Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“Perhaps you should have chappatis also. You had rice last night too and it’s bad for the bones two days in a row, especially in this cold country.” She pauses, waiting for him to dreamily say that now that he has reached the year of his retirement they would soon move back to the hot climate of Sohni Dharti, as they had planned decades ago. They have discussed the matter several times over the past few months and each time she has told him he would have to leave without her — she would remain in hated England because her children are here.

“If only Jugnu was here, there would be no leftovers—” She stops, having got carried away with her thoughts, and looks at Shamas, but he doesn’t react. Quietly she turns to the work at hand, and sighs:

Dear Allah, if only things had gone another way. Only the other day the matchmaker was talking about one of the young women she had suggested for Jugnu all those years ago, someone called Suraya, who has now been divorced by her drunk husband and is now looking for someone to marry temporarily. Kaukab shakes her head: she doesn’t remember who that woman was, but if only Jugnu had married her the poor woman wouldn’t be in this predicament, and he himself wouldn’t now be missing. Instead, he took up with white women. Kaukab knew that the few nights a week that he spent away from home were spent in the arms of one of his white girlfriends. Kaukab lived in fear of such contemptible and unforgivable behaviour rubbing off on her three children, but there was nothing she could do. He was discreet and she liked him for that — he was secretly colluding with her, preventing her children from seeing immoral conduct.

Years passed and then one day a little boy stopped her in the street and asked her whether it was true that Jugnu’s “place of urine” was also glow-in-the-dark like his hands. She puts the boy’s obscenity and impertinence down to the corrupting influence of Western society, but within hours she learned what some of the neighbourhood’s adults had known for about a week and its children for about a fortnight. A group of boys had peeped into the upstairs bedroom of Jugnu’s house — where the cage containing the female Great Peacock moth had swayed one night with the passionate wing beats of the male velvet clinging to the wires, the bedroom papered with twisted leaves and indigo berries. Those children had dimly seen the two secret lovers in bed, the light from his hands illuminating her skin.

And, just as the king of Samarkand had come upon his wife locked in the embrace of a kitchen boy and set into motion the Thousand and One Nights, what the five young boys espied through the window that afternoon — when they climbed up to the boughs of the purple beech to bring down a kite — became the starting point of another set of tales.

The children told them to each other, adding and subtracting this or that detail, and it eventually reached the adults’ realm. Kaukab was on her way into town when the boy had stopped her to ask about the light-giving properties of Jugnu’s manhood; coming back from the town centre the bus was crowded so she had to sit next to the white woman who had burnt her Muslim husband’s Koran, but when a few stops later a seat next to a Gujarati woman became vacant, she had moved. The Gujratan gave her the news that Chanda and Jugnu were lovers.

She waited for Jugnu to come home from work that night. “I may only be a woman and not as educated as you, but I won’t stand by and let you damage further that already-damaged girl. Have you considered the consequences for her when her family finds out about this? You men can do anything you want but it’s different for us women. Who will marry her again when people find out that she has been engaging in intercourse with men she’s not married to?”

Chanda moved in with Jugnu a few days after that.

Over the coming weeks Kaukab began to time her trips outdoors in order to avoid the girl, because that was what Chanda was, a girl. Instead of the drawstring that adults use, she used elastic in the waistband of her shalwar; Kaukab could see her clothes hanging out on the washing line between two of the five apple trees. She sensed the girl’s own reluctance to let her gaze meet hers.

And it was by that washing line that Kaukab, having crossed over into the adjoining garden, had eventually told the girl to move out of Jugnu’s house.

Chanda tried to pull her arm back but Kaukab tightened her hold: “If truly offered, repentance is honoured even on one’s deathbed and wipes out a lifetime’s worth of sins to deliver the sinner into Paradise along with those who led virtuous lives. Only on the day that the sun would rise out of the west, the Judgement Day, would the gates of forgiveness be barred shut.”

The girl freed her arm with a jerk, her green eyes igniting. “There is no alternative. He says he’ll marry me but I am not divorced and my husband cannot be located.” She flicked the dripping muhaish -work kameez back on the line — like flipping a giant page — and went back into the house, but not before stopping at the doorstep to say to Kaukab: “We love each other deeply and honestly.”

Kaukab had looked her directly in the eyes: “I care about what it is, yes, but also about what it looks like.”

“And I care only about what it is.”

It was Kaukab’s first and last conversation with Jugnu’s lover. His own visits to the house were already dwindling. It was a sin to offer food to a fornicator, and Kaukab — the daughter of a cleric, born and raised in the shadow of a minaret — stopped soaking that third glassful of rice and peeled two aubergines instead of three. And then on a July afternoon heady with the pine-soup heat of the lake, Jugnu and Chanda left for Pakistan for four weeks, and Kaukab busied herself with trying to arrange a marriage for Charag.

After the hopelessness and despair that resulted from the disclosure about the vasectomy had settled a little (she had startled herself by abusing her father-in-law, that loving and beloved man, he who was so good that when he visited a saint’s shrine the holy man’s hand was said to have emerged from the grave to shake hands with him) and, stunned and repentant at her thoughts, feeling Allah’s spit land on her soul because she was so evil-minded, feeling so small in her own eyes that she would have had to fight to subdue a beetle, she had told herself that she must try to accept the world’s realities; it was almost time for the couple’s expected return to England. By complete chance she ran into Chanda’s third husband in the street and told him he had to release her by divorcing her: “Immediately contact her parents to tell them that that is what you plan to do. Allah will never forgive you if you don’t. If not out of the fear of Allah, then do it out of gratitude towards the girl who made you a British citizen.”

Chanda and Jugnu could now get married!

She propped open the back door with the lobster buoy from Maine to keep an eye on the activity in Jugnu’s back garden: the front door of his house was always locked because The Darwin filled up his front garden. The boat’s actual price was £3,000 but he had bought it, a battered wreck, for £650 in 1985, and then spent the following few years renovating it with the help of the three children. It lived at the front like a huge clothes iron and so the back door was how everyone always entered the house.

As the days passed without the couple appearing, she telephoned Pakistan and was told that they had left a week earlier than planned. She asked a boy in the street to climb the purple beech in the back garden to look into the upstairs bedroom. She then dragged a ladder and put it to the upstairs windows at the front. Were they in England or still in Pakistan? Perhaps they had left the house in Sohni Dharti and gone butterfly collecting around Pakistan? The boy she had sent up the ladder shouted down that he could see open suitcases through one of the windows.