, staring at the stamp depicting the pretty flower of the tree that is valued for, among other things, its effectiveness against malarial fevers, the abil ity to regularize menstrual dysfunction, and as an antidote to snake venom.

The sun rounds the corner and begins to sail at the front of the house. She sits there, wondering if that’s who she is, if that’s what her image looks like in the mirror: a mother who feeds poisons to her son, and a mother who jumps to conclusions and holds her daughter responsible for the fact that her marriage ended disastrously? The realizations are still new and she is not sure what effect they will have on her soul after she has lived with them for an hour, a day, a month. The bitterness of the poison is as yet only testing her tongue and mouth: what will happen when it soaks into the veins?

She hears a car pull up outside and, from the bathroom window, she looks down to see that Charag and Stella have arrived. Charag opens the back door of the car to let the eight-year-old son out. The temperature has plummeted over the past two days and Kaukab is pleased to see that the grandson is wrapped up against the December cold. The end of the woollen cap doubles in a band across his little forehead, over the ears and back along the nape of the neck, for extra warmth. When they were still married Kaukab had once seen Stella and Charag arrive for a visit—and Charag had kissed her on the lips out in the street. Kaukab had backed away. Must they display such lewdness in public? (Chanda and Jugnu at least spared her such obscene behaviour outdoors.) And right there in front of the little boy too, who would no doubt begin to chase girls as soon as he is in his teens and be sexually active by the time he is fifteen, thinking display-of-wantonness and sex-before-marriage was the norm and not grave sins! The little boy would no doubt marry a white girl and his own children would too:
all
trace of modesty and propriety would be bred out of them. Is this how Charag’s grandchildren would think of Charag?—“My mother and father are white, and my mother’s people are all white. I look a little dark because of one of my grandparents. He was a Paki.”

The grandson flings his cap onto the linoleum the moment she lets the three of them in. She apologizes for the kitchen smelling of food and asks them all to take their coats into the next room. Before closing the outside door she runs her gaze in a sweep across the street to see if Mah-Jabin and Ujala are returning. She hugs the little boy and kisses his head, face and both hands.

“What’s that?” Charag points to the crumpled letter that Kaukab only now realizes she still has in her hand.

She quickly puts it into her cardigan pocket. “A letter from your grandfather in Pakistan. He says he is disappointed that your son—his great-grandson—didn’t begin Koranic lessons at the age of four years, four months and four days, as is prescribed for every Muslim child.”

Stella is looking into the room next door. “Have Mah-Jabin and Ujala not arrived yet?” The dining table in there is paved with plates. The tablecloth is obviously from an Asian fabric shop, the beautiful material— patterned with movements of flower-heavy creepers—that the Asian women make their clothing out of, the colours often bright, the shapes exquisite, and which, Charag once said, had made his adolescent self look at Matisse more carefully.

“They have gone for a walk,” Kaukab says as she strikes a match to relight the hobs. She tilts the matchstick downward so that the wood beyond the head tempts the fire into remaining alive. “Please, go into the next room and stay there. I don’t want the smell getting into your clothes.” She was hoping to take Mah-Jabin aside as soon she came back to the house—to let her know that she has found the letter, to ask her to explain the truth about her marriage in Pakistan—but it’s unlikely that she would have a chance to do that over the next few hours. And she has yet to explain to Ujala that it wasn’t her intention to harm him with the sacred salt. Those damned scientists, how they love to analyse everything! As she takes the lids off the pans one by one, she is reminded once again— having forgotten it when she read that letter upstairs—that she has to scale down the evening meal. Suddenly confused, she wishes Mah-Jabin were here to be consulted, and she calls out to Charag in the next room so that he can go out and look for his brother and sister. But he doesn’t hear her.

Switching on the television in the next room, Charag is startled by the loud burst of noise that comes out: the volume is turned too high. He decides not to ask Kaukab whether his father’s hearing is deteriorating: he had asked once but Kaukab had denied it and seemed to consider the inquiry impertinent. A son may not notice his father’s inadequacies. Tonight he will contrive to show Shamas how to access the subtitles on the remote control: white, green, yellow, red—each person speaking a differently coloured sentence.

A black-and-white Tarzan movie is found for the little boy and Stella sits with him in front of it with the assurance that he’ll like it. “What does he turn into?” he asks after a while and he loses interest immediately when he is told that the character doesn’t
turn
into anything, isn’t transformed into a monster or otherworldly creature, that he remains a human being. But then he looks up, points to Tarzan and says, “He speaks like Grandma Kaukab!”

The three of them go back into the kitchen just as Kaukab is opening the door to Mah-Jabin.

“Ujala is still at the lake,” she announces, and, holding Kaukab’s eye, makes the smallest possible movement of the head to convey reassurance, “He’ll be back in a moment, Mother. We walked all the way to the
Safeena.
”

With her arms around her little nephew, Mah-Jabin buries her lips into the soft skin of his neck. How old would her child have been now had she not lost it?

Stella tells her she has the beginning of a cold: “There was a spectacular storm scene in the play I went to not long ago. Wind machine, real water for rain.”

