Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She carries the nodding Madonnas to the table and places them next to a bowl full of apples whose skins are covered in yellow and red brush-strokes like the plumage of tropical parrots.

She stands in the blue kitchen, gently swaying: Shamas will be at the bookshop all afternoon and she wonders what she herself would do over the next few hours. Let me talk to myself, she whispers, an old fool talking to an old fool.

With her children absent from her life, she feels as bewildered as a child whose dolls have been stolen. She is sure she hadn’t felt this bereft even when Shamas had moved out of the house to live on his own for nearly three years, all those years ago, when the children were younger.

She lifts the vase and takes it into the pink room where there are books in five languages on the shelves, the books she had one lonely afternoon opened at random one after the other, madly, to see if she could find in any of them an explanation of her predicament. The framed verses of the Koran hanging on the walls provide her with solace. She places the lilies on the coffee table, and goes to the window to look at the falling snow, the mirrors on her breast reflecting the snowflakes as though they are little windows and it’s snowing inside her body.

She dials Ujala’s number and listens to his voice.

He was here in the neighbourhood soon after the couple vanished, she knows. The rumours about Chanda’s family being involved in the disappearance had begun almost immediately, and one day Kaukab received a phone call from the girl’s panicked mother: “Your son is digging up our back garden, sister-ji, saying we buried his uncle there!” The woman had been startled by him and his pickaxe when she went out to the back of the shop to discard an apple crate. Kaukab rushed to the shop but he had gone by then; there was nothing but a small hole in the ground and the pickaxe which she had dragged home, closing her fingers around the warmth in the wooden handle where he had held it only moments before. The steel point of the pickaxe tinkled on the pavement like ice-cubes in a glass of water and scored a dotted line on the stone slabs, knocking off sparks.

The following week he attacked the shop’s display window with a cricket bat.

He was never an easy son; but Jugnu had been his companion since his earliest childhood. She remembered them together, Jugnu telling him about an Irish law of 1680 which decreed that a white butterfly was not to be killed because it was the soul of a child, and how in Romania adolescent girls made a drink with the wings of butterflies to attract suitable partners. And as he grew up and entered his teens, she found butterfly dust in his underpants and vest one day: Jugnu was puzzled when she told him about it but then smiled and said: “Along the Ivory coast, pubescent boys hunt butterflies to gather the colours from their wings, which they rub into their armpits and genitals in the belief that pubic hair will grow, that it would bring on manhood and bestow virility. I told him about it last week. Now I know where one of my Apollos and my Two-tailed Pasha have gone.” She was shocked, as much by what the boy had done as by the fact that Jugnu seemed to find the whole thing amusing.

Kaukab had dreamed of her sons graduating from university, first the elder, Charag, and then a few years later the younger, Ujala, and she planned to send the graduation-ceremony photographs to the local newspaper, standing proudly next to her gowned boy in her Benaresi shalwar-kameez, the names printed in the caption below. She had already bought the two 12 x 12 gold frames in which she would display the photographs at home.

She did get her name in The Afternoon, but for entirely different reasons. The police had obviously wanted to know why it had taken almost thirteen days for the family to go around and see where Chanda and Jugnu were. They had wanted to interview all three children in case they had any information about the missing uncle. And Ujala had told the officers and The Afternoon that it was all the fault of his cunt of a mother who had decided not to speak to Jugnu because he was offending her religion and that his fucking spineless father must’ve just gone along with what she said because she was a poor immigrant woman in a hostile white environment who deserved everyone’s compassion, what with her sons and daughter away, leading their own lives, and to cap it all she was also going through the menopause.

He must’ve heard this last from his sister because, yes, he is in touch with his siblings — the only ones he can’t bear are his parents, or, rather, Kaukab. She shudders now, remembering how angry he used to become before he left home, seven years ago. He ruled the house as an entire forest vibrates to the movements of a tiger. Although living in fear of him, Kaukab often pretended not to notice his rage in an effort to deceive him into thinking he was not having any effect on her. One day as she came to ask him whether he wanted her to make anything for breakfast, the covers had slid off him a little where he lay in bed and exposed a section of his bare thighs. He was in bed naked, one arm tucked behind the head to reveal the long armpit hair. She demanded he get up and put on his pyjamas: she could not bear the thought of him being alone with his nakedness! He glanced at her in contempt but did not stir as she raised her voice the way she used to when he was a child throwing a tantrum in Woolworth’s over a costly toy, rolling around on the floor, indifferent to the threat that he would be handed over to a white person if he didn’t behave, a threat that had reduced his siblings into submission when they were his age. It was the weekend and Shamas was home so she shouted for him to come upstairs, keeping her eyes fixed on Ujala the while. His own eyes were on the ceiling, unmoving. Shamas came up and stood behind her and she explained the situation to him.

“Get up, right now,” said Shamas, “and do what your mother says.”

Immediately after what happened next, Kaukab’s first thought was of death, that whenever Allah decided to take her, He should take her while Shamas was still alive, because were he to go ahead of her she would be totally alone in the world. But it was equally unbearable to think of him stumbling around the no-man’s-land of old age without her hand to steady him, a widower whose children were past caring, his corpse awaiting discovery at the bottom of the stairs for hours, days, perhaps even weeks.

What happened next was this: Ujala brought out his hand from under the covers and jerked his fingers at them where they stood in the door so that the swipe of semen flew across the room in an arc to spatter their faces, smelling of bleach, runny like the whites of a quarter-boiled egg.

Shamas picks up the package that had arrived yesterday from India, containing foliage from the most-famous tamarind tree in the Indian Subcontinent, the tree that spreads over the tomb of the legendary singer Tansen, who had brought on the rains just by singing about them, and whose golden voice had led the Emperor Akbar to proclaim him one of the nine gems of his court. Even today, Tansen’s renown is such that singers travel to his tomb in the city of Gwalior to pluck foliage from the branches of the tamarind tree to make into throat concoctions, in the hope that their voices will become as pure as that of their illustrious predecessor, he who had caused the palace lamps to light up by singing the Deepak Raag, four centuries ago.

This one bent into the arc of cursive script, this one leaping back on itself to form a bangle — the long feathery leaves have come from India, and although their final destination is Pakistan, they have been sent to England. The hostility between the two neighbours makes it necessary for a letter to Pakistan from India, or one to India from Pakistan, to be posted to a third country — to a friend or a relative in Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia or the countries of the Persian Gulf — from where it is forwarded to the intended recipient in a new envelope, the entire procedure reminiscent of a rubber ball being made to bounce off a wall by the left hand to be caught on the return journey by the right one. Direct correspondence is often destroyed out of pettiness disguised as patriotic duty, or violated by the authorities who are quick to see a regular communicator with the other side as a traitor. Countless thousands of families wait for the news of their loved ones from the other side of the border — a wall that also effectively cuts the whole of Asia in half — but what they feel is less important than nationalistic ideals.