Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Kaukab smarts at the words. “How your tongue has lengthened in the past few years. Is this what they taught you at university, to talk like this, your precious university far away in London that you had to attend because you wanted an education? If education was what you wanted you would have gone to a university within commuting distance and lived at home like decent girls all over these streets. Freedom is what you wanted, not education; the freedom to do obscene things with white boys and lead a sin-smeared life.”

Mah-Jabin’s head not only hums like a wasp’s nest but also feels as weightless as those oblongs of chewed-up paper glued together with spit. “I knew it was not the distance that worried you; you had after all sent me a thousand miles away at sixteen.”

“We did what you asked us to do.” Kaukab moves closer and stares at her as though pinning a dangerous animal to the ground with a lance.

“I was sixteen: in every other matter I was considered a child by you but why was that decision of mine taken to be that of an adult? Another parent would have given me time to think but you were thrilled that I wanted to go and live in your beloved country,” Mah-Jabin screams. “And I was afraid as the time approached for us to leave, but I knew I couldn’t have said no at that stage.”

“No you couldn’t. These things are not child’s play. We had given our word, the wedding arrangements were ready over there, and, yes, I would’ve tied you up and taken you there had it come to that. And what’s wrong with Pakistan? Many girls from here are sent back to marry and live there, and they are happy there. Only the other month, the matchmaker told me of a woman from here who has been divorced by her Pakistani husband by mistake, and she’s still eager to go back and live with him there. That’s what a good and dignified woman is like.” She pauses for a moment and repeats her question: “What’s wrong with Pakistan? I grew up there—”

“And look what happened to you, you fool!”

The hard open palm of Kaukab’s hand lunges at Mah-Jabin and in striking her face takes away her breath. This is something Kaukab has longed to do whenever she has thought about the girl in her absence and really isn’t a response to what she has just said: she simply happened to be within reach as the need overtook Kaukab and the moment chose itself.

The force of the impact knocks Mah-Jabin off the chair, while Kaukab’s rosary — looped double at the back of the chair — snaps and the beads clatter to the floor. Kaukab’s hand alights and grips the girl’s soggy gritty hair like a claw and slams the head many times against the wall with all her strength, the red stain of henna growing richer and larger on the wall, Mah-Jabin crooking her elbow against the side of the head until Kaukab finally lets go and moves to the sink at the other side of the kitchen, washing the redness — sticky as blood — off her hands, her back turned towards the girl.

Mah-Jabin opens her eyes and slides herself upright against the wall, the pull causing the safety-pin at her throat to open up and the point to enter the soft hollow between her collarbones.

Sometimes the right question can be as difficult to come by as the right answer. Yes: Mah-Jabin has spent the last nine years, and most of the two years of her marriage before that, looking for the question that has come to her only just now. She remembers that Kaukab, on catching Jessye Norman on television once — singing a lyric Kaukab did not know the significance to, in a language she did not know — had risen to her feet slowly as though in homage to the grandeur of the heart-breakingly beautiful goddess standing proud as a mountain against the Paris sky, and afterwards had managed to articulate only a few words:

“I love people who accomplish great things.”

The sentence had startled the girl; and there were other similar occasions. Sometimes an idea would seem to come to Kaukab and disappear immediately so that her face was dark once again but not as dark as before, this being the darkness left behind in the flight-path of a firefly, a darkness aflicker with the knowledge that something had happened here recently, some illumination, the brain cells vibrating in the lucid wake of an insight. She would sigh, and talk to her daughter wistfully for a while.

Mah-Jabin remembers Kaukab telling her she regretted not having been able to have had an education, that she had wished to own a bicycle as a girl but it was out of the question even within the confines of the courtyard because her mother feared she would fall off and break a limb and no one would marry the cripple, so that she had bought herself a tiny pendant in the shape of a bicycle and put it around her neck on a chain, just as real bicycles are secured to trees or pillars with real chains.

And yet this same woman who had allowed her daughter to leave school at sixteen, hadn’t allowed her to ride a bicycle lest she be ruined for life. Why?

“Why don’t you hit me harder, Mother? Like this. .” Mah-Jabin strikes her own face as she walks towards Kaukab. “Like this. . this. . this. . Hit me harder. . harder. .”

Kaukab takes the cutlery from lunch and the knife with which Mah-Jabin had prepared the red peppers and drops them into the soapy water, standing solid as stone while the girl shakes her violently from behind with both hands. “You must be a moral cripple if you think what you did to me wasn’t wrong. Didn’t you once tell me that a woman’s life is hard because you have to run the house during the day and listen to your husband’s demands in bed at night? So why didn’t you make sure I avoided such a life? Answer me. . Answer me. . Why do you people keep doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result?”

Kaukab’s hand searches for and finds the handle of the long steel knife inside the water covered with the lace of bubbles.

“What was it you said to me once, Mother, that the first two decades of marriage belong to the husband, the rest to the wife because she can turn her children against the husband while she’s bringing them up, so when they are grown up they’ll make him eat dirt while she reigns over them all for the rest of her days.”

Kaukab stands immovably while the girl pulls at her shoulder to make her turn around, she the most intimate of her enemies.

“How fucking wise you are, Mother, such wisdom! Victory awaits all the beleaguered Pakistani women but what a price, Mother, two decades of your life wasted. . What a waste when instead of conniving for all these years you could just walk away. .”

Drops of water slide off the blade slowly as the knife rises vertically through the air. “Get away from me, you little bitch!”

The hungry steel slices an arc as Kaukab swings around and then Mah-Jabin stumbles backwards with one arm raised and the other across her stomach.

“How dare you throw questions at me like stones!”

Dazzle explodes on the blade — like blood spurting from a vein — when the weapon enters a beam of sunlight. The air itself seems to contract away from Kaukab as a school of fish twitches itself to safety at the approach of a predator. The bowl that had held henna falls to the floor, spinning on its edge like the silver cups that revolve around the lights on top of police cars to make them blink.

Eyes dilated as though lost in darkness, Kaukab lowers the knife, that diamond-hard tip that had very briefly become the sharp point of her despair and defeat.

Her own jewelled eyes flashing, Mah-Jabin throws back her head and laughs for the third time today, face tilted up to the ceiling.

“Here we have proof that Chanda was murdered by her brothers, that a family can kill one of its own. I wonder if this will stand up as evidence in court so that those two bastards can be put away for life. My god, for all of you she probably didn’t die hard enough: you would like to dig her up piece by piece, put her back together, and kill her once more for going against your laws and codes, the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this country with you like shit on your shoes.”