Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Kaukab holds the blue cloth firmly at the girl’s shoulders and slides her chair back across the floor so that the cloth is pulled off the lap and rests like a little sailor cape at the girl’s back, a barrier between the henna and the fabric of the girl’s shirt. She takes the front-door key, attached — for want of pockets on her kameez —with a safety pin to her veil, and gives the pin to her to secure the blue cloth at the front.

The back of the house has been moving out of the sunlight at a snail’s pace over the previous hours, and now — now that the sun has vaulted over the roof — it is in total shade, the sodium-yellow warmth directed at the front.

Mah-Jabin makes herself coffee, Kaukab peels an orange and places the segments curved like leaping dolphins onto a plate, and they both go outside to sit on the front step where the breeze turns the lilacs’ pages in the little garden, the shadows beginning to stretch like chewing gum.

Light is gone from the back to appear here as rain soaks into the earth and flows away underground to emerge elsewhere as a spring.

The girl sits diagonally on the step, instinctively turned a little away from the house that joins theirs on the right, to keep it out of sight: Jugnu’s house. But it is there nevertheless, she cannot ignore its presence: the soul has many eyes, is capable of seeing in every direction.

The woman next door on the left has taken advantage of the sunny afternoon and put out a rug to air that releases swinging plumes of fenugreek odour. “She must put fenugreek in everything,” Kaukab says; she is consuming her orange in the Pakistani manner, dipping the blunt-nosed segments in salt first. “The smell penetrates. In Pakistan it gave no trouble because the houses there were — are — big and airy and nothing lingers. But here the rooms are small and closed up, and the smell refuses to shift.”

“That’s not the least of it: if I remember correctly from the few times you used fenugreek the damned thing gets into your sweat and urine after you’ve eaten it.”

“Be quiet!”

“Sorry,” Mah-Jabin laughs, for the first time in weeks, and touches her mother’s knee with her own. The laughter dissolves in the sunlight, while, like a music-box left open beside her, the coffee steams in the dry air.

A voice bursts through like a ball landing in the little garden: “Mother and daughter are enjoying the sunlight, I see. And the daughter-empress wants to lighten the colour of her hair, does she?”

Mah-Jabin looks up: a vaguely remembered neighbourhood woman is struggling with the rusted screeching latch of the garden gate. Kaukab explains how to circumvent the eccentricities of the catch and the woman — acting on the advice — gains entry to advance towards them under the jewelled nets of the lilac branches.

Mah-Jabin — fearing that the woman has come to collect material for gossip — wishes to retreat inside, but the woman flags her down: “I won’t take a seat, beautiful. I’ve just stopped by to remind your mother that Ateeka — the wife of Zafar-who-has-a-clothes-stall-in-Thursday-market and not the left-handed Zafar — is flying to Pakistan on Monday, so if there are any presents that have to be sent back home there is still room in the luggage.”

Kaukab tells her that earlier the taxi-driver-Mahmood’s wife had called her out to the garden gate in passing and given her the same message; Mah-Jabin can envisage the woman going along the street, one of the many who begin doing the rounds in late morning, all involved in that organized crime called arranged marriages.

Mah-Jabin dips a finger in the hot coffee until it begins to burn, pulling out just in time, as though she were teasing a pet bird, withdrawing the fingertip from the bars of the cage before the inevitable inflamed peck.

She looks at the roses to distract herself, the petals wrinkled like elastic-marks on skin, the blown heads lying in whole clumps under the bushes like bright droppings of fantastic creatures.

The grass is rising like knives, the green the colour of the butterfly fabric, and now Mah-Jabin remembers that this woman is the mother of the girl she’d seen earlier with her Hindu lover on Omar Khayyám Road. Mah-Jabin examines her with interest now.

The visitor slips a foot out of her shoe and rests the dry cracked sole on the bottom rung of the fence dividing this garden from the next. She has not stopped speaking since she came: “Of course Ateeka’s boys are growing up and eat everything they can lay their hands on, so all the fancy food and the biscuits and cakes intended for the visitors who are coming to the house to see off their mother must be hidden away. She thought that the built-in space under the settee in the kitchen — where she stores her linen and pillow-cases — was an ideal hiding place. And what do you think happened? This: the guests came last night and settled on that very settee! Now the kettle is whistling and steaming, the milk has boiled and got cold and been boiled again, the cups and plates are at the ready, but how to get at those pastries, from Marks and Spencer no less? She says she just sat and looked at the guests’ faces, getting up now and then and pretending to give the cutlery and crockery one last wipe with the dish cloth. ‘I’m sure they thought I was the cleanest woman on Allah’s earth,’ she told me just now. ‘Either that or the most forgetful and the most crazy.’ It must have been a spectacle to behold, Kaukab.”

Mah-Jabin finds herself gripped by helpless laughter; all three are shaking with noisy delight, touching wrists to the rims of their eyes.

“I am telling you the truth, Kaukab. If it isn’t true you can change my name to Liar.”

Kaukab soaks up on a tissue paper the line of red liquid that has broken onto Mah-Jabin’s forehead.

“Kaukab, what brand henna is it, Lotus- or Elephant-?” the woman asks, but does not wait for the reply, continuing distractedly: “These last few days have been very hard on Ateeka, though, because her sister in America was fondled and handcuffed by police for wearing her head-to-toe veil. It would soon be a hanging offence to be a Muslim anywhere in the world, it seems. The police officers—”

“Whereabouts in America, auntie-ji? Wearing masks in public is illegal in some states over there,” Mah-Jabin explains. “The officers could’ve mistaken her face-veil for the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member.”

“What? A who member?” the visitor is puzzled while Kaukab — breath pulled in in disapproval — gives Mah-Jabin a look of reproof for interrupting and trying to enlighten a grown-up. “In Portsmouth, Virginia. They stopped her as she walked towards the shops, and even though she explained she was wearing Islamic dress they asked her to uncover her face: when she refused they handcuffed and searched her while she screamed ‘Stop touching me, stop touching me.’ An unmarried girl: anything could have happened.”

Yes: the girl could’ve damaged her hymen in the scuffle, Mah-Jabin thinks, with contempt. She had not been allowed to see a gynaecologist when she had hormonal problems at twelve, not even a female one; the neighbourhood is full of teenaged girls who are doughy and have chins coarse as cactus, bristly like their brothers.

But it is the tears that fill the visitor’s eyes in sudden overflowing fullness that are occupying Kaukab: she quickly tells Mah-Jabin to go indoors and look at the post that has been waiting for her in her absence, upstairs in her room. The girl stands up, baffled, notices that the woman is on the verge of weeping, and edges open the door to enter the house quietly.

The woman takes the place vacated by her and Kaukab places her arm around her. “Kaukab, it has been such a terrible morning. . I feel I can tell you everything, you are like a sister to me. . My daughter refuses to behave properly with her husband. .” She presses her veil to her eyes with both hands and begins to cry silently, freely.