Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

And he — like Shamas — would try not to think of the fact that someone in the night went into the cemetery and dug up the corpse no matter how deep they buried it; it happened three times.

Jugnu beat the flames out with the loi he had wrapped around himself before leaving the house and then he covered the burnt man with it, he who was producing growl-like low sounds at the back of his throat, and was in too fragile a state to be lifted. A crow swooped down from a low branch above Jugnu and picked up a glistening red piece of meat from the dusty floor. Just after the bird took off — disappearing through a gash in the wall — Jugnu recognized what it was: Chakor had cut out his tongue before setting fire to himself lest the pain cause him to call out for help.

He is returning home through the empty town centre, having been to the newsagent and collected the bundle of newspaper.

He climbs down to the riverbank, to listen to the river. The leaves of the rowan trees resemble the tamarinds’. Even if found, Aarti would not have been able to attend her brother’s funeral — it would have been too soon after the war with the Hindus for her to be granted a visa.

Drowned grass-blades whip like tails of sperm in the shallow edges and it is on reaching a secluded curve where the bubbles are like a tumbling spillage of glass beads that he looks up to find the two lovers staring fixedly at him, and the unexpectedness of it is as though a syringe of adrenaline has been emptied into his body.

It is obvious that they saw him before he saw them: they’ve flown apart and are already somewhat composed but their faces retain traces of the look they must’ve borne only moments earlier— show me where and I’ll taste you there. The boy’s back arched, he has almost refastened the buttons of his fly, and the girl is shrugging her shoulder back into the kameez that had been undone at the back — or had it magically come undone at his touch? — and peeled to expose a breast.

They must have taken great care to select a secluded enough place for this rendezvous, and no doubt the condom he would have unrolled onto himself sometime soon had they remained undisturbed is patterned with battle-fatigue camouflage.

“Hello, Shamas-uncle-ji,” the boy — twenty-odd, a Hindu — says with a smile. “It is Shamas-uncle-ji, yes?”

Shamas knows him vaguely from the neighbourhood. Knowing no English on the first day of nursery school, having spoken nothing but his parents’ Hindi up until then, he had demanded to know whether his mother was being called a liar by the teacher who insisted that this fruit was an “apple” and not a saib as he had been taught to call it till then.

A smiler, he stands there now, the shirt straining at the wide shoulders. The force of puberty had struck from within the plates of his face with differing intensity in different places: the nose has become disproportionately longer; the cheekbones are flat, remaining where they were in childhood; the chin and jaw are more angular.

“Let me get my lid”: he nods backwards where his baseball cap lies on a boulder. It is a pretext: he wishes in reality to check on his lover — she, the nipples the size of vaccination scars embossed on the fabric of the shirt, had vanished when the boy came towards Shamas, tenderly giving her the time to correct her appearance somewhere discreetly out of sight, even though the jut and swell of his own erection was still there and he had had to thrust his fists into the trouser pockets to make it less obvious.

She is now married to a Muslim, but this love is much older than the marriage.

Shamas is suddenly tired from the jolt the encounter has given him. On the luminous edge of his fevered senses, he waits, feeling slightly stoned, dreamily stilled. The sky is almost all light now, the water sparkling. There is the beginning of cataract in his eyes, but the faint milkiness has to be endured for now because nothing can be done about it until it has grown more opaque, setting like glue, shutting out vision, the doctor informing him that surgery would be performed in about a decade, surprising him by how long he expected him to live.

He brings her to Shamas now. Poised and graceful, marked by distinction at every pore, as she comes she pats her hair and consults her shadow on a boulder as she would a mirror.

“You know Shamas-uncle-ji, of course? He and his brother are the coolest adults I know. He lives near St. Eustace’s Church. When we were children we used to call the vicar Bo Peep: the whites have moved out, so he’s lost his flock.”

She is a girl from the edge of the neighbourhood, and her face concentrates with the effort to place Shamas — the intruder on stolen rapture. She has freshly applied scent to herself and it drifts to Shamas in surges as though gardenia flowers are opening in rapid succession somewhere nearby.

“A heart was found here yesterday, uncle-ji,” the girl tells him — she has obviously decided to believe her lover and trust Shamas, understanding that he is not the kind of adult who would report this sighting to others and make trouble for the pair. “About half a mile in that direction, beyond the pine trees. There were detectives everywhere. We came just out of curiosity. .”

“A human heart,” says the boy. “Some children went home talking of something they called a ‘beat box.’ The parents called the police.”

Shamas looks at them without understanding what he is being told. A heart? The lovers stand facing him, still as if painted in a picture, though the fronds of the bracken they had walked through are still moving from that disturbance as though ghosts are passing through. His words, when he speaks, come out ragged from the throat that has remained unused for a while: “Whose heart was it?” Chanda’s? Jugnu’s? He hears himself give out a small cry. A wren on a tree that overhangs the boulders has been watching Shamas and now flies away with a shrill whistle. He turns and begins to walk away.

The soft distortion of tiredness polluting his blood, Shamas moves under the high nave formed by the pine trees, the trees occasionally shaking drops of yesterday’s rain onto him, the clusters of needles dripping like saturated paintbrushes, producing a mud thick as mayonnaise. No, it can’t be Jugnu’s heart or Chanda’s, he tells himself as he hurries, his breathing settling somewhat.

He is embarrassed by the manner of his departure from the two lovers, and looks back to see if he can locate them. In love with a Hindu, she was married off against her will to a cousin brought over from Pakistan, but the couple divorced because she remained distant from him — the cousin moved out as soon as he got his British nationality, no longer having to put up with her. Though she was still young, no one was willing to marry a girl who was not a virgin—“Why not marry a blue-eyed English blonde if virginity is not an issue?”—and the parents could only find an older man for her, who, it has now turned out, has three other wives: one is under the British and also the Islamic law, the other three are under Islamic law only. He wants a son but they keep producing girls, so he has married again and again. The fertility clinics run by Pakistani doctors often place advertisements in the Urdu newspapers, saying, We tell you the sex of the foetus while you wait; this is innocent-seeming, yes, but Shamas knows what message is being conveyed— so that if it’s female you may have it aborted quickly. He wonders if the husband of this particular girl has used these services.

Shamas gives a final glance in search of the lovers but they are nowhere to be seen. When her mother discovered that she had refused to consummate the marriage with her cousin after sharing a bed for almost a week, she took the bridegroom aside and told him in a whisper,