Maps for Lost Lovers (56 page)

They didn’t know where Jugnu was. Two days after they disposed of Chanda’s remains, they went into the house to see if they had cleaned up everything properly, because someone at the shop said that her little son had gone into the back garden to look at the wren in the denim jacket and noticed a funny smell coming from the house.

Kaukab too noticed that faint smell, but she thought it was probably one of Jugnu’s creatures that had died in his absence, or that the fridge full of butterfly and moth cocoons had broken down. One year he had bought a chameleon—against her protests, because it was a chameleon that had bitten through the water-skin of Hazrat Abbaas in the desert, causing him to go without water in the burning sands of Karbala—and it crawled somewhere under the floorboards and died. The whole house stank for days.

The house smelled of death when Chotta and Barra entered it at around two that night—a smell they knew from their butcher’s trade, and from the hours they had recently spent by the drowned-giant’s lake. It was a dead peacock. The brothers were crossing the room downstairs, the room hung about with the monsoon washing, when the telephone rang from somewhere behind one of the yard-long veils and chadors. They were paralysed with shock. It rang two or three times before Chotta could move to pull it off the hook. That was when he saw Jugnu’s body, on the floor behind a blue-and-green dotted veil that was suspended from the washing line, the edge touching the floor. Next to him lay the bright corpse of the peacock.

Jugnu had been in the house all along. He was there when the brothers came in through the open door that first morning. He had made it back ahead of them and gone through the coloured cloths to connect the phone. He died there, before he could call the police. Chanda didn’t know he was in the house any more than they did.

After the British police had collected the testimonies of the people in Sohni Dharti, they would check to see if any telephone calls had been made to Jugnu’s house at that particular hour on that particular date. They would learn that the call was from Chanda’s husband. Drunk in the middle of the night, he had decided to use the number Kaukab had given him: “I wanted to tell her that I wanted her back. But no one answered, and I woke up with the receiver in my hand, the mouthpiece full of bubbles from my saliva, as though someone was trying to shout through water on the other end.”

“It was doubly fortunate that we went in because we saw something else,” Chotta would say in Pakistan. “When wiping a shelf with a rag, to get rid of any fingerprints on the wood shortly before we carried Chanda’s body out, I had let fall all the dust of the shelf onto the small table stand ing below it. The gun was on that table. And I picked it up just before we left the house with her body. On this return visit to the house, I saw that there was a perfect silhouette of the gun on the table. The fine waft of dust from the shelf had fallen onto the weapon and the surface surrounding it. It was like a stencil.”

“And as for peacocks that burst out when the police forced their way in the following week,” Barra would say, “we have no idea how and when
they
got into the house.”

The birds urinated on the dinner plate, picked pinned butterflies off the frames and ate them, spitting out the pins everywhere the way humans spit out fish-bones, and the female laid an egg in an open suitcase. The males had got into a fight, over food, over the female, ripping each other with their snake-killing claws and beaks, and the liquids seeping from their wounds and gashes would mean that the blood samples found on the floor would never prove to be conclusively human, conclusively Jugnu’s.

The house itself—the house of Sin, the house of Death, the house of Love—went through a destiny of its own, shut up, abandoned to dust and insects. The police dug up the back garden.

A spider’s web—sagging under the weight of a hundred dewdrops, no two the same size—had hung between two apple trees in the garden, and the late morning sunlight was a deep translucent yellow—as though the sky was being seen through a bar of Pears soap the day Chanda came to the house for the very first time. It was March. The sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five-hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm, to return to their summer plumage of three-thousand feathers each. The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers (the blossom would be out in May, and Chanda would be dead by the time those very flowers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would continue to lie in a circle of bright red dots under each tree until the Siberian snows of this year’s January).

Her veil caught on a branch (as though she were being clairvoyantly prevented by the tree from advancing any further, as though the crop of fruit last year was not apples but crystal balls full of blood, predicting red rage and red death), but she freed herself and moved towards the door.

On her upper lip there was a mole the size of a kiwi seed; and her eyes always changed colour in keeping with the seasons: in spring they were the bright green of budding leaves, but in summer they were darker, the colour of mature foliage, and while they were a pale yellow-brown at the beginning of autumn when the leaves were beginning to turn, with hints of pinks and reds here and there, they became and stayed wholly brown for the rest of autumn and winter, the cycle beginning again the following spring.

