Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Now and then as they moved forward they consulted the guidebooks of stories and hearsay (without realizing that they were getting closer and closer to the pages of history).

They arrived, but in the place where the dak bungalow was said to be situated, up a path lined with stones painted a bright green, they found nothing but the perfunctory sketch, charcoal on sky: only the framework of the building had survived yesterday’s conflagration; the walls and roof had fallen to the ground in a black heap. The outline reminded them of the drawing of the house their father had made on the floor with a piece of coal, the house he said he was building for them, the house that was wrested by their father’s family from their mother as soon as she was widowed, leaving her homeless with no alternative but the brutal charity of her sister’s husband.

Deepak and Aarti circled the remains of the dak bungalow, Deepak attempting hard to contain his disappointment. The women with tails had been so real during the journey that he had expected footprints around himself as he walked but now the apparitions had vanished.

Aarti saw that he was close to tears, and since she could not propose raiding the orange grove — men could be heard digging water-ditches just over the wall — she tried to distract him by constructing the dak bungalow from the clues scattered around the site. Up there had been a balcony splashed by a hibiscus vine, and down here there was a tiled veranda with a frangipani tree at its edge, the leaves the shape of a ram’s ears. Bride-red, indigo, emerald — the place glittered with fragments of stained glass. Violence unleashing violence, the fire had liberated the hundred deadly edges each pane had contained harmlessly within it when whole. In the heat breathed out by the burnt debris, the clarified butter smeared on Deepak’s skin gave off a pungent smell. He had lubricated himself before setting off on the adventure to maximize his chances of escape in case of discovery: before entering a house or a train, thieves and robbers greased themselves similarly to become as difficult to hold as fish, as melon seeds.

Smallpox had pockmarked Deepak’s skin during infancy and as he stood in the kitchen applying the clarified butter to himself, Aarti had joked that there wouldn’t be any left for her. She had only just begun to grease her arm when they were discovered by their uncle. The beating woke the two women from their nap but their appeals for moderation were ignored. Instead he imprisoned the two sisters in the back room by trapping their long plaits in a trunk lid, locking it, and pocketing the key, a smile of vengeful delight on his face on seeing both these women in torment as they sat tethered on the floor, one of them dark, the other pale— the first he was married to, the other he had wanted to marry but had been deemed unworthy of because only a wealthy man was good enough for such a pale-rinded beauty, but now that the rich man had died he was burdened with having to clothe, feed and shelter her and her children— that bitch daughter whom he intended to hand over to the first toothless man to ask for her hand in marriage, the poorer the better, no matter that she was as pale as her mother who dreamed of educating her bastard son when it was clear to everyone that the only education that street-loving loafer was ever likely to acquire was the skills of a pickpocket.

He dragged the children across the courtyard and shut them out of the house while the voices of the two women continued to plead for clemency from back there because it was dangerous for the children to be out on the streets today.

Their fear was not misplaced. There were disturbances across the province as the news of the Amritsar killing spread farther and farther. All the urban centres in the Gujranwala district were on fire — Ramnagar, Sangla, Wazirabad, Akalgarh, Hafizabad, Sheikhupura, Chuharkana, and the rebellion had also spread north along the railway line into Gujarat and west into Lyallpur.

Requests for help from Gujranwala had left the governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, in a predicament: he could not send large numbers of troops without severely depleting the garrisons in Amritsar and Lahore where the army was already overstretched. He turned to the Royal Air Force who made available three First World War BE2c biplanes, each armed with a Lewis machinegun and carrying ten twenty-pound bombs.

They were under the command of Captain D. H. M. Carberry who had flown the reconnaissance mission over Amritsar for General Dyer on Sunday, pinpointing Jallianwallah Garden as the location where a public meeting of natives was taking place. This afternoon, Tuesday, his instructions were that he was not to bomb Gujranwala “unless necessary,” but that any crowds in the open were to be bombed, and that any gatherings near the local villages were to be dispersed if they were heading towards town.

Aarti and Deepak — and the men working in the orange grove on the other side of the wall — heard the drone of the biplane engine and the tension singing in the strut-wires before they saw the machine itself, gliding steadily at an altitude of three-hundred feet, the wind of oxygen in its propeller igniting a few hidden embers in the sooty rubble around the children.

It was a vie jaaj, a ship-of-the-air, Deepak understood immediately.

He had heard about these flying vessels from his Muslim and Sikh friends whose fathers had gone to fight the War in France for the King.

It grew in size as it approached them and began to diminish once it had gone over them. The four flat projections — two on either side of the body — were the ship-of-the-air’s horizontal sails, the crisscross of wires the sails’ rigging. He wished it would drop anchor so he could examine it carefully but it had gone as quickly as it had come.

A species prone to turbulence at the merest provocation, the crows were filling the air with their noisy uproar.

Drops of sweat slid down Aarti’s arm and moved across the one stolen stripe of clarified butter, above the wrist, in the same curvilinear lines they described on the untreated areas but faster this time, like a cobra leaving coarse ground to swim across a river.

The shadow of the returning biplane poured itself down the dak bungalow’s boundary wall and advanced like a sheet of unstoppable black water undulating along the ground’s gentle rise and fall.

It had lost height and made Aarti feel she had grown taller in its absence.

Perhaps, she thought, the metal bird was about to flex two gracefully-aligned legs like a stork and alight on the dhrake tree which was now suddenly on fire.

A red lily grew out of her arm.

The sharp images blurred like a carousel gaining speed and suddenly she was so tired she had to sit down against the wall she found herself against and close her eyes.

Uprooted, lifted high onto the contours of expanding air, Deepak saw the ground rushing under him and smelled oranges being cut open before he forgot everything, the last sensation being the flesh-eating heat of his hair on fire against his scalp.

The bomb, like a foot stamped into a rain puddle, had emptied his mind of all its contents.

Shamas looks out at the snow lying on the street outside, hearing Kaukab at work in the kitchen.

In most minds, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the governor of Punjab at the time, carried the ultimate responsibility for the Jallianwallah Garden Massacre of 1919. He was shot dead in London in March 1940 by Udam Singh, who had been wounded in the Massacre as a child; he was hanged in Pentonville for the murder.

But one of the stories that began with the RAF’s bombing of Gujranwala two days after the Jallianwallah Massacre would take considerably more than twenty-one years to find an ending of sorts, an ending equally brutal.