Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She had been brought up to be patient — because for every thirst there was a cloud — and so she had waited, waited for their wedding night when they would come together at last like the two halves of a deck of cards cut and pushed back into each other with a forced ease, merging with a hesitant avidity. And may that night be longer than all nights.

Girls frequently sighed with relief when they got married because the husbands were less strict than the mothers had been, with whom it was as though they’d been handcuffed to dangerous lunatics at the moment of birth. Mah-Jabin, however, learned that the women of the family in the vicarage — the women whom she had to win over to gain access to the man of her life — were at least as traditional in outlook as her own mother, and she covered her head so quickly it was as though she was standing under a bird-filled tree, stopped wearing the few Western clothes that Kaukab had allowed her, and prayed five times a day.

A year and a half passed in the hopeful torpor, the single-mindedness, and the apparent masochism that had to be made intelligible to her white schoolfriends, there being no need for explanations when it came to the Indian and Pakistani girls, most of whom were trapped helplessly in similar webs of their own.

And then one day Kaukab mentioned in passing that so-and-so’s boy was getting married. Mah-Jabin ran upstairs before Kaukab finished speaking and bolted the door as though it could shut out that news from her life.

The boy had not been able to get into a medical college within commuting distance and would have to move away in the autumn: the parents suspected it was a conspiracy of the white people to get Pakistani children away from their culture, to make them have sex before marriage and every day as though it were a bodily function, and to eventually make them marry white people, it being a neighbourhood curse to say may your son marry a white woman; Mah-Jabin remembers being sent into her brothers’ room by her mother to look for condoms, and addresses, photographs or phone numbers of white girls, and remembers being told about a family that was tragic because the father had cancer and the daughter had just married a white boy.

And so — after telephone lines had burned between England and Pakistan — it had been decided that before he left for medical school the boy would marry his cousin from Pakistan; the parents had made sure he was ambitious and a high achiever — if he gained 90 percent and stood first in class then that was fine, but if 95 percent meant only a second place then it was not good enough. And they were not about to lose their prize of a boy to some white girl who most probably wouldn’t be a virgin.

The two doctors in the surgery at the end of the road — Dr. Lockwood and Dr. Varma — who had taken an interest in the boy after learning that he was applying to medical schools and wasn’t just another young nohoper from around here, warned him of the dangers of inbreeding, but the father had gone to the surgery and reminded the Englishman that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins, and told the Hindu woman that before lecturing the Muslims on the dangers of genetic defects she might want to do something about her own gods, who had eyes in the middle of their foreheads and what about those six-armed goddesses that were more Swiss Army knives than deities.

Shamas warned Kaukab to be careful and not lay a hand on the girl, because otherwise tomorrow the local newspaper would be carrying the headline BRITISH-BORN DAUGHTER OF PAKISTANI MUSLIM COMMUNITY LEADER BEATEN OVER MATTER OF MARRIAGE, bringing into disrepute, in one fell swoop, Islam, Pakistan, the immigrant population here in England, and his place of work, which was — in the matters of race — the officially appointed conscience of the land.

“How will I bear it, Mother, seeing him with his arms around someone else?” They were in the bathroom and Kaukab was shaving off the hair at Mah-Jabin’s groin while she stood in the tub with her legs spread: the girl had lost all sense of herself, but the religion demanded that pubic hair must not go beyond the length of an uncooked grain of rice. “I don’t want to live here, here in this neighbourhood, this town. Let’s move away.”

Kaukab dried the girl’s legs with a towel and looked for the box of sanitary pads: “We’ll think of something, baby.”

The wife of Shamas’s elder brother had died recently in Sohni Dharti and the olive-green house was without a woman (a fate that may not befall even an enemy’s home); Kaukab and Shamas had felt it their responsibility to somehow come to the aid of the devastated husband and son the dead woman had left behind: they asked Mah-Jabin if she would marry her cousin and move to Pakistan; she said yes. Life for her had become wandering from one dark room to another. As she was looking into a hand-mirror one day and had turned it around — to the side that gave a magnified image — she realized that she had been looking at the magnification of her face all along: she was wasting away.

She begged forgiveness from Allah for her charade of piety over the previous two years, and now, addressing Him in her prayers, said that she would put to rest all her doubts about His existence if He were to perform a miracle and make her his bride, see to it that she was rowed across these turbulent waters.

But miracles came from faith, not faith from miracles.

Kaukab had never lost faith that Allah would find a way of helping her widower brother-in-law — a man whom she loved and respected like a blood-brother, difficult though he was — and she was pleased when Mah-Jabin unexpectedly agreed to marry his son and settle in Sohni Dharti to run the house and look after her ageing, grief-stricken uncle. Things had worked out for everyone, and in the girl’s silent fantasy of the past two years — her silent and extravagant fantasy, misguided, innocent and unbounded — Kaukab saw the proof of how Allah blinds His creatures when He needs to further the designs of destiny.

It’s stopped raining so that out there everything that can sparkle is sparkling. Mah-Jabin lowers her ear to the opening of the conch shell that is a one-third open orchid or lily in bone, a stone vulva, a book warped and soaked double by rain, and listens to the sea that is not there with her eyes closed.

The henna has imparted a reddish darkness to her hair, a tone of black found on photographic negatives. Each night the stars seem a little further away. This house is almost not a building but an emotion; every last surface here bears scars of war. Through glass and water-beads she looks down at the front garden, the lilacs bathed clean, the roses newly shattered like china in the rain, the front gate where on arrival she had smelled a cloud of the perfume her mother always wears, the vapour of jasmine telling her that she was out here only moments ago — and now she knows how her mother found out about her planned trip to the US; she had told the taxi driver about it, and he must’ve called and told his wife, who had then stopped by to tell Kaukab that her daughter was on the way, calling her out to the gate. The Indian and Pakistani taxi drivers are known for spreading news to all corners of Dasht-e-Tanhaii through their radios— who was seen when and with whom and where — and she always avoids a conversation with them, letting them listen to their Hindi music or taped sermons of Muslim clerics, but today a song whose lyrics are meant to be misinterpreted had come on—

Choli ke pechay kya hai, choli ke pechay? Chunri ke nechay kya hai, chunri ke nechay?

What are you hiding behind that blouse?

What is being kept covered under the veil?

The flustered driver had switched off the music to begin a conversation with Mah-Jabin, not allowing the singer’s question to be answered by the other singer in the lilting duet—