Maps for Lost Lovers (51 page)

“I know you all think me the worst woman in the world,” Kaukab hears herself speak, “but I . . .” And speaking evenly she tells everyone, turning now to Charag, now to Shamas, breaking into English occasionally to include Stella, that she hadn’t known the salt given to her by the cleric-ji was a bromide—whatever a bromide is—and, she sees herself reaching into her cardigan pocket many seconds before her hand actually makes that movement: she takes out the letter and says: “And, Mah-Jabin, I know you think I’ve kept at you unreasonably to return to your husband, but that’s because I didn’t know any of these details. I know I can’t seem to move without bruising anyone, but I don’t mean to cause pain.”

Mah-Jabin has recognized the letter and moves forward to take it from Kaukab’s hands.

Kaukab leaves the room and hurries upstairs, wishing to be alone. She closes the door to her bedroom and locks it, getting into bed with the intention of staying there for only a while but opening the door more than an hour and a half later. She must get downstairs quickly, she tells herself as she steps onto the landing, because otherwise Mah-Jabin would start doing the washing up: there are too many dishes and pots today for her to ask the girl to wash them.

She comes downstairs to find Shamas bringing the chairs back into the kitchen. The dining table is already in its usual place. “Have Stella and Charag gone?” she asks. He gives a nod, and when she asks him where Mah-Jabin and Ujala are he tells her that they have gone too: “They all drove away together. Mah-Jabin knocked on your door before leaving but you didn’t answer.”

“Where have they gone? When are they coming back?” Kaukab finds herself asking in panic. “I have things to say to Mah-Jabin—tell her that the
next
husband I find for her would be decent—and I have things to say to Ujala. I hadn’t expected a happy farewell but at least a tender and affectionate one.” She rushes to the front door and opens it, looking around desperately. A sandalwood-coloured cat that has been standing in the garden flashes out of sight at the appearance of the human, very fast, as though it had been at the end of a length of elastic stretched to the limit. “How long ago did they leave?” It was all over so quickly: this morning she had thought she would have many hours with her children, whole days with Ujala: she feels the crushing disappointment she felt as a child whenever she accidentally swallowed whole the sweet she had hoped to enjoy sucking the flavour out of slowly.

The bitterly cold air spills into the house like a sea. Shamas asks her to calm herself and makes her sit on the chair for a few minutes. Stony-faced, she does what he says but then gets up to begin the washing up, waving away his offers to do it all for her. She rubs the pans mechanically until she can see her face in them and then stops as though that was what she’d been looking for. There are fifty-five items to be washed altogether and the leftovers are to be put into dishes of manageable sizes and fitted into the fridge. She says her night prayers at ten, and although she is silent, her faith is not mute: he can hear her screaming as she sits on the prayer mat. Without a word exchanged they both work until eleven at night when the kitchen and the sitting room are back to their normal shapes, the drawers shut, the cupboards stacked with pots and pans, the floors clean, and the Madonna lilies glowing on the central coffee table.

As Shamas drifts towards sleep he hears Kaukab’s movements in the next bedroom.

And in the middle of the night he opens his eyes because he has suddenly become aware of sounds from downstairs. The winter nights are deceptive, he reminds himself: although it is dark it must be nearly dawn—Kaukab has no doubt gone downstairs to say the first prayer of the coming day. But then he notices that it’s 3 a.m. Too early for the dawn prayer. Even though it is not uncommon for one of them to get up in the middle of the night to go downstairs and rattle the aspirin bottle, he decides to go downstairs to take a look nevertheless. At the bottom of the black staircase there is an envelope-thin slit of light from the door to the kitchen, and on the very last step there is a miscalculation by him—he thinks there are no more steps left—and his foot falls through the ten or so inches of air to land with a thump on the floor, a feeling not too dissimilar to mistaking an empty stapler for a full one and punching it with force. It seems she hasn’t heard the noise and doesn’t react when he enters. She remains motionless but says quietly of the pan on the cooker: “I am waiting for it to cool. It’s still too hot to drink.”

