Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

A friend of Kaukab’s a few doors down is originally from Gwalior: the foliage has been sent by her and will be passed on to Kaukab’s father — so he can maintain the suppleness of his vocal cords with which he calls the faithful to prayer.

If Shamas’s aunt Aarti had been located over there in India he would have arranged the supply of foliage through her. The thirteen-year-old girl who had become separated from her brother during the bombing of Gujranwala in April 1919 would be ninety-one this year — if she’s alive. At the time of Partition she must have left the Gujranwala — which was part of Pakistan now — and moved to India. Shamas’s parents would try to find her and the rest of the family shortly after his father’s true identity and early past came to light, but there was little access to India. Nor was there any way of knowing whether they had survived the Partition massacres during the move to India.

She is lost forever. It is conceivable that, as a grown man, he would not have felt the loss of an aunt with as much intensity as he sometimes does Aarti’s — but she’s linked with the tragedy of his father, and his mind keeps returning to her for that reason. And also, it could have something to do with his advancing years: has he, perhaps, come to see life as little more than darkness and separation?

Shamas uncovers the window and looks out at the dawn. His back teeth still warm from the tea of five minutes earlier, he steps out of the house as he does early morning each Saturday and Sunday, to go into the town centre and intercept the bunch of newspapers that the newsagent otherwise drops into his closed office. He brings the office keys in case the papers have already gone out, but that rarely happens because he leaves as early as possible, sometimes setting off before dawn, these leisurely strolls in the empty roads and streets being a pleasure much looked forward to during the week. He carries the newspapers back to the office on Monday, and the stories and articles — concerning race relations — that he has circled during the weekend are clipped and filed by the secretary.

The sky is beginning to pale, but a mournful darkness still clings to the world down here.

Locking into each other like the facets of a jewel, the tilting surfaces of the neighbourhood have channelled away the water that the snows released upon melting.

When the snows began to melt, receding to lie on the sides of the roads, the white mounds looked as though they were dead bodies covered in white sheets.

Where are they? They are nowhere and yet he feels as though he is handcuffed to their corpses. It has been many months since their disappearance but Kaukab cannot be swayed: “They will return, safe and sound. What are months and years in Allah’s plans? For all we know your own father’s sister will contact you one day, after half a century.”

The truth about his true identity had returned to Chakor slowly over the years, the truth that he hid from his family for as long as possible. He had known that truth in its entirety long before he introduced into The First Children on the Moon a regular section called “Encyclopaedia Pakistanica,” inviting the readers to write the histories of their towns, villages and neighbourhoods, and a boy from Gujranwala had sent in the details of the 1919 bombing. He had looked up the accounts of that April Tuesday in history books too.

The three First World War BE2c biplanes, under the command of Captain D. H. M. Carberry, arrived over Gujranwala at 3:10 p.m. that Tuesday. He dropped his first three bombs on a party of 150 people in the nearby village of Dhulla, who looked as though they were heading for the town. One bomb fell through the roof of a house and failed to explode. Two fell near the crowd, killing a woman and a boy, and slightly wounding two men. The rest of the crowd fled back to the village, encouraged by 50 rounds from the Lewis machinegun.

A few minutes later, Carberry dropped two bombs — one of them a dud — and fired 25 rounds at a crowd of about fifty near the village of Garjhak,without causing any casualties.

Returning to Gujranwala, he attacked a crowd of about 200 in a field near a high school on the outskirts of the town, dropping a bomb which landed in a courtyard, and followed up with 30 rounds of machinegun fire: a sweet-seller was wounded by a bullet, a student was hit by a bomb splinter,and a small boy was stunned.

In the town itself he dropped a further four bombs — two of which failed to explode — and fired between 100 and 150 rounds at crowds in the streets.

When asked later why he had machinegunned the crowds even after they had been dispersed, Carberry replied, “I was trying to do this in their own interests. If I killed a few people, they would not gather and come to Gujranwala to do damage.”

His idea was “to produce a sort of moral effect upon them.”

He claimed he could “see perfectly well” from the altitude of 200 feet and that he did not see anybody at all who was innocent. .

Deepak confessed everything to Mahtaab eventually, the truth that Chakor had kept from his family. The first very-brief and confusing flash of recall had occurred as early as 1922, just three years after the bombing, when he saw a white woman and inexplicably found himself staring at her feet. But in the years to come — the years during which he married Mahtaab and had children — the details of his past life would return more fully, making themselves visible in the gentle and gradual manner of objects taking shape with the slow arrival of dawn. When the British began selling the contents of their homes in preparation for their official departure from the Subcontinent in 1947, Mahtaab had returned home one day with a crinoline to make into a quilt (along with six suede hats to take to the shoemaker to have slippers made out of them), but he had not needed that prompt to remember that his name was Deepak, that he was a Hindu, or that he and his sister had been on their way to see whether it was really true that white women hid tails under their crinolines.

Mahtaab gave no indication that she minded his not having shared it all with her much earlier. He said he hadn’t known what to do so he had ended up doing nothing.

Not for a single moment, Mahtaab wrote in answer to the letter in which Kaukab had asked whether she felt betrayed by her husband. Imagine how much he must’ve suffered with that secret gnawing at his innards.

Shamas is standing on the bridge, looking down into the water. And a woman’s voice calls to him, softly, from behind:

“Brother-ji.”

He is startled, and, turning in a near swoon, sees Chanda’s mother standing there, hesitating about approaching him.

“I wanted to tell you something, brother-ji.”

Shamas doesn’t know how to react, his head a perfect vacuum.

“It is something important. I thought of going to the Urdu bookshop by the lake yesterday afternoon, but I couldn’t make time. Instead, because I know you always go to collect the newspapers from the town centre very very early, I left the house this morning to talk to you. . I was walking behind you but couldn’t catch up. Then you stopped here to look at the river. . Brother-ji, a woman from near our house returned from a visit to Lahore yesterday. She says she thinks she saw Jugnu in the crowd at the Data Darbar mausoleum last Thursday.”

He looks at her without making eye contact. In her earlobe there is an emerald that would fill the cupped paws of a mouse — a berry of solid green light. He clears his throat, confused by what he is being told, but then the power of reason and the ability to conceive coherent thought fly back into his skull. “Both their passports were found in the house,” he says quietly. “Have you forgotten that, sister-ji? No one saw them upon their return from Pakistan but they did return.”