Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She collected the boats and heron’s beaks from under the bed — off-cuts the ceiling fan had scattered — and stood motionlessly, holding all the pieces in her fist, wrinkling the paper further, hoping the stranger would tire and leave. But he tapped again, and she opened the casement just enough for her hand to pass through and handed him his beloved literary supplement, the pages that did not mention the name of Allah or Muhammad, prayer and peace be upon him, even once because she had checked before spreading them on the floor.

“Here it is, brother-ji. I am sorry it is a bit creased but the iron isn’t working today,” she said, as though all he would notice would be the creases and not the chopping up. And she shuddered that a daughter of the mosque was handing over her vital statistics to a complete stranger. There were no limits to the depravity of the world and all this man had to do was to spread the whole thing out on a bed and with a bit of sense put together a cut-out of her upper body like a jigsaw.

He received the pieces and left without another word.

The following Thursday, oppressed by a sense of remorse about last week, she ran the hot iron over the newspaper just before it was due to be sent back, to smooth over the few creases her father had made whilst reading. Somehow she managed not to make a sound when the words I see the iron is working today appeared suddenly along the margin of the literary section. It was a schoolchild’s trick: the sentence had been inscribed with a clean bamboo pen using onion water as ink — upon drying it was invisible to the eye, but the iron scorched it a deep manila, revealing it.

Later that year, she locked herself into the bathroom and wept when her parents informed her that her engagement had been finalized. The instant the first onion-water message had materialized she had ripped it off the newspaper, relieved that no one else had seen it, but she regretted her action during the week because the missing strip was a signal to the sender that his words had been received. Having successfully shunned the literary section for the two Thursdays that followed the first message, she had plugged in the iron on the third and was troubled as to why she felt inconsolable because no message appeared on the paper. And there would be none over the next two months, but, today, now that she was engaged to be married to another man, there was a cruelly mocking, I heard the good news. Congratulations.

Her mother interpreted her tears as the ordinary reaction of a girl who had just been told that she would soon leave her parents’ house forever, and she was proud at having raised such a modest girl when she ran away upon being told her fiancé’s name. When the relatives of the fiancé came for a formal viewing of the girl, she offered the women her needlework to admire, the chain stitch, the satin stitch, lazy daisy, herringbone, the French stitch and the German stitch, the cross-stitch pillowcases and long smock-work caterpillars, embroidered Koranic samplers, bedspreads with borders encrusted with glass beads tiny as grains of sugar, and she poured tea for the men, speaking only once and so softly that it was difficult to make her out above the cutlery.

She cried in secret for the man she wanted. Throughout the months of her engagement the iron revealed the literary pages to contain a love poem every Thursday which she memorized before the paper went back. She turned the lines of the poems into curlicued and tendrilled vines and then embroidered them onto her wedding-day clothes. She hoped someone in the house would notice the revealed poems on the newspaper, or ask her to explain why the arabesques on the hems and cuffs and veil-border of her dress looked like actual words — she would tell the truth, the alarm would be raised, precipitating a crisis that would bring her engagement to an end.

On the day the wedding clothes were ready, sparkling so much they made people think sequins were collected free of charge from beaches and that beads were cheaper than lentils, she became resigned to her fate.

And the day before the wedding, sitting under the cage of the Japanese nightingales that her future mother-in-law had brought for her on the occasion of the formal viewing — the droppings of the birds contained lime and were to be rubbed onto her skin to enhance her complexion, the birds as though feathered tubes of beauty-cream, automatically dispensing measured amounts three times a day — she clicked open the small locket containing the photograph of her fiancé that her mother had passed wordlessly into her hands months ago, and, as she would tell her own daughter Mah-Jabin many years later, red with laughter, it was like opening the casements of the window all over again and getting caught unawares because her fiancé and the handsome stranger were the same person, my Allah, it was him all along!

She is about to telephone Ujala’s voice, but the doorbell rings: she opens the door, her heart thumping, swallowing hard against the searing pain in her throat, and finds a white man on the doorstep. He holds a bouquet of Madonna lilies, their whiteness undiminished even against the falling snow, the sight of them bringing a smile to her face. Glory be to Allah who has created beauty for the eyes of His servants.

The “thank you” she murmurs to the flower-deliveryman is her third exchange with a white person this year; there were five last year; none the year before, if she remembers correctly; three the year before that;. . She places the Madonna lilies on the draining board. Three pithy stems, each with a sparrow-foot-like division at the top bearing the hollow coffinshaped buds and the already-open heavy blooms, white as the flesh of a newly-split coconut. She reads the card — a birthday greeting. It seems her daughter was the only one in the family to have remembered it. Tears well up in her eyes — someone loves her.

The gold in her earlobes and nostril is chilled from the blast of snowy air that the opening of the door had exposed it to.

Each containing a miniature image of the lilies, the small pieces of mir ror stitched along the front of her kameez feel as though they are discs of ice.

Passingly, she wishes some neighbourhood woman would drop by so she could show off the flowers to her with pride: “My daughter sent me these for my birthday. I am always telling her not to waste money on me, but she loves me — as you can see.”

Holding the glass vase under the tap she fills it with water. The bubbles seethe and lift themselves into a jostling heap and then subside.

Carefully using one of the flowered stems she stirs an aspirin tablet into the water and she counts the flowers because an arrangement must always have an odd number of blooms. Her Koran is full of lilies dried flat as cutouts, the colour of tea-stains. She thins some of the leaves where they would crowd together at the vase’s rim; peeled off with the leaves, the thin strips of green skin contract slowly and neatly come to rest in perfect spirals like the tin coils inside a wound-up toy taken apart by children. Why hadn’t the boys also remembered her birthday? She wipes her tears: her life is over and yet there is still so much of it left to live. She briefly rinses each lily stem before it takes its diagonal place inside the vase and the rope of water frays whenever it scrapes against the edge of a leaf, the fluttering splashes reminiscent of a bird in a pool of rain.

Their scent is strongest at night, and since there is a hedge plant back in Sohni Dharti whose buds, like the Madonna lilies, not only open in the evening’s whispers but also release a perfume as hazy as them, Kaukab’s affection for the lilies has increased over the years.

Compared with England, Pakistan is a poor and humble country but she aches for it, because to be thirsty is to crave a glass of simple water and no amount of rich buttermilk will do.