Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

A bright-green rose-ringed parakeet makes a shrill noise as it darts through the snowflakes to the left of him.

He gets up and walks along the streets where the shops are being opened but he stops to look in through the glass pane of the newsagent. In the local paper there is the picture of a Pakistani man who was found dead in the snow by the lake — someone quite prominent and respected, it seems.

According to the Book of Fates, He’ll look at Shamas’s photograph only for a few moments before moving on, but this delay will mean that he’ll run into the Pakistani girl with the locket containing the strands of his brother’s hair, the girl Chanda’s sister-in-law had met at the shop back in the summer. Coming along through the snowflakes, her head lowered and neck withdrawninto the shoulders against the cold, she will enter the street from the far end, the end the boy is walking towards.

They’ll collide at the corner in less than a minute and it wouldn’t have happened had the photograph of the dead man not held his attention for those few moments — she wouldn’t yet have arrived at the corner. .

She’s walking close to the wall, sheltering against the wind, approaching the corner. She remarks to herself that the snow is as bright as a full moon.

He looks at the face in the newspaper. It is the first day in over a fortnight that he has dared to venture into the town centre, afraid of other people, of being recognized. Someone could follow him and inform Chanda’s family of his whereabouts — they must be deeply angry at him for not having gone through with what they had planned. He hasn’t been able to sleep much and keeps thinking some calamity is imminent, dreaming again and again of rocks and stones being hurled at butterflies. But at dawn today he had told himself to go out into the world again. If a calamity is coming then where else would he rather be than with his fellow humans? What else is there but them?

He moves away from the newsagent’s window and resumes his journey along the snow-covered street.

London — Dasht-e-Tanhaii

October 1991–April 2003