Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

There is a curve of pale-yellow crust — the remnant of a previous meal — on one of the plates Mah-Jabin takes out of the cupboard, on the china so intensely pigmented it seems to stain the air with each movement like a beetroot leaking colour: once it would have been Kaukab who noticed such a flaw in a chore assigned to the girl.

Her mother is getting old.

They sit together, eating side by side, Kaukab letting out a sigh of pleasure and touching Mah-Jabin every now and then. The girl bites off buttered chappati segments and jabs at the limp, endlessly compliant ampersands of the pepper-rings soaked with sunflower oil, the fork marking the sauce like bird-imprints on sepia mud.

“I wonder what that girl was doing on Omar Khayyám Road,” Kaukab says. “Did you talk to her? Was she with someone — that Hindu boy, perhaps?”

Mah-Jabin has been fearing this question. She is unable to control the roughness of her reaction: “Oh Christ, what difference does it make who she was with?”

“You had been quiet for a while so I was just making conversation,” Kaukab says as she pushes her plate away with her hands and her chair backwards with her calves, standing up violently. The three furrows deepen on her forehead; they’ve been there for as long as her children remember, Mah-Jabin wishing to — as a child — write her alphabet on these equally-spaced straight lines drawn on the brow as though in an exercise book. “And do not try to sound white by saying things like ‘Oh Christ,’ because you don’t impress me. Do you hear me?” Her eyes narrow in a blank white glare. “I said do you hear me?”

“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault,” Mah-Jabin sighs. “I was just thinking about Uncle Jugnu.”

She winces inwardly at what she has just said, feeling degraded, that already the death of the two loved people is being used in deceit because she does not wish to hurt this living person by her side, either that or because she is too cowardly to confront her: so will this terrible thing called life extract concessions out of her, teach her to compromise, and force her to become less than her best self, force her to reduce the amount of honour due the memory of her lost ones! One day she is going to wake up and not recognize herself.

They have talked about Jugnu and Chanda on the telephone several times since January, and again on her arrival today — and before January too, over the long anguished weeks and months when they disappeared like two raindrops in a lake, the months of disappearance that led to the brothers’ arrest — and there is nothing more to be said about it: Kaukab is unshakeable that they have not been killed and that they will return one day, that to give up hope is a sin, that the brothers could not have murdered their own sister in cold blood. “I don’t care how many people agree on what has happened to Jugnu and Chanda: a lie does not become truth just because ten people are telling it. And I won’t lose faith in Allah’s benevolence no matter how bleak things look: the sun never disappears, it’s the earth that changes sides.”

She has given the girl the news of the graffiti scrawled on Jugnu’s house: They lived the life of sin and died the death of sinners and They have been burning in the Fire now for over six months but remember that Eternity minus six months is still Eternity.

Mah-Jabin clears the table in the steady golden light in the blue-skinned room, in the talkative silence of the stream that Kaukab, still angry, leaves behind when she takes her transparent-red rosary lying in a saucer like the circle of pollen grains in the middle of a flower and goes upstairs to say her prayers.

With a loose bulky knot Mah-Jabin shortens the length of the curtain covering the glass in the front door and carries a chair into the burning slice of sunlight, listening out for her mother’s loud end-of-prayer Arabic, when she begins to mix hair-dye in the plastic lid of an old aerosol can, using a worn toothbrush which she identifies from the characteristic disfigurement of the bristles as having once been used by her father.

Kaukab comes down, the cranberry rosary swaying from her grip, the beads larger than those she used in her younger days when the fingertips were nimbler, more-sensitive, just as she needs a large-print copy of the Koran now because her eyes too are beginning to fumble amid words.

Even after the contact and consultation with Allah, her displeasure at the girl, and the sadness which the outburst had caused, is there in her: she approaches the sunlight wordlessly and takes the chair, bending her head forward.

Mah-Jabin — standing ready behind the chair — knows that being unable to dispel her anger before the prayer must have exacerbated her mother, that it must have interfered with the concentration required for the worship — like the intermittent annoyance of a hang-nail during daily chores. The only thing for Mah-Jabin now is to wade upstream and begin the journey anew, this time making sure that the bend leading to the vortex is avoided, but she cannot think of anything to say.

Gently — and in strategy — she wets a knuckle with her spit and touches Kaukab’s earlobe with it: Kaukab sighs to empty herself and speaks at last, “Mah-Jabin, make sure you don’t get any dye on my ears.”

The girl smiles at her triumph. “Stop worrying. There —I’ve wiped it off.”

Nevertheless, Kaukab asks her to keep within reach a rag that is an off-cut from a new kameez she has sewn for herself: “The rag in the drawer, a shade less blue than navy. Yes, I did say to myself when I was buying it that my Mah-Jabin would ooh and aah over this colour. Four pounds per yard. I still haven’t stitched the hem of the new kameez.” And, when Mah-Jabin tells her with a smile that she would be unable to help her in that task as she could never achieve those tiny invisible stitches, Kaukab asks her if she remembers the time she had sat with a new kameez on her lap — working on the hem all day — and discovered at the end that she had stitched it onto the one she was wearing! “I don’t remember doing it but I can believe I did it,” replies the girl. “There. Finished. My turn now. No, hold on. There. Finished now. ”

She spreads the blue cloth across Kaukab’s knees and sits on the floor with her hair in her mother’s lap.

The hair does not fill the lap anymore and Kaukab misses the weight; she draws the comb of her fingers along the length and when it ends suddenly — shockingly, as in the dream in which the dreamer stumbles off a kerb — her fingers groping the empty air are an illustration of what is now missing from her life, what was once so palpably there — so palpably here.

She begins to say something but remains silent, simply runs her fingers through what remains of the black locks just for the slippery slipping pleasure of it, how it slides off her fingers, the softest sensation in the world to her, and, once absent, impossible to summon at will.

“Are you comfortable propped up like a rag doll on the floor? Let me know and you can sit on the chair and I’ll stand up.” Kaukab works the wet henna into Mah-Jabin’s hair, scoop by scoop of fingers. “Well, tell me anytime you get tired and I’ll stand up. In Pakistan we used to squat in the toilet and when I came here I thought I’d never get used to the Western toilets. But now, after all these years, those others seem impossible: how did we manage to squat like that every day?”

“The body gets used to things.”

“Even if the mind doesn’t.”

She packs the entire bowl of henna into the girl’s hair, patting it on until the head appears as though coated with a fragrant mixture of mud and moss, tangy as tamarind, sweet as brown sugar; and the pulverised dark green leaf, through each pore and microscopic crack that the drying and the powdering had opened up, begins to release its red sap, diluted by water and made sticky by the lemon.