Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

He answers only after a while. “It’s not difficult to guess who it was but there is no proof.” An English girl had converted to Islam in December and had been given shelter in the mosque because her family was hostile towards her decision to change her faith.

Kaukab sips her tea in silence. Unable to understand the lovers’ mysterious vanishing, she has wept over Jugnu’s absence (perhaps the reaction with which his love for the girl was met has made him take her somewhere and start a new life?) and she prays for their safety after each of the day’s five prayers (perhaps something dreadful has happened to them?) but she refuses to believe that Chanda’s brothers had anything to do with it.

While Chanda and Jugnu were away in Pakistan last year, Kaukab had asked Charag to visit Dasht-e-Tanhaii. He and the white girl were no longer together and Kaukab had had several meetings with the matchmaker with the thought of finding a girl of Pakistani origin for him. Thirty-two, he was still young — a mere boy — and it wasn’t unheard of for Muslim men to marry white girls and then divorce them quickly upon learning how difficult and shameless they were, and then having an arranged marriage to a decorous and compliant Muslim girl, preferably a first cousin brought over from back home. Her Allah told her to be optimistic: let the rope of breath snap, but never the thread of hope. Charag had no suitable first cousins in Pakistan, but Kaukab had made a list of four girls from amongst the three dozen the matchmaker had told her about. She planned and dreamed for weeks and she had the photographs of the four beautiful girls in her hand as she telephoned Charag to ask him to come home the following weekend because she missed him. (“It’s not a lie,” she told herself, “I do miss him!”) And it must be said that a part of Kaukab was somewhat relieved when Jugnu and Chanda had decided to go to Pakistan for the summer: she didn’t want any interference from the uncle when she suggested a second marriage to Charag.

“A vasectomy! You’ve had a vasectomy!”

It was against Allah and everything the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said. He had mutilated himself. Unmanned.

“My Allah! When did you have it done?”

“A while back. I don’t want another child. Ever. I can’t even look after the one I already have. I resent him sometimes when I want to paint but must look after him instead.”

“That’s what a wife is for! Looking after the children is the woman’s job while the man gets on with his work.” A man, a man — she lamented in her heart — something you no longer are! If that white girl had done what a woman is supposed to do her son would still be a man.

“I slapped him once when he moved some of the drawings I had laid out on the floor. No, I didn’t slap him — I hit him, hard.”

“So? Parents are supposed to hit children.”

“I remember.”

“What do you mean by that remark? Parents are supposed to hit children, disciplining them. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that when you send a camel out to graze, make sure one of its legs is doubled up and tied securely with a rope, so it can’t wander too far. Too much freedom isn’t good for anyone or anything.”

A marriage to a Pakistani girl was now an impossibility — who would want a neutered husband for their daughter? — and Kaukab was to be denied the ally the Pakistani daughter-in-law would have proved to be.

“How could you have made such a big decision without first consulting me and your father?”

“What?”

“If you don’t want any more children, then why couldn’t you have been just careful, instead of doing something as drastic as that?” She couldn’t believe she was having to conduct this conversation with her son.

“You can never be sure. That first time was an accident.”

“Really? It wasn’t planned? I have sometimes wondered whether that white girl hadn’t trapped you by deliberately getting pregnant.”

“I am sorry, but I can’t listen to any more of this.”

Charag went back, leaving her alone with the four photographs and her thoughts. She kept having the same dream every night: she was hanging from a noose and also standing beside the scaffold. “I can’t help wondering it’s all my fault,” said the corpse. “Stop wondering,” said the executioner-self. But during the waking hours, as usual, she could find no one other than the old culprits for this new disaster that had befallen her. Shamas. Jugnu. England. The white race. The vasectomy was a Christian conspiracy to stop the number of Muslims from increasing. Her parents were responsible for marrying her to an infidel. Her in-laws were Godless. Afflicted with loneliness and maddening fury, she finally accused Shamas of not being a Muslim at all, the son of a Hindu, whose filthy infidel’s corpse was spat out repeatedly by the earth no matter how deep they buried it the next day — a phenomenon which she had up until then ascribed to the angel of death regretting his action in having removed that most-virtuous and — loving man from the world, a man whom she loved as much as her own father.

Chanda and Jugnu were staying in Shamas’s parents’ olive-green house — and were pretending to be just friends during their stay there; and it was to that olive-green house that Kaukab made a telephone call after Charag’s departure: she could talk to the people in the house and tell them they had two sinners under their roof.

She hasn’t revealed this fact to anyone, not even Shamas.

Her telephone call was probably why the pair had returned to England earlier than expected: they had been asked to leave. They came back to England and. . disappeared.

Kaukab’s anger and distress were beginning to subside somewhat as the time drew closer for the couple’s expected return. But the day of the expected arrival passed. And then another, and another. . When the police eventually forced their way into the house, the passports revealed that the couple had come back to England thirteen days earlier. A peacock and a peahen burst out of a room and escaped to the freedom of the street — this would eventually lead to the talk that Chanda and Jugnu had been transformed into a pair of peacocks. The corpse of another peacock was found in one of the downstairs rooms, the injuries revealing that it had been pecked to death by the other two. A dozen-strong flock of peacocks had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight or so previously: they had escaped from the menagerie of a stately home on the other side of the lake, and they would be rounded up eventually — the foliage falling from the trees in the coming months of autumn meaning that they would have no groves or clusters of bushes to hide in. For the time being, however, no one could tell where they were from. They roamed the streets, scratched the paintwork of the cars and attacked the cats and sparrows. How three members of the flock had managed to enter Jugnu’s house and how long they had been in there could not be determined. There were sweeps on the dust on the floors, made by the males’ tail-feathers. On a white plate on the dinner table there was a puddle of urine the pale-green colour of gripe water. The hen had laid an egg in one of the open suitcases that lay on the bed upstairs.

Jugnu had put up a framed photograph of a peacock on one wall and for a moment it was as though the live peacock had left its reflection in a mirror in the house.

She finishes her tea and says, “I am soaking some rice for you to eat with the masar this evening. I’ll have to make chappatis for myself because there is a little dough left over from Friday and it’ll spoil if not used today.”

“Won’t it keep until tomorrow? The weather is cold enough,” Shamas says quietly; it could almost be a thought being passed into her head from his.