“Milk?” And when he moves towards it she comes at him from behind and pushes him sideways, his right hipbone hits the wood of the dresser and he jack-knifes with pain. His hand had been about to close on the handle of the pan and the pan tilts off the hob: a transparent sheet of stretched water emerges, and within this long waterfall a thousand one-pence coins clattering to the linoleum.

A circle of steam expands towards the four walls from the spilled water. She scrambles for the pennies on all fours. “Get away from me.” She tries to shake his hand off her shoulder now that he has staggered forward. “I am going to drink this water.” She turns around and a lioness’s paw scratches his face because he tries to drag her away. “You brought me here. To this accursed country. You made me lose my children.”

He is terrified. Someone in Sohni Dharti
had
committed suicide by drinking the water in which a handful of coins had been boiled, the relatives mistaking his broken footsteps for alcohol and putting him to bed so he could sleep it off.

She looks wildly at him: “I hold you responsible for the fact that my children hate me.” She catapults forward but his arms are ready to grip her from behind, keeping her a yard or so away from the coins overlapping like fish scales. There is no longer any danger because all the water has been spilled, but a revulsion in him must prevent her from touching the coins, a fear of death-contamination—and she seems to want a contact with them for corresponding reasons.

“Yes, I hold you responsible. Have you read what that beast nephew of yours did to my daughter, my better-than-flowers daughter?” She loosens his grip from around her waist and gets up, the tail of her
kameez
and the top of the
shalwar
soaked in the poisonous water. “I want you to know that Mah-Jabin’s chances in life were ruined by you, her father. You didn’t want to move to a better neighbourhood, and no decent family was
ever
going to come to ask for the hand of a girl living in this third-class neighbourhood of people who are mill labourers or work at The Jewel in the Crown and The Star of Punjab. You have to think of these things when you have daughters. I asked you to put aside your principles when there was talk of an O.B.E., just for the girl’s sake, just so there would be at least
something
attractive about her to other people, your photograph in the Urdu newspaper for all to see, but you said no, said you neither seek honour among men nor kingship over them. I swear on the Koran I didn’t want any of these things for myself but for the children. I wanted Charag to become a doctor so people would say Mah-Jabin is a doctor’s sister, but that dream of mine failed too. And how am I going to find another man for her
now,
now that her brother’s picture
is
in the newspapers but for disgusting immoral wicked reasons. I can only hope no one sees that magazine. How will I face the decent God-fearing people of this neighbourhood if the news of that debased picture ever gets out? How I hate you for allowing Satan to plant his seeds in my stomach.”

Shamas knows that she’s referring to the belief that Satan shares the sexual intercourse of a husband if he has omitted to read appropriate Koranic verses before penetration. And the penalty is great if the husband has not read specific verses at the precise moment of ejaculation: Satan’s seed enters the woman’s womb along with the man’s and the resulting child is predisposed to Satanic deeds.

He listens as she talks in a monotone. There is a half-penny coin in amongst the pennies, a coin out of circulation now, not seen in a while. Coins in the rotted pockets of some buried bodies have helped the police to narrow the time period within which that person might have gone missing. What was in Chanda and Jugnu’s pockets when the bodies were dismembered?

“Charag didn’t get into medical school because he was unable to concentrate on his studies in this house: the woman next door had begun making jeans for a garment company and had that industrial sewing machine installed in her kitchen, so that for twelve hours a day there was a buzzing noise in every room of this house. It would not have happened in a better neighbourhood. And Ujala grew up among the dole-collecting sons of factory workers and ended up thinking like them, leaving school at fifteen. In a better neighbourhood he would have had better examples all around him. You nearly called me a snob last month when I said I didn’t want one of Ujala’s old school friends in my house, but that wasn’t because he is on the dole and his father works in a mill, it was because that boy is said to be an expert thief who could, if he wished, even steal the kohl from your eyes. I would have missed the women I know in this neighbourhood had we moved elsewhere, but I would have been prepared to make that sacrifice for my children. Tonight, you were more interested in the fate of
other
photographs than the one of your own family.”

