Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

And then Kaukab suddenly knew what had happened: the couple had returned from Pakistan and gone straight to Chanda’s family’s shop to ask for their forgiveness. The decadent and corrupt West had made them forget piety and restraint, but the countless examples in Pakistan had brought home to them the importance and beauty of a life decorously lived according to His rules and injunctions, Pakistan being a country of the pious and the devout, a place where boundaries are respected. She rushed to the shop, absolutely sure that Chanda and Jugnu had gone there in repentance and — Oh, the miracles of Allah! — Chanda’s parents had in turn told them that the girl’s third husband had been on the telephone recently to say he was ready to divorce her. But when she got to the shop Chanda’s brother told her bluntly:

“Stop bothering us with all that, auntie-ji. As far as we are concerned, that little whore died the day she moved in with him.”

She returned, shocked by the vehemence. All the way there she had been thinking that the family would have forgiven the couple, that the parents would have remembered that everyone loved someone before marriage, love being a phenomenon as old and sacred as Adam and Eve. Women joked amongst themselves: “Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It’s for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past—‘you were born and then I married you’—but men are fools.”

The size of a matchbox, the old piece of cooked fish in the fridge is stiff with the cold and ought to be thrown away but Kaukab wraps it in a slice of bread and eats it, bending forward at the second bite because she has neglected to check for bones. It’s like a metal hook in her throat. She coughs and splutters, gasping for air, and manages to swallow, her throat raw. She takes a glass of water and sits down to steady her nerves, the danger passed, her mind returning to what she was thinking about earlier.

Love.

Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love. And, said the True Faith, it did not even begin with humans and animals: even the trees were in love. The very stones sang of love. Allah Himself was a being in love with His own creations.

In their youth Chanda’s parents themselves must have loved someone other than the person they were married to now, for Kaukab certainly had, she who was the daughter of a cleric. .

But it seems that the danger from the fishbone has not passed: she leans forward and watches in horror as a small wrinkled kerchief of blood issues from her mouth and spreads on the table before her.

Before she has had time to realize what is happening, Shamas has called for a taxi to take her to the hospital, another small pool of blood on the stairs as she goes up to the bathroom, feeling faint.

Suspicious at first, she lets Shamas hold her hand in the taxi as she presses the bloody tissue-paper to her lips with the other.

She is examined and X-rayed and it turns out to be only a minor injury. “Nothing to worry about,” says the white doctor. “Date of birth?” he asks her, flipping through the forms before him.

Shamas looks at her to be reminded of it, and she whispers it. It hurts her to speak.

“On your birthday you should have had trouble with swallowing cake not fish,” the man laughs good-naturedly.

“It’s your birthday?” Shamas asks quietly.

“You didn’t know?” The doctor looks at him, amused.

“I didn’t remember myself,” she interjects. She scrutinizes Shamas’s face. Surely, he is more embarrassed about what the white man is thinking of him than upset that he’d forgotten the date, that she would be hurt by it. But then she drives the wicked thought away.

Back home through the snow-covered roads and streets, she wants him out of the house so she can ring Ujala’s voice, but he is reluctant to leave her and go to the bookshop as had been his plan. She pretends she is in less pain than she really is. There is also the fear in her that he might become amorous again, this time in repentance for having forgotten the day, as though she cares in the least about frivolities like birthdays.

The trip to the hospital had taken more than an hour but it had passed blankly for her: there’s nothing for her out there in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, to notice or be interested in. Everything is here in this house. Every beloved absence is present here.

An oasis — albeit a haunted one — in the middle of the Desert of Loneliness.

Out there, there was nothing but humiliation: she’s hot with shame at what the white doctor would now think of Pakistanis, of Muslims — they are like animals, not even remembering or celebrating birthdays. Dumb cattle.

She convinces Shamas to go at last and watches from the window as he walks away between the twenty maples, her husband — who, all those years ago, very nearly wasn’t her husband. Kaukab hadn’t seen a man up close without there being the gauze of her burqa between him and her since the age of twelve — she had been made to wear it because it was well known that certain men marked out beautiful girl-children and then waited for years for them to grow up. Her vigilant mother lifted the stamp of every letter that came into the house to make sure no clandestine message was being passed. And then on a certain monsoon Thursday when she was in her twenties, and sitting in the back room working on the articles that would one day soon become part of her dowry, for her parents had begun the preliminary negotiations for her marriage, she heard a short tap on the window. She put aside the fabric she was cutting up into a kameez and went to open it, expecting it to be the little boy she had seen through the same window wandering through the street earlier and sent to the shop at the corner with a swatch of fabric the size of a teabag to buy a spool of thread “matching exactly that colour, or I’ll send you back to exchange it. And show me your pocket so I can make sure there’s no hole in it, otherwise you’ll lose my money and come back with a long face.”

Only after he left had she regretted not having told him to get an adult — preferably a woman — to match the thread with the cloth.

She opened the window and recoiled, barely managing to hide behind the casement leaf because there was a grown man standing on the other side.

She was shaking. She heard his voice but it was many seconds before she made out his words: “The newspaper. Can I have our newspaper back?” It must be the son of the family from whom her father borrowed the newspaper each morning, she understood, and felt terror at the thought that someone might have seen her opening the window to him: a woman’s life was ruined as easily as that. People might not believe that she was innocent.

And then suddenly she felt anger at him: how dare he knock on a window during the daytime when there was every possibility that he might catch the daughters of the house unawares.

“The newspaper was sent back at eleven o’clock, brother-ji.”

She was about to close the window when the voice said: “The literary supplement is missing. Could you check that you don’t still have it in there somewhere. I’d be grateful.”

She closed the window and bolted it shut noisily with a “Wait there, brother-ji,” more and more furious at him for neglecting to refer to her as “sister-ji,” which would have decriminalized the glimpse he had caught of her face, and in a panic because she hadn’t checked the date on the paper she had found on the table earlier and had spent the past hour practising the pattern of her kameez on it: there it lay on the floor now, today’s literary supplement, cut up into geometric shapes.