Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

The cancer of the pancreas was in the last stage when it was diagnosed, and as death drew near, Chakor’s raving became constant, wanting cremation instead of burial. Fearful that Mahtaab might act upon the words of a dying man out of his mind with pain, Kaukab had sent Shamas to Pakistan:

“I want you to go there and see that what needs to be done is done.” She pointed to the one-year-old daughter, Mah-Jabin: “No one will marry her if your mother-ji does what he is asking. She herself never had any daughters so she doesn’t realize how important it is to remain on the good side of society. But you do have a daughter now, and must place her before everybody else. A scandal like that would do irreparable damage to her chances.”

It was November 1971, and the West Pakistani army had been in East Pakistan since March, spreading death and destruction: the general election last December had been won by an East Pakistani leader and the West Pakistani powers had refused to allow him to form the government, sending in the soldiers to suppress the unrest that followed. These soldiers had been told that the East Pakistanis were an inferior race — short, dark, weak, and still infected with Hinduism — and junior and senior officers alike had spoken of seeking in the course of the military campaign to improve the genes of the East Pakistanis: women and girls were raped in their hundreds of thousands. On the day in December that Chakor vomited dark-brown half-digested blood, grainy like sand — the aorta had ruptured and spilled its contents into the stomach so that now his body was consuming itself — the Indian army moved into East Pakistan, and Pakistan surrendered after a two-week long war: East Pakistan was now Bangladesh — India had not only defeated Pakistan, it had helped cut it in two.

At night Shamas would sit beside Chakor, the basket of bloody rags set by his chair leg. Sometimes the twenty-four-year-old Jugnu would be there with them, back from the Soviet Union.

The harsinghar tree in the courtyard, which dropped its funereal white flowers at dawn, had more flowers than usual under it during those mornings, as though the branches had been disturbed during the night. Shamas was no believer, but imagination insists that all aspects of life be at its disposal, the language of thought richer for its appropriation of concepts such as the afterlife. And so as he looked at the carpet of blossoms he couldn’t help entertaining the thought that during the night Izraeel, the Muslim angel of death, had wrestled in the branches above with the Hindu god of death for our father’s soul. Shamas looked up and imagined the branches twisting around the two supernatural beings, the flowers detaching from twigs and forming a thick layer on the ground.

The excessively heavy drop of blossoms was caused in fact by Mahtaab, who had lately taken to chewing the harsinghar foliage: the betel leaves, which were her lifelong addiction, and without which it was impossible for her digestive system to function, grew mainly in East Pakistan, and when their price went up at the beginning of the civil war she had reduced her intake to just a two-inch section at dawn; but now that East Pakistan was another country, the supply of betel had stopped altogether, and while a few people had given up the habit as a patriotic gesture, all over Sohni Dharti men and women were experimenting with any leaf they came across in case it resembled the betel in bitterness and flavour.

“I am sure the government is happy at last,” Mahtaab had said, “now that it has turned us all into donkeys.”

Both Shamas and Jugnu had smiled but their elder brother had taken exception to the comment. He had become increasingly religious in his forties and the news that his father was a Hindu had devastated him. He had accused the man of betraying them all by concealing the secret from them, prolonging the sin he was committing by living with a Muslim woman.

As a young man he occasionally attended the mosque run by Kaukab’s father, his attendance increasing when he fell in love with Kaukab’s young aunt who lived with the cleric’s family beside the mosque. He hoped to catch a glimpse of her each time he went to pray: she was often at a high window overlooking the prayer hall — waiting to catch sight of him, surely? And through his piety he hoped to be seen in favourable light by Kaukab’s father, hoping that one day he would think him an appropriate match for his sister. When he heard that the young woman was soon to be married off to the man to whom she had been betrothed at birth, he was heart-broken and stopped going to that mosque, attending instead another one, one operated along a more strict interpretation of Islam. It was here that he would meet the people who would eventually lead him towards the austere and volatile form of the faith that was alien to his parents and brothers.

After his father’s origins became known, he pushed aside the recommendations and gentle reassurances of Kaukab’s father, and wrote and talked to some friends and scholars he himself trusted, and the news they gave him nearly pushed him over the edge — the children of the union between Mahtaab and Chakor were all illegitimate. He smashed the furniture on the veranda and hurled the water pitcher against the wall when he heard that Chakor wanted to be cremated. He shouted that Chakor should not have produced children if he was not sure about his religious standing, that on Judgement Day he would be hauled in front of his children in chains to ask for mercy from them.

He was against their efforts to locate Aarti. He said the cancer of the pancreas was Allah’s punishment and stood over the dying man while he coughed up blood and asked him to beg forgiveness from his wife and children and from Allah, “Only then would Allah stop the pain.” The war with the Hindus over East Pakistan was the final blow, and the defeat, when it came, traumatized him (and most of the rest of the country). He became silent, jaws working in rage as he went about the house, eyes aflame, spitting into the plate and walking away if the food was not to his liking, beating his son almost unconscious for flying a kite which he considered unIslamic, or for blowing on his whistle or dribbling a ball in the courtyard — asking a child to apologize for being a child.

Shamas fell asleep beside Chakor’s bed one night and woke at the sound caused by the opium addict next door throwing stones at the moon. He was alone in the room and it would be several decades before he would know fully what had happened while he slept. While he was asleep Jugnu too had nodded off, waking up only at a sudden blast of chilled air. The door to the courtyard was open — the pale light indicated that dawn was near — and the harsinghar was shedding its petals. Jugnu looked at his father’s bed and found it empty. Shamas was asleep on the mat on the floor. Going out into the courtyard, Jugnu saw that the front door was open and there was a bloody rag in the street, just outside the threshold. He went and picked it up — the blood was wet. Soon he found himself walking towards the ruin of the Hindu temple, following the trail of blood drops. The building had fallen into disrepair since 1947, when the Hindus of Sohni Dharti had left for India.

He went from room to ruined room, shouting his father’s name. He thought he heard sounds but they were the birds waking up. The smell of the smoke had intensified and he ran towards it but it was too late: his father had doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire. Knowing himself to be near death, out of his mind with the excruciating pain, he had decided to cremate himself.

The charred face, the lack of gleaming moisture on the teeth, the marriage ring melting and fusing with the finger the way meat sticks to the grill during roasting: Jugnu would try over the years not to think about these things, try not to put them in their sequential place in the story of the next two hours in the temple.