“They are an important document.”

“So is the one of your own family.”

The top layer of coins has lost its heat to the air but those buried underneath are still warm, a coil of vapour rises from them as when a biscuit not long out of the oven is broken in two: he has taken the glass jar (the twin of which, he remembers, was used to fashion the cage for the Great Peacock moth) from which the money came and is filling it up again, scooping up the slithery discs. The steam is a tangible soft pressure on the face: at one point it is no less repugnant than as if it were rising from the opened gut of a slaughtered animal, but the moment passes. And now there is that swan wing that was flexed up at him, brushing his face one summer night this year: he had been returning from a late meeting at the town hall and the milky bird sitting in the middle of the street collecting the day’s warmth from the tarmac.

He follows her up the stairs. She climbs sideways, like someone very old, holding onto the handrail: the steroid injection in the kneecap last year has relieved the arthritis somewhat but that leg is still not what it once was: in time one learns the individual failures behind the standard attitude actors and children-at-play assume when imitating old age. He watches as she changes into dry clothes and gets into bed. Would she like some hot milk? The fire on?

Downstairs, he dries the kitchen floor and sits looking at the jar of coins (while the little girl next door coughs in her sleep). The sight of the coins revolts him, a threat, and after quietly climbing the stairs to check on Kaukab, he gets dressed and, picking up the jar, steps out of the house. He can’t bear to have them under the same roof as him. It wouldn’t take him long to drop the coins into the lake. But less than a minute into his journey the cold forces him back into the house. December sucks warmth out of his body in white plumes as he goes. He climbs the stairs once again and, having checked on Kaukab, goes to the wardrobe where he keeps the whisky. Out on the landing he drinks two gulps and he places the bottle in his coat pocket before setting out for the lake once again. He had once overheard Charag say to Stella that he was glad Islam forbade alcohol “because otherwise I am sure both my mother and my father would be alcoholics.” The maples along the sloping side-street between the mosque and the church had begun to bleed drop by drop at the beginning of autumn and now they are almost empty, skeletons of their former selves. The moon floats on the water’s surface in a roadside pool, and the stars are closer to him on this bitingly cold night than the sparkling veil on her head is to a bride (as Kaukab once said) as he walks on towards the lake.

Kaukab, unable to gain more than an hour’s sleep, sits up, the house empty of her children. There are searing convulsions in her belly like the “three-day pain” a woman suffers after giving birth, the womb going mad looking for the baby it had contained until recently.

She wishes she had the Book of Fates for a few minutes so she could flick through the golden text, looking for happiness, while moths hit the windowpanes of the house loudly, to get at the light emanating from Allah’s ink. If only the angels would accidentally let fall the Book and it would land in her garden encircled by a brief nimbus of pure gold brightness. As it dropped through the dark air it would attract the attention of moths from the warmer corners of the universe, and they would follow its journey as though they were being sucked into a vortex. They would be hovering above the Book as it lay in her garden, those otherworldly moths, in an excited dance like sparks above a fire, the wings thinly haired like the back of a man’s hands. She would go down and pick it up, waving the insects aside with her free hand, maddening them with the smell of spices that still clings to her from earlier today. The Book would be very cold from its journey through outer space, and she would quickly step back into the house with it, clutching the secrets of her destiny to her body. And when she opened the pages the luminous words inside would light up her face—she’d feel the pressure of the light resting on her skin, as she looks for happiness.

She’ll find the page where the family had gone to have that photograph taken (as Allah willed and the angels wrote down with quills plucked from their wings).

Turn a few pages, and here she is six years ago, looking out at the young man who had been Ujala’s school friend—her boy-doll of a son Ujala— going by the house. Ujala had once swapped a coat with him for a pair of shoes the way young people do sometimes. And she had noticed with a pang that the coat was too small for the boy who wore it now, and she was reminded of how much Ujala too must’ve grown in the years she hasn’t seen a new photograph of him. At that age boys get bigger and taller at such a rate that they outgrow their clothes during the time it takes to buy them at the shops and to unpack them at home.