Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Kaukab looks up at Mah-Jabin who has not moved an inch from the open door behind the two women, motionless with incomprehension.

The woman says from behind the veil, her voice weak, “Go in and look at your letters, beautiful, and leave me alone with your mother for a while. Go on. . Did you know I am always telling Kaukab how beautiful her daughter is? People tell stories about faces such as yours. . Go now. . Has she gone? This morning I went to see the cleric-ji at the mosque and he says that in all probability my girl has been possessed by the djinns, that’s why she’s behaving erratically. .”

Mah-Jabin withdraws, lest a comment from her now cause both women to turn on her. Djinns!

The Madonna lilies have been giving off fragrance as candles give out light, filling the house into which Mah-Jabin steps. She drifts upstairs. The two pieces of post are in the drawer directly below: a poll card for the general election; and a letter that bears a stamp portraying a tree ablaze with festive pink-white blossoms in the distance and in the foreground a sprig containing a ruffled orchid-like flower and a leaf resembling the imprint of a camel’s foot: it is Bauhinia variegata, the wording informs along a vertical margin, and horizontally that the stamp is one of a series depicting the MEDICINAL PLANTS OF PAKISTAN. Mah-Jabin lowers herself onto a chair, having recognized the hand that had written out the address. Her husband has never attempted to communicate directly with her before and she wonders what is contained within the letter that bears the pretty flower of the tree that is valued for, amongst other things, its effectiveness against malarial fevers, the ability to regularize menstrual dysfunction, and as an antidote to snake poison.

She won’t unseal the letter, as though it is a way of keeping his mouth shut. Touching her head to see if the henna is still wet, she discovers that the preparation has lost almost all of its moisture — clinging to her hair but crumbling like green sand on contact, having deposited the gluey dark-red sap onto the filaments. In the bathroom she becomes curious and opens the letter, but cannot bring herself to read it. She opens the narrow angular cupboard in the corner that houses the immersion heater swaddled in insulating pillows of shiny silver nylon. “Hello, spaceman.” She switches it on and, just before closing the hatch of the rocket, tosses the crumpled letter and envelope in — toxic waste to be dumped into some distant black hole.

She taps out a tube from the box of tampons in her toilet bag and, later, throws the empty tube into the wicker basket but picks it up again, pressing it into a flat strip and putting it in her pocket to dispose of later, away from where Kaukab may come across it, she who had warned the twelve-year-old virgin against using these kind of napkins that have to be inserted into the body lest she be “ruined for life.”

Just before she leaves the bathroom, and as though acting on a will and independent memory of their own, the fingers of her hand open the door to the immersion heater once again, reach around the belly of the quilted water-drum and grope in the darkness there: when they find what they are seeking she too remembers it suddenly, as though a jolting electric current has passed from the object to her brain.

The knitting needle she had dropped there nearly nine years ago, shortly after returning from Pakistan, is still there, undissolved by the passage of time and the lack of light. She sinks queasily to the edge of the bath, holding tightly against her breast the hand that had touched the slippery smooth solidness of the spike, as a mother might console and reassure a child by hugging it after it has witnessed something disturbing.

Equipped with that knitting needle she had shut herself in here after discovering herself pregnant — the smell of rust in her nostrils and the taste of iron behind her teeth and gums seeming to grow richer every second, as though chains to bind her were being forged within her — and had realized only then that she did not know how to proceed. How exactly was it done? In the end her courage had failed her and she had sat trembling. A legal termination at a clinic was an impossibility: her only source of money was her parents and they would not have allowed her to have an abortion, and would have used the pregnancy to renew their efforts to make her return to her husband.

In the end she had induced a miscarriage by taking quinine tablets for a fortnight, something a young mother of eight in Sohni Dharti had said she found effective whenever she needed to give her body a respite, her husband refusing to see reason and claiming the use of contraceptives would lead to the unborn children pointing to him on Judgement Day and saying to Allah, “That man is the one who did not allow us to be born and swell the numbers of the faithful!” with the result that once the woman had given birth in the January and December of the same year.

With surprising heat in her heart, she takes the flattened and curved tube of white cardboard from her pocket and tosses it — like the crescent moon come unstuck and spiralling down — into the rubbish before leaving the bathroom.

“Mother, what was the matter with auntie-ji?”

Kaukab is at the sink, washing the lunch dishes, Mah-Jabin’s coffee cup, the plate that had held her own orange pieces, and the henna bowl. She doesn’t answer the question immediately — once again concealing everything regarding the Pakistanis that the children might deem objectionable. She knows Mah-Jabin will ridicule the idea of djinns.

“Nothing. She was just a little tired.”

Mah-Jabin had heard a few words of what the woman had said to Kaukab: the girl’s husband is demanding to know why she hasn’t conceived yet — either she is secretly taking contraceptives or she is barren. He called her a stony valley that had wasted all his seed. “She mentioned something about her daughter and her husband—”

“Every marriage has it ups and downs,” Kaukab says abruptly, and then as abruptly: “What was in the letter?”

“I threw it away unopened,” Mah-Jabin hears herself state flatly.

Kaukab nods; she still holds on to the hope that Mah-Jabin will return to her husband, if he’ll take her back, that is, and if not that then perhaps another marriage could be arranged for her — which would be difficult because she is no longer a virgin, is used goods. She peers over her shoulder to meet her eye, “I forbid you to go to America.” Her hands clench into fists. “A strange country full of strangers! I’m sure your father wouldn’t approve either.”

“How do you know I’m going to America?” Mah-Jabin is puzzled. “And well, I’ve been to a country full of my own kind of people and seen what that is like so I thought I’d try a strange country full of strangers this time.” Trapped within the cage of permitted thinking, this woman — her mother — is the most dangerous animal she’ll ever have to confront. “I’m just going to stay with some friends during the summer. Who told you about it? And may I add that I am not afraid of Father.”

Oh your father will be angry, oh your father will be upset: Mah-Jabin had grown up hearing these sentences, Kaukab trying to obtain legitimacy for her own decisions by invoking his name. She wanted him to be angry, she needed him to be angry. She had cast him in the role of the head of the household and he had to act accordingly: there were times when he came in to inform the young teenagers that something they had asked from their mother earlier — the permission for an after-hours school disco, for example — was an impossibility, and it was obvious from the look on his face that he personally had no problem with what the children wanted. Sometimes Mah-Jabin wonders whether her mother knows Shamas at all. Shamas wouldn’t object to her visiting America, she knows. And she says these things out loud now.