Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“But surely, auntie-ji, you look like a eunuch.”

Shooing the child away, who must have seen eunuchs dancing at a wedding during a visit to Pakistan or India, Kaukab rushed indoors burning with shame and humiliation, wondering whether she hadn’t in fact got carried away with the cosmetics, and she pleaded with Allah for help because now there was no time for her to correct her appearance: the doorbell rang to announce the arrival of Jugnu and the white woman, she who no doubt had a perfectly made-up face framed by perfectly arranged hair. She stood frozen in the middle of the room and heard the key slide into the lock of the front door: Shamas must be with Jugnu and his guest.

“My Allah, come to my help! Save the honour of your servant, O Par vardigar, ” she mouthed to herself because the door was about to open any second and disgrace her. But had she forgotten that the Almighty had nothing but compassion for His creatures? The moment the front door opened, the electricity in the entire street happened to fail and — praise be to Allah — the house plunged into darkness. Kaukab managed to move and clambered upstairs to wash her face while Shamas brought in Jugnu and the white woman.

Most of the meal was taken by candlelight, the wet prints the white woman’s high-heeled shoes had made on the linoleum of the kitchen floor shining like exclamation marks in the yellow light. The kitchen table was carried into the pink room next door and there was a vase of flowers at its centre. The spoons had been polished and the meal was among the best Kaukab had cooked. The white woman wore a lilac blouse of shimmering silk that Kaukab couldn’t resist the urge to finger just for the pleasure of it — it looked like a fabric known in Pakistan as Aab-e-Ravan, the Flowing Water — but despite all that the evening was not a success: what happened during the get-together would eventually lead to the end of Jugnu and the white woman’s relationship.

Trying to keep Charag’s revelations of the afternoon out of her mind, and trying not to dwell on the fact that the white woman’s legs were bare below her knee-length skirt (made, incidentally, of a checked fabric that reminded Kaukab of Bulbul Chasm, the Eye of the Songbird), Kaukab busied herself with the food and was reluctant to sit at the table with the other three, saying she must bake the chappatis freshly, that the aloo bhurta had to be turka ’d moments before it was served, that the sweet zarda rice had to be got going so that they would be ready just in time for the end of the dinner. The candle flames corrugated each time she arrived in the room with another tray, another bowl, another tureen. The white woman praised Kaukab’s skill as a cook whenever she took a mouthful of something new on the table, the candlelight throwing dark shadows under her breasts, emphasizing them obscenely. Kaukab’s stomach twisted into a knot when Jugnu shamelessly planted a small kiss on the woman’s cheek in passing, and she gritted her teeth at Shamas’s expansive behaviour towards the white woman and towards her own self: “Come sit with us, Kaukab, and talk. Let’s prove to our guest that Pakistanis are the most talkative people on earth. My goodness, we use seven syllables just to say hello: Assalamaulaikum. ”

Kaukab was glad Ujala was out of the house: she wouldn’t have wanted him to think there was anything normal about a Pakistani man bringing home a white woman to meet his family.

And that was when she panicked. Ujala! She had already lost one son to a white girl; wouldn’t Jugnu marrying this white woman make it possible for Ujala to marry white one day too? Outside the rain intensified, and she shook with fear as she heard the sounds of conversation from the table, the clinking of glasses, the cutlery on the plates: it sounded like a normal family gathering, yes, but she herself — and everything she stood for — was excluded from it. They were talking in English and too fast for her to keep up. She tried to follow the conversation and her fear began to turn to anger. “I was born into a Muslim household, but I object to the idea that that automatically makes me a Muslim,” Jugnu said. “The fact of the matter is that had I lived at the time of Muhammad, and he came to me with his heavenly message, I would have walked away. .” Stunned, Kaukab knew that it was the white woman’s presence that was really responsible for this utterance of Jugnu (she who herself didn’t add anything disrespectful, just listened intently): he felt emboldened to say such a thing in her company — he may have thought these things before, but the white person enabled him to say them out loud. And sure enough, soon Shamas too was dancing in that direction:

While Kaukab was in the kitchen — adding to the refilled salad bowl the radishes she’d carved into intricate twenty-petalled roses with the tip of a knife — Shamas laughed above the conversation in the pink room and, raising his voice, addressed her in Punjabi: “Kaukab, you should really come and talk to our guest: she’s just said something which I have often heard you say, ‘But, surely, the rational explanations of how the universe began are just as shaky. Every day the scientists tell us that their long-held theory about this or that matter has proved to be inaccurate.’ ” Yes, Kaukab had indeed made this observation when defending religion, and now she tried to follow Shamas’s words as he switched to English and said to the white woman, “I am still inclined to believe the scientists, because, unlike the prophets, they readily admit that they are working towards an answer, they don’t have the final and absolute answer.” Kaukab had still not recovered from this when Jugnu added (to Shamas, in Punjabi, proof yet again that the white woman’s presence was just a catalyst for the two brothers to air their blasphemies):

“And anyway, the same procedures and the same intellectual and analytical rigour that went on to produce the car we’ve driven in this evening, the telephone we talk on, the planes we fly in, the electricity we use, are the ones that are being used to probe the universe. I trust what science says about the universe because I can see the result of scientific methods all around me. I cannot be expected to believe what an illiterate merchant-turned-opportunistic-preacher — for he was no systematic theologian— in the seventh-century Arabian desert had to say about the origin of life.”

It took Kaukab several minutes to understand what she had just heard, and then she had to steady herself against a wall because she realized that Muhammad, peace be upon him, peace be upon him, was being referred to here.

Praising things like electricity: the very thing that’s failed this evening, she had fumed inwardly, making you all sit in the darkness!

Soon her children would be further encouraged towards Godlessness.

What would she tell her father-ji? She remembered how horrified her entire family had been when her brother had wanted to marry a Sikh woman back in the 1950s, despite the fact that the Sikhs were a people of the Subcontinent, a people whose habits, language, skin colour and culture were somewhat familiar. Who was this white woman? How clean was she, for instance: did she know that a person must bathe after sexual intercourse, or remain polluted, contaminating everything one came into contact with? She had an image of Jugnu and the woman stopping by at the house next door to fornicate before coming around to dinner here: and she felt nausea. And all this had been going on with her own son too, Charag. Kaukab had touched the white woman and would have to bathe and change her clothes to be able to say her next prayers. She refilled the bowl of raita and took it to the table in the pink room, and she had just placed it next to the vase of roses when the electricity returned. The abrupt brilliance so surprised Shamas that he let drop the bottle of wine he had been holding: the liquid splashed onto the carpet and Kaukab stepped back to avoid being touched by the repulsive stuff.