Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

The knife falls from Kaukab’s lifeless grip. “Oh God, Mah-Jabin. . I didn’t know I had the knife in my hand. I just tried to push you away with my hand. ”

“Please don’t come near me, Mother. And you would love me to go back to Pakistan to my husband, wouldn’t you, back to my ‘earthly god’? Or find me someone new like they did for poor Chanda. How many times had she been married before she met Uncle Jugnu? Twice? Three times? Yes, if it doesn’t work once, try again, because you are bound to hit the target eventually, as long as it’s you who decides what to do: if the bitch decides to take matters into her own hands and finds someone herself then raise the fucking knives and cut her to pieces.”

“Not everyone has the freedom to walk away from a way of life,” Kaukab says quietly. “The fact that you have managed to do it easily has made you arrogant and heartless.”

“It was not easy! It is still a torment. What hurts me is that you could have given me that freedom instead of delivering me into the same kind of life that you were delivered into. I want to go back into the past and tell that young girl who was me — and whom I love — what not to do, but no one can return to the past. But it was easier for you because I was there right next to you: if you loved me you would have prevented me from doing certain things—”

“I did not have the freedom to give you that freedom, don’t you see?” Kaukab is pained and broken at the realization that someone as close to you as one of your children can make so many mistaken assumptions when they take it upon themselves to evaluate your life.

“Don’t lie. You would have done it if you wanted to. You still want me married because you still believe a woman must have a husband. Please, don’t come near me, I said.”

But Kaukab walks by her and begins to pluck the rosary beads off the floor.

“Yes, I do want you to go back, because in the eyes of Allah you are still married to him. You may have divorced him under British law, but haven’t done so in a Muslim court. My religion is not the British legal system, it’s Islam.” Snatches of sentences are coming to her from the past few timeless minutes like waves returning to a shore and she deals with them as they come. “When I said a woman’s troubles are over within twenty years of marriage because now her grown-up children will defend her against the father and in-laws, I didn’t mean you have to connive and tell your children certain things deliberately. You need someone to talk to, to tell your troubles to, and her children are the people closest to a woman. You don’t connive to bring about that situation, it happens of its own accord.” She is on her haunches, weeping, as she lifts the beads off the linoleum like picking shells off a beach. “And what is this talk about me taking a knife to you: do you really think I could harm you?” There is a sense of consolation to the activity her fingers are engaged in, almost as though contact is being made with the dead: as a child she had seen her mother and grandmothers, and the other women in the house, similarly bent over the myriad daily tasks of the day, and sometimes — but not today, not now— the feeling is close to celebration, a remembrance and a praising of those now dead and absent but still living in her mind, unsung elsewhere and otherwise. Gone so thoroughly it is as though she had dreamed them.

Mah-Jabin moves towards the stairs, on the floor coated with dried-up or drying henna that she had shaken loose when she hit herself, and from the powdered layer under her feet it is as though she is in a room in Pakistan after a dust storm has just passed through. “Don’t worry.” She pauses by the bottom step. “It’s not the first beating I’ve taken from you. Your husband beats you and you beat your children in return.”

“I cannot understand why you constantly pluck this one string. I wish to Allah I had never told you about him hitting me and I’ve told you a thousand times since that it only happened that one time and that I didn’t speak to him for many months afterwards. He begged for my forgiveness and when that didn’t work, he even moved out for nearly three years.” Kaukab comes to the stairs, obstructing the flow of light into the well, and watches the girl’s ascending back. “Have you never made a mistake? Remember if you ever go back in time, make sure you choose to fall in love with the right person at fourteen, so that when he marries someone else two years later you wouldn’t have to ask your parents to arrange a marriage for you somewhere far-away — somewhere like Pakistan, for instance. We sent you to Pakistan because you wanted to go live in a place where you wouldn’t have to witness that young man leading a happy life with another woman.”

A moth pressed to a window-pane, Mah-Jabin stops on the staircase as though air has suddenly solidified ahead, but she doesn’t turn around. She rubs the point of pain at the base of the neck where the safety-pin has broken the skin, rubs it until it is lost in the smudge of heat the friction creates, and then, when the light rises a tone higher to signify that Kaukab has returned to the kitchen, she continues up the stairs, breaking free of the chains that her mother’s words had briefly become around her ankles, head bowed like a lily on a broken stem.

He, a stranger, had smiled at her for a few moments and held her eye. That’s all it had taken. Over the next few days she re-imagined and revised those first moments. He had paid her a compliment by noticing her and she had fallen in love: it was that easy because she had never been an object of curiosity, a scrutiny other than the kind that was openly intrusive, always aggressive, usually hostile. But what was deadlier was that she believed he too was in love with her, that he contrived to run into her here and there. She imagined herself beside him as his lover, naked, her tresses parted in a two-panelled robe along the front of her body, playfully identifying on his person the thirty-two signs of excellence in a man: deep in three respects and broad in three as well; glowing a healthy red in seven; fine in five and long in four; elevated in six, and shapely and short in four. He lay with his head in her lap, and she kept up a commentary as she ticked these off to him, both of them attempting to suppress their giggles, “It is said that it is a mark of excellence in men if the navel, voice and breath are deep, and the thighs, brow and face are broad; if feet and hands, the corners of the eyes, palate, tongue, lower lip and nails have a rich red hue; according to the ancients it augurs well if fingers and finger-joints, hair, skin and teeth are fine; in the rulers of the earth the jaw-line, eyes, arms, and the space between the breasts are long; happiness is said to be ensured if chest and shoulders, finger-and-toe nails, nose, chin and throat are raised and prominent; and if back and shanks and the male member are shapely and short — oh dear! Well, thirty-one out of thirty-two isn’t bad. Alright, I agree that it should be thirty-one and a half because it is shapely.”

Each day she found another justification for her obsessive belief. He didn’t have to speak: she felt. He gave no sign but she thought he was being prudent because in this neighbourhood, and in the way they had been brought up, the things that were natural and instinctive to all humans were frowned upon, the people making you feel that it was you who was the odd one out. Everyone here was imprisoned in the cage of others’ thoughts. She and he were born here in England and had grown up witnessing people taking pleasure in freedom, but that freedom, although within reach was of no use to them, as a lamp with a genie was of no use to a person whose tongue had been cut off, who could not form words to ask for the three wishes.