Mah-Jabin smiles and lowers the boy onto the floor and turns brightly to Kaukab. “Let’s get the food ready. Fasten your tastebuds, Charag and Stella. No doubt, you two haven’t been asked to help with the preparations because Mother is too polite . . .” Stella is assigned the task to locate the cellophane bag of crushed summer mint from the ice-compartment and add them to a bowl of yoghurt. The beaten pulp is frozen solid in the cellophane like a creaking chunk of tundra with prehistoric algae in it, and there is no adult way of breaking it apart: it has to be done clumsily the way a child would do it.

Leaning into Mah-Jabin at the first opportunity, Kaukab tries to tell her that she knows the truth about her marriage but all she can say is, “Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t know what was going on?”

Mah-Jabin knits her brows and puckers her lips into a silent
Shhh,
and whispers back, “It’s OK. We’ll talk later. I think he knows you thought it was just ordinary salt.”

“I am not talking about Ujala,” Kaukab says, and wonders if she would know how to broach the subject of her marriage with Mah-Jabin later. “But, for the record I didn’t know anything about that too.” Her eyes are red.

From her coat pocket, Mah-Jabin takes out a pack of tamarind pulp: “I thought we could add it to the chutney, Mother. I stopped by at a shop on my way back.”

Kaukab is immediately concerned. “You went into a shop?” She knows the women of the neighbourhood know the girl is divorced, and is sure they would have made comments about her to each other—comments about her character, about her Western dress and cut-off hair.

“Yes. Chanda’s parents’ shop is closed. I went to the one in the next street.” She unwraps the tamarind. “A woman came in while I was there, a wealthy-looking, well-dressed woman. She must’ve heard that somewhere around here two brothers had killed their sister, and, not knowing that I was the niece of the dead man, she began berating the two murderers. She said, ‘People like that are ruining the name of Pakistan abroad.’ She was visiting from Pakistan, staying with her relatives in the suburbs who had brought her to our neighbourhood for amusement—if their suppressed smiles were anything to go by whenever a woman entered the shop with bright village-like embroidery on her
kameez
—to show her how the poor Pakistanis lived here in England, the factory workers, the bus drivers, the waiters. She couldn’t hide her contempt for us. Apparently she had been called a ‘darkie bitch’ by a white man in the town centre during her first week here and was resentful. She said, ‘The man who called me that name was filthy and stinking. And he would not have called me that name if it had not been for the people in this area, who have so demeaned Pakistan’s image in foreign countries. Imagine!
He
thought he could insult
me,
I who live in a house in Islamabad the likes of which he’d never see in his life, I who speak better English than him, educated as I was at Cam-bridge, my sons studying at Harvard right now. And it’s all the fault of you lot, you sister-murdering, nose-blowing, mosque-going, cousin-marrying, veil-wearing inbred imbeciles.’ ”

Kaukab shakes her head in disappointment. “We are driven out of our countries because of people like her, the rich and the powerful. We leave because we never have any food or dignity because of their selfish behaviour. And now they resent our being
here
too. Where are we supposed to go? The poor and the unprivileged, in their desire to keep living, are being disrespectful towards the rich and the privileged: is that it?”

“She was very elegant, not at all like people who have made their fortunes quite recently and are intent on showing it off.”

Kaukab bangs the wooden ladle on the rim of the pan—to free it of the sauce clinging to it, but with a little more force than necessary so that it emphasizes her disapproval: “What’s all this talk about old money and new money? If it’s new money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who are being used and abused in the present, and if it’s old money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who were used and abused in the past. The legs of the rich people’s thrones have always rested on the heads of poor people.” She turns back to her work: “I haven’t lived with your father for four decades and not learned a few truths.”

She wishes she could’ve said all this in English so that Stella would know she was intelligent, a thinking person. Yes, she had grown to like Stella eventually. She remembers when Charag had come home from university years ago to tell her that he was in love with a white girl who was expecting their child. After the initial shock of the revelation had worn off, Kaukab had walked to the train station to get on the train that would take her to Charag and his white girlfriend and their unborn child. How her selfishness had blinded her to the immense love her son must feel for the girl! Kaukab had grown up being told that what the two of them had done before marriage was wrong, wanton and depraved, but she had made sure her own children grew up with the same message: and if what had occurred was hard for
her
to accept, how hard it must have been for her son, how great the love that made him act against her teachings. Even in Pakistan everyone loved someone before marriage, but from a distance: a surreptitious glance answered by an eloquent smile. The West just gave a person the permission and opportunity to
act
on those feelings—it wasn’t her son’s fault. On the way to the train station, she longed to nestle her future daughter-in-law in her arms, call her by her name, Stella, but at the ticket-office window she lost heart on being told that she would have to change trains, fearing she would be lost without her lack of English as she searched for the correct platform, too humiliated by her pronounced accent and broken words to ask someone to guide her to the connecting trains. And where and how do you get a taxi in a strange city? She was a beggar who did not want to stretch out her hand because that hand was dirty. And so with eyes veined with carmine, she waited for Shamas to come home: as soon as he returned she asked him to take her to her son.

“This curry is done. Now I must see if there’s enough dough for the chappatis. Who wants chappatis instead of rice?”

Charag has been peeling and cutting fruit into a salad bowl that is now filled up with the sweet chunks—the colourful heap of peels beside it looks as though the flags of a dozen nations have been shredded—and he now asks from where he is standing at the dresser, “Where are the lemons? And why is there such a feast being laid out for tonight?”