She knocked several times on the door but there was no sign of life inside the house; she hesitated and then went in.

Inside, the walls were decorated with pinned butterflies in glass frames that appeared to be strays from Paradise. The girl—carrying the little wooden stars—didn’t yet know that some of the butterflies she was looking at had stood at the centre of man’s interest since their discovery, the glinting creatures named after the heroes and heroines of Greek mythology and the queens of the great maritime powers, that at one time some of the rare specimens had been paid for with gold and others used as royal gifts. She moved around the room, slowly, and then came to a standstill. There were ten dead butterflies on the sky-blue table before her. They were large and belonged to the same species, the bodies as long as match-sticks, the wings breathtakingly lovely to her, and she—the girl dressed in straw-yellow—lowered her head to examine them. The charcoal-black forewings were rounded ovals while the outline of each hind wing was tear-shaped and had three thin spurs protruding from the base; the forewings were marked with white bars, and each hind wing—although the same colour and pattern as the forewings on the whole—had a circle the size of a ten-pence piece on it, divided into three vivid bands, one berry red, the middle one blue, and the lowest yellow, a thin streak from this yellow band emerging and flowing deep into each of the three spurs.

She contemplated them with a serious and absorbed expression as though about to whisper a magical formula to reverse death. And, inexplicably, as she looked at the ten luxuriant insects, she began to think of how her mother, after she had washed her hair, liked to prepare a brazier of smouldering incense, cover it with a small upturned basket and then lie down for half an hour with her head resting on its base, her eyes closed in lassitude, her long hair collected about the sloping sides of the basket, the warm fragrant smoke escaping through the weave to simultaneously perfume and dry the locks, a few stray wisps of the smoke climbing onto her forehead and dancing there as though, below, her brain and thoughts were on fire.

Wondering what had triggered the memories concerning her mother’s hair, the girl realized that the wings of the dead butterflies issued a fine odour, the scent of garments stored in jasmine and sandal, of dark hair dried in incense and gentle musk.

The girl’s face hung above the ten butterflies and the sky-blue rectangle of the table’s surface, and she wondered where Jugnu was. She was eight when Jugnu arrived from America—twenty-three years younger than him—and had grown up thinking of him as an uncle like almost every other child in the neighbourhood. She had sometimes heard people say that his was an unconventional family. Once a woman said it wouldn’t surprise her if she was told that some member of this family, after he had died and been made ready for burial, had suddenly sat upright to tear the shroud away from him, not wishing to be bound by any tradition or custom even then. He loved butterflies and the butterflies loved him equally in return, gathering around him as though around a rose, and, said a number of children, although they were his passion, whenever their fluttering hampered his daily routines he collected them all in the palm of his hand and swallowed them, but he soon began to miss them and, growing sad, brought them out of his mouth one by one to fly about him once again.

Just before Chanda entered the back garden, Jugnu had been studying the charcoal-black butterflies that lay on the table.
Bhutanitis lidderdalii.
Bhutan Glory. A relative of the Festoon butterflies, the species was extremely precious and listed in the
Red Data Book: Threatened
Swallowtail Butterflies of the World.
It lived in the eastern part of the Himalayas, in Bhutan and adjoining Assam, and also in one locality in Burma, its natural habitat being mountains and mountain valleys where tall trees grew. They liked to flutter about in the high crowns and laid their eggs on poisonous lianas. The Bhutan Glories had a fragrance which even lingered for some time after they died, and Jugnu had dipped these ten live specimens in dry ice to induce deep sleep in order to study the scent-related mechanisms. Having finished, he had put away his microscope and the notebooks, leaving the butterflies to revive in their own time, and had gone upstairs.

While he was up there, the heat from Chanda’s face had roused the Bhutan Glories.

