Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Once, during a disagreement, Mah-Jabin had shouted, “And don’t come running to me the next time those sons of yours upset you or Father says something you consider contrary to Islam”: these three had been within earshot and Kaukab’s eyes had boiled over with tears at the shock and humiliation of the betrayal.

The kettle shrieks like a squeaky toy caught underfoot, and Kaukab takes two cups from the six hanging at regular intervals from the hooks at the edge of the shelf, like ripe pears on a branch, or an arrangement of bells. “I usually cook in the evening when your father gets home — he doesn’t like reheated food — but today we’ll cook now. I remember when I was a girl my mother used to say that when it comes to food a woman should neither end something nor begin it: meaning, she must never take the last of something in case someone else needs it, and she must never take the first helping or cook something especially for herself because it indicates an indecent lack of restraint. But these ideas are considered old- fashioned now. People are different these days.” She brings Mah-Jabin the cup the colour of a lotus bloom.

“Mother, I think we should cook at six o’clock, but since I left without breakfast this morning, and it was such a long journey, I would like to eat something for lunch — a sandwich perhaps.” She takes the tea and catches again the scent her mother is wearing and which she had caught earlier, on arrival, in a pocket of air above the garden gate: by it she had known that her mother was outside only moments earlier, either leaving the house or returning.

“I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind: let’s have the peppers and chappatis now.” Kaukab opens the door to the back garden, propping it in place with the lobster-buoy from Maine, and suddenly heat-veined air is being breathed into the kitchen.

Hugging the narrow lane that is full of moist shadow and that lies between garden and slope, the blue-and-pink trickle of the stream will dry to brilliant-white stones by midsummer. It flows from right to left like Urdu.

“You make the chappatis, Mother, and I’ll do the peppers. How shall I cook them?” She can already sense the pleasure of the flame-cored spices on her tastebuds like atoms dancing in a reactor, but her mother’s reply sears her heart:

“Whichever way you cook them at university.”

Kaukab stands facing the back garden, the green grass that only a month ago was the orangey-gold of the foil that orange-flavoured chocolate bars come wrapped in, listening to the stream’s mother-tongue that is constant in the house like the babble of blood in a human ear. When she arrived in England all those years ago she had thought the reason this country lacked blossom-headed parakeets, lorikeets, mynahs and bee-eaters was that its inhabitants did not plant the correct trees and vines in their gardens, did not know that acacias were needed to coax weaverbirds out of the skies, that grapevines were required for golden orioles, that rose-ringed parakeets had a penchant for mangoes and jamun. She knew that paradise flycatchers were heartbroken when coral trees were cut down and that the tiny sunbird would quarrel with a butterfly to feed on the lustrous hibiscus bloom that dwarfs them both.

And so she had written back home to ask for seeds, and seedlings and cuttings, none of which had flourished here, leaving the hoopoes and the blue-jays and the red-vented bulbuls circling above the clouds of England for want of somewhere to perch, and later she had wondered whether this country’s soil itself hadn’t been responsible for the failures and contemplated requesting sacks of Pakistani soil which was hospitable to everything as the century-old public parks and gardens of Lahore — planned and opened during colonial times — were said to testify, containing as they did every plant from every country the British had ever ruled. This land is warmer now however, and she knows someone not far away on Benazir Bhutto Road who had raised a banana tree successfully, though it never survived the denuding it suffered when — soon after a television programme on Madrasi cooking was aired — some schoolgirls followed the recipes and decided to eat their dosa s off banana leaves for added South Indian authenticity.

Mah-Jabin rises, stretches her body until she feels the spine pulled taut as an iron chain, goes to rinse her cup and hangs it from its empty hook. She notices that there is a dead moth like a pinch of powdered gold in one of the other cups (undiscovered by her mother because there has been no occasion to use all six for a while?), and now recalls seeing, earlier, on the curtain close to where the vase is set, the stale discoloured pollen from the Madonna lilies she had sent Kaukab for her birthday.

Once upon a time this would have been unthinkable.

The girl reaching puberty had been a turning point in the appearance of the house: many improvements were made to the interiors which until then had been seen only as temporary accommodation in a country never thought of as home — the period in England was the equivalent of earthly suffering, the return one day to Pakistan entry into Paradise.

The growing daughter’s irritation at her economized surroundings had made the mother agree to the transformation of the home, and she followed the girl into shops she would not have entered on her own, watched her ask the white assistants if this thing came in that colour and whether that other thing was available in a smaller size but with snap-fasteners instead of these tasselled ties like the one in this picture that I clipped from a magazine. She watched dumbfounded as the girl spoke English sentences at the rate she herself spoke English words, as she said let’s get rid of the tablecloth because I want to be able to “enjoy” the grain of the wood.

Mah-Jabin remembers Kaukab’s disappointment at the two “over-dependent” neighbourhood girls, one of whom had told her mother in great distress that her husband wanted to “do it from the back,” and the other who told her mother that her husband wanted to “discharge in my mouth,” and she remembers also her saying that the first fifteen to twenty years of marriage belong to the man but the rest to the woman because she can turn her children against their father by telling them of all his injustices and cruelties while they are growing up, patience being the key to happiness: and so Mah-Jabin has never revealed the truth about her marriage to Kaukab, to the extent that there are times she herself believes that her husband — the cousin she had gone to Pakistan to marry at sixteen and lived with for two years in the pale-green house in Sohni Dharti — was in desperate love with her, that he asks the trees of the forest where she has gone. In these fantasies he does not grab her by the throat— in a grip as strong as a tree root — to call her a “wanton shameless English whore” for secretly touching herself towards climax after he himself had finished, rolled over and begun to fall asleep, having wiped himself on the nearest fistful of fabric in the darkness dark as the grave.

She knows the truth that her daughter had suffered would cause Kaukab more pain than the lie that she had selfishly and scandalously abandoned someone loving. How Kaukab would react to the truth would be a proof of her love, that she is being spared it is proof of Mah-Jabin’s.

“You should rest,” Kaukab says. “Leave everything to me.” And within ten minutes the work-top is littered with broken onion skins — crisp fractured bowls of conch-pink tissue — and resembles a song thrush’s “workshop,” as Jugnu had referred to a flint ledge in a chalk meadow where a thrush had been smashing open snails. Pinching her eyes against the fuming sulphur, Kaukab cuts the onion into crescents and drops them into hot oil where they disappear under a rugby scrum of bubbles, lets them sputter until they begin to lose firmness and the tips turn a pale red and yellowish-brown — the shapes and colours of the decorative tendrils on Venetian glass ornaments. Kaukab points to the butterfly-patterned silk: “Mah-Jabin, put that into the next room, in case a drop from all this sputtering oil falls on it. I’ve just remembered that some days ago I saw a girl wearing a kameez made out of this very fabric. It was the girl from Faiz Street who had wanted to marry a Hindu boy but was made to see sense and married to a first cousin. Of course that didn’t work out because she didn’t get on with him — she was very young then and still influenced by the ideas she must’ve picked up from school and her teachers and friends, from life in general in this country, but she agreed to be married off a second time and is perfectly happy now.”