Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Choli me dil hai mera,

Chunri me dil hai mera:

Yeh dil main doon gi mere yar ko, pyar ko.

The blouse contains my heart,

The veil conceals my heart:

The heart which I’ll give to my lover, to my beloved.

She lowers the conch shell onto the table surface, and remains there, recalling how as a child she had wanted to fish in the sea that she heard surging within the red petrified folds and ruffles freckled with archipelagos of white stains, giddy at the thought of the fantastic creatures to be found down in the depths below the waves that weren’t there, in the coves that edged its slow silver, the illusory sea that is the equivalent of the sky in a cupped-handful of water.

She leaves the room, her forehead burnt by the thoughts in her mind.

Outside, a male starling is carrying a flower in its beak to decorate the nest it has built for the female somewhere, and in the empty room the sea and all that it contains sloshes and echoes silently in the shell’s red cone.

Charag steps into the lake, naked, and scoops water onto his head, bending his neck to let the falling drops flatten his hair. The water reaches the scalp and begins to pour down the face, getting into the eyes where the rich brown irises are an arrangement of suede-splinters — like the gills of a mushroom. A good deal of the light from the moon seems to be reaching the earth but without first lighting up the intervening sky and air— the earth is as though glowing itself. It’s half an hour or so to dawn, and in the predawn light the world appears as though newly formed, softer on the eye, as exalted as a vision. Leaves float around him as he swims in the lake, one or two curled at the tips as in botanical illustrations, the oaks lobed like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. His clothes lie on the shore among the stones while he moves through the water that is a skin trying to contain a deep-blue light which seems to come to the surface from somewhere down below, the colour of the blue vein on the pale inside of his elbow.

He is still undecided about whether he will visit his parents. He has driven all night to be back in Dasht-e-Tanhaii but now isn’t sure why he has come.

He was the elder son and, throughout his boyhood, was always accompanied by the sense that the family’s betterment lay on his shoulders. Nothing was ever made verbal but this expectation had been inhaled by him with each breath he had taken during those early years. His parents wanted to return to Pakistan: he would become a doctor and go back with them — this was understood by him. They — all of them — would be free of England when he finished his studies. He was troubled by the guilt of truancy every time he did something he enjoyed, every time he picked up his drawing pad. His art teacher came to the house one day when he was fourteen, to plead with the parents to let him continue with the subject. She had secured a place for three of the paintings in the little art gallery above the public library in the town centre, and his photograph had appeared in The Afternoon. The art teacher’s letters had been ignored at home — the mischievous attempts of the whites to lead the boy astray, said Kaukab, an attempt to prevent the Pakistanis from getting ahead in life, encouraging them to waste time on childish things instead of working towards a position of influence. When the teacher came to the house Charag had felt humiliated, screaming at her inside his head to go away, wondering whether the parents thought he had asked her to come, that he had betrayed them somehow.

He had to concentrate on sciences, spending his time in the laboratories where the microscopes slept like hawks under their dust covers. The science teachers advised him to simplify the diagrams that accompanied his essays, concerned that it would become a habit and he would lose valuable time during exams. But the diagrams were the only sketching he could do without furtiveness and guilt at home.

Everyone at home was, of course, aware of his talent. Kaukab sometimes brought him a bar of perfumed soap so he could sketch the vignette indented at its centre for her to embroider it in rows on her own or Mah-Jabin’s kameez s. And she asked him to convert the vines and geometric designs from the borders of the paper kitchen-towels so that they could be traced on the hands in henna, reducing it to fit the fingers, enlarging it for the palms. She saved the sketches in a folder that lived in her sewing hamper and they were often lent to other women around the neighbourhood. Whenever she couldn’t find her tailor’s chalk she asked to borrow one of his colouring pencils.

His grades at A-level were not high enough to get into medical school. Putting aside the feeling of guilt and disgrace and failure, he told his parents he would not be retaking the exams next year to improve his grades for medical school, nor would he go to university this year to read the many other science subjects for which his grades were good enough.

He planned to go to art college.

But he changed his mind when from the dark staircase he heard his mother slap the thirteen-year-old Mah-Jabin in the kitchen and say, “Who would marry you now?”

The year he went back to repeat his A-levels was a year enclosed on all sides by loneliness. Everyone he knew had gone away to university. He sat alone on the bus on the way to the school that was a low long building among the hills, made of gleaming glass and greyness and as windy as a harmonica, and in the classrooms he found himself unwilling to make contact with the new batch of students. Things had changed at home also: his failure had been a cruel dashing of his parents’ hopes, and a cloud of something anaesthetizing hung over his brother and sister who had witnessed his commitment to his studies all their lives — and, having failed despite all the hard work, he had made them afraid of their own books and schoolwork; the event had injured their confidence in their own abilities.

Early in October a pain opened in his back and legs, and the doctor— after checking his reflexes by trailing and wafting a tissue paper along his naked body — had wondered if he would like to be referred to a psychiatrist since there seemed no organic cause for the severe ache. His mother said it was out of the question: a young girl in the neighbourhood had been sent to a psychiatrist by the doctor and had within months rebelled against her parents and left home.

The months passed. He lost the pain somewhere along the way, working hard on his studies, but again did not make the required grades. He went away to university in London to do a BSc in Chemistry: there was one last path open to medical school still — if he managed to do well in his degree finals he could apply for entry then, in three years’ time.

But during his second year in London, everything changed: one night, drunk, he found the courage to speak to Stella. “I am never wrong about colour,” was one of the first things he said to her.

“Are you wearing contact lenses?” he shouted over the music. “No one with hair that colour has such blue eyes. I am never wrong about colour.”

She looked at him. “My eyes are that colour naturally. How do you know my hair isn’t dyed?” It fell onto her shoulders from beneath a large black hat the rim of which had been turned up above the face, the slice pinned to the crown with a pointy rose made of folded ribbon, also black. His hands were shaking. During the year in which he had tried to improve his grades, he saw many Pakistani and Indian boys and girls— who had been waiting since the beginning of puberty to leave home and find lovers at university — make desperate, clumsy and foolish attempts to pair up now that freedom had been delayed by one more unbearable year. But he had kept his distance and reserve. And upon arrival in London, the sadness was of a different kind: there was no fear of discovery or repercussions here but he was inhibited by incompetence and inexperience, by a profound sense of shame regarding his virginal state.