Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“She thinks she saw him, brother-ji.” Roses suddenly bloom on her cheeks.

He feels himself soaked in profoundest grief: when she speaks it is as though all the sorrow in the world has been given voice. The words float out of a deep loneliness he recognizes. “The passports are here in England, sister-ji.” He must state the facts but feels himself cruel for doing so, vindictive, as though he is swinging at her hopes with a club.

The sun lights up the course of tears on the fraught melancholy mask of her face. “Everyone in that country wants to come to the West, brother-ji, so the two of them probably sold the passports to another couple and decided to live in Pakistan themselves. . Everyone made their life difficult here. . No one at the airports checks to see if the passport photographs match exactly. .” She is searching his face to see if some little thing can be salvaged from the wreck of her ideas.

He shakes his head. “That other couple entered Britain, came to this town, let themselves into Jugnu and Chanda’s home, and deposited the passports and luggage before disappearing. Forgive me, sister-ji, but is that what you are suggesting?” She resembles her daughter; it is as though the father had made no genetic contribution towards the absent perished girl.

“Yes. . No. . Yes. . I know it sounds foolish but. .”

“Forgive me, but that is as absurd as that talk about them turning into a pair of peacocks. Don’t you agree?”

Standing immovably, she tries again. “Brother-ji, people are lost and found in so many ways. . Your own father-ji was separated from his family members in a strange manner. .”

Coloured motes fill the sunlit distance between him and her.

Shamas wonders what expression he’s wearing on his face — is he frowning, does he look angry, distressed?

She is silent for a few moments and then, defeated, says, “Yes, it is foolish. I am terribly sorry to have troubled you, brother-ji.” On her head is a veil transparent as water and her upper body is wrapped in a yellow shawl printed with white penny-sized stars; her arms are crossed under the shawl. He is not sure if he has ever conversed with her before but he knows she has the long slender fingers of a piano player, has seen her using them to manipulate with sensitivity and graceful importance the cash register at the shop.

“Would you like me to walk back with you?” He is not sure whether he should have made this offer: what would people think if they saw her walking beside a man not her husband at this early hour? If someone has seen them talking there is already a possibility of gossip. The breeze is coming from her direction and he realizes now that the sorrow he had sensed within him earlier was partly due to the woman’s smell— the mother smells like the daughter. All he has to do to be reminded of Chanda is to draw a breath. Once, during the brief few months that the couple lived together — in radiant ignorance of the fate that awaited them — Jugnu had tacked one of Chanda’s veils to the window to keep out insects, and Shamas had walked into a space saturated with a scent he had understood to be the scent of Chanda’s body and hair.

She shakes her head to decline his offer to see her home. “No, thank you, brother-ji. I’m not going far.” And before walking away, she says, “But you yourself should be careful: I don’t like the thought of you going out of the house at an hour when there is no one around. As I was waiting for you earlier I felt like the only one out in a town under curfew. You must try to break this habit. Anything could happen: you should remember that this isn’t our country.”

There is silence all around and the whole town lies wrapped in dreaming. He must continue with his own journey. He straightens as though shifting a yoke. The exchange of words could not have taken more than two minutes but it had felt longer: shocking or stressful events and incidents are said to concentrate consciousness to a single point and that slows down the time. Dying, over within seconds, supposedly takes forever.

He’s been left shaken by the encounter, and as always in times of stress he thinks of his younger days in Lahore and Sohni Dharti, when he was writing poetry, beginning to develop political awareness. An unmarried young man’s sexual life, in those days and in a segregated country like Pakistan, began late, and so they were also the years of his sexual initiation, exploration, and gratification — in the “Diamond Market” district of prostitutes in Lahore. (During the past few years here in England, at the other end of his life, he has occasionally thought again about paying for sexual contentment, to alleviate his physical loneliness, but he hasn’t gone beyond looking at telephone numbers and addresses in the classified pages of The Afternoon. ) He was twenty-six and awaiting the publication of his first book of poems. The rumour in the publishing world in Lahore was that of any two rivals competing for the love and attentions of the same woman, the one who owned a copy of his book would have the upper hand. But then, in 1958, he had had to leave Pakistan for England, fleeing the military coup. The new government began hunting for Communists and he came to England a month after police raided the offices of his publisher and noted down all the names they found there before torching the place. He stayed in England until he was thirty-one, working in the mills and factories around Dasht-e-Tanhaii.

After five years in England, he returned to Sohni Dharti in 1963 and married Kaukab, doing all he could to catch a glimpse of her after the negotiations had begun, and succeeding finally when he knocked on her window one monsoon afternoon to ask for the literary pages of the newspaper. When he learned that he was to be a father, he decided to go back to England, having failed to gain meaningful employment since his return to Pakistan. He was back in England at the beginning of 1965, and Kaukab joined him at the end of that year, wearing a long chocolate-brown coat he had sent her from here, and carrying the baby Charag in her arms.

Shamas was working in a factory and that was when the word of his father’s past reached him. It was 1970. Shamas did not return for a visit until the following year when news came that Chakor was dying of pancreatic cancer.

And as death drew near he became delirious, asking Mahtaab to promise she would cremate him on logs of the flame-of-the-forest tree, like a Hindu, instead of burying him in the ground like a Muslim.

Difficulties had arisen soon after the identity became known but the letters to Shamas had hidden the news of this harassment. He would learn later that a shopkeeper whose hand had accidentally brushed against Chakor’s had immediately washed it, saying, “I wouldn’t touch a Hindu even with a meat hook.” Women began to send back the rose essence Mahtaab sold — in bottles the size and shape of a bicycle’s light-generator — claiming it was contaminated with onion. Things were made difficult for him at The First Children on the Moon until he had no alternative but to resign; the “Encyclopaedia Pakistanica” series was seen by some to be nothing more than his excuse for publishing detailed maps of Pakistani towns and cities which the Indians could use during war — a war with India being always a possibility, the most recent only five years ago, when, to distract the attention of the public who had become disaffected following that election back in 1964, the government had sent the army into Kashmir, and India had retaliated by crossing the border into Lahore.

An Indian Hindu scholar claimed that Anarkali, Pomegranate Blossom — the servant girl with whom the Muslim prince Saleem had fallen in love, and whom Saleem’s father the Emperor Akbar had had buried alive as a result in 1599—was not a girl at all, but, in fact, a boy, a fact the Muslim historians of the Mughul era had suppressed till now: the claim was published in Pakistani newspapers and Chakor was manhandled in the street that week and told that the Hindu gods were “pretty boys,” what with their rouged cheeks and lipsticked mouths.