Failing to find her full voice, she let out a small startled cry when a “dead” Bhutan Glory gave a rustling spasm, flapped its white-striped wings and—all compressed power—lifted itself from the surface of the blue table to—extraordinarily, without losing any of its elegance, in spite of the recent somnolent state—begin dipping and swilling about through the interior, and it was followed immediately by another and then one by one the rest as though they were all threaded at regular intervals onto an invisible string, were the bowed tail of an unseen kite that swayed and undulated.

The bag of star anise fell from her hand and the spice—an ingredient for the food of some of Jugnu’s butterflies, and for which he had telephoned the shop earlier, saying they were to send it to his house if someone was coming this way—scattered on the floor.

“I didn’t know they were alive, that I hadn’t just dragged them out of their graves,” she explained to Jugnu as he helped her gather the wooden stars a few minutes later, all ten of the Glories scraping their wings against walls, probing the objects in the room and the ceiling above them, slowly whisking a million molecules of perfume into the air.

Beginning in about a month, they—Chanda and Jugnu—would lie in the various rooms of this house on secret trysts, the windows curtained and the clocks daringly put away the way they are in casinos—but they wouldn’t know in enough time that they were gambling with their lives.

They contrived to meet for sensual dalliance in other places too, in the age-old manner of lovers, Jugnu telling her about Keshav Das, the court poet of Rajah Madhkar Shah of Orchcha, who wrote in the sixteenth century of how every day in summer the cowherds gathered on the banks of the Jamna, the girls on one side, Krishna and the crowd of boys on the opposite side: the two groups dived into the water and after a while emerged once again on their own side of the river, each lover having met and entwined with the beloved under the surface, their longing satisfied for now, the disapproving world unaware that any contact had taken place.

GHOSTS

Carrying the jar of coins, Shamas nears the lake. The sand lines on the shore emit a pale brightness like the dry smears of grainy starch left on the knife that has been used to cut potatoes. Is it here that the ghosts of Chanda and Jugnu are said to roam? The lake reeks of minerals, the deep centre of the mass rising in response to the tug of the moon, making a sudden and momentary hill of water that causes the leaves floating on the surface to roll down towards the margins, the leaves that would stick coldly to the bodies of children whenever they braved the chill and went swimming in early autumn, marking them like fawns, and which they would pluck off each other when they emerged onto the land.

Standing here at the edge of the lake in night darkness with the long jar of coins that shine in the moon, he could be a figure out of a fairytale published in
The First Children on the Moon
—perhaps a fisherman who is releasing back into the water a fish that is in reality a marine princess whose grateful father would then give him a boon, bestow on him the ability to bypass reality. He walks along the water’s rim until he comes to a point where the water is deep and lowers the jar into the lake. It sinks, sending up a noise of bubbles. The water is full of large stones here—each the size a horse’s egg would be if horses could lay eggs (as the child Ujala had once described something). He turns back, crossing leapingly the little wet patches of the sand as though jumping from one square of a hopscotch grid chalked on a pavement to the next. While the moon dances on the waves, he goes past the
Safeena
and takes a mouthful of whisky at the xylophone jetty where lovers have carved English, Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu initials into the wood. When Kaukab was screaming at him earlier tonight he had thought, for one terrible moment, that, in addition to everything else, she had somehow found out about Suraya: rumours do begin and widen their rings with time. He sets off again, under the tall pines that the children are fond of climbing, Charag once saying that when he was up there he felt like a bird clinging to a giraffe’s neck. The night-air is frozen solid by now but, as he walks, the heat of his blood melts a burrow for him to slip through, the lake continuing to dream audibly in the darkness. He stops where the path forks and, instead of beginning the journey that would take him back home, he takes the path that leads to the cemetery, the narrow passage that is lined in summer with thimble-shaped foxgloves attracting gauzy Peacock butterflies. Could Suraya be visiting her mother’s resting-place in the darkness— avoiding him? Climbing a hawthorn-planted slope that is increasingly steep under his feet, he ends up suddenly lost in the fringe of bracken whose tips curve like violin necks, not knowing when he had left the path that in late summer is covered with the red paste of dropped hawthorn berries. He is very high up and can look down on a stretch of the lake shore that would take five minutes to walk along. He is lost, alone here with his mind. Every now and then he steps into a stream, one of the many that go towards the lake and the paths of which the children know the way they know the lines on the palms of their hands.