Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“Well?” she had now turned her back squarely on the boy she had been talking to when he approached her, and — in the privacy which included him — made a quick male-masturbatory gesture with the looped thumb and first finger of her left hand, to convey to him what she thought of the boy. Shunned, the boy stood behind her for a while and then miserably walked away.

Her confidence filled him with terror. Would she dismiss and denounce him similarly upon meeting the next person? Her lips were red and syrupy like glacé cherries.

“Well, young man, how do you know my hair isn’t dyed?”

“It just isn’t. I would know if it were. As I said I am never wrong about colour.”

She shrugged and smiled: “Hey, listen, I have seen you around the campus. And at the weekend you work at that bar in Soho, don’t you. I have wanted to talk to you for weeks now.”

“My name is Charag.”

“I know. I am Stella.”

“I know.”

They had to lean very close to each other to be heard and as a result could hear each other’s breath. They were in the cellar of a student house in Notting Hill, the space packed with people, and, softly, she took his hand and led him to the edge of the room, the walls that had been stencilled with giant capsules and pills in acidic colours, tumbling and floating, a brightly glowing mural celebrating their milieu’s fetish. There was to be a performance by a band — some friends of the party-givers who had travelled down from Scotland — but the party dispersed when the police arrived, summoned by the neighbours whose extreme dislike of the stu dents and the young they themselves were unable to comprehend, thinking their high-decibel drinking sprees and benders went unheard just as their intense internal storms of confusion did. Charag and Stella lost each other in the crowd that spilled onto the street like a nest of termites broken into.

She came to Soho the following Friday, then again the next night, and asked her friends to leave without her, waiting for the staff to finish the after-work duties. And just before dawn — when the red dots on her bed covers were juxtaposed on the windowpane as though berries hung on the tree outside — he left her room to go back to his own house, burning with longing and humiliation, kicking in murderous rage at the dry plane leaves that littered the footpaths.

He had watched the cigarette in her hands: tiny pink eyes opening and closing, breathing, where the paper burned and sent into the air a brown thread parallel to and distinct from the blue wisp of smoke rising out of the live tobacco.

The anxieties had been many. The sense passed on to him during his upbringing was that the differences between the whites and the Pakistanis were too many for interaction to successfully take place; many marriages ended. The cleric at the mosque had advised the boys to stay away from the “faeces-filled sacks” that were earthly women and wait for the houris of Paradise. He said the boys should handle their members with tissue paper when they urinated, that it was a disgusting appendage. And, of course, intercourse was so dirty that the body had to be made pure afterwards by bathing. Charag had once heard one of the women assembled in the blue kitchen tell the others about how she had had to lie when confronted with the inquisitive innocence of her young son that day because he had wondered why her hair was wet so early in the morning: “I said his little sister had urinated on the bed and I had to purify myself with a bath at dawn to say the dawn prayers.” He heard the women laughing and offering variations of the incident as he sat naked from waist to knee in his room, stopping with an elbow the trembling slippery magazines from sliding off the bed. The jingle of the belt buckle had to be silenced in a fist when the trousers were pulled up afterwards. He had built up and discarded and built up again caches of girlie magazines during his adolescence, the pages crossed with white splintery creases where they had been folded double to keep a combination of favourite images before the eyes during the moment of orgasm. He threw them away in moments of self-disgust, timing this cleansing carefully with the bin men’s visit, so that they may not lie outside the house for days. Each visit to the newsagent for the purpose of beginning again was a defeat: he was weak and corrupt.

The following weekend Stella decided to take matters into her own hands, and they became lovers. His mouth was winter-chapped and dry while hers was cared-for and soft: her tongue felt like a hand going through the ripped silk lining of a pocket and scraping against the coarse fabric beyond.

His hand deposited a glowing impression on her belly as the net of capillaries sank away from the cold. He erased it by licking, warmly coaxing the blood back to the surface.

Her breasts were flattened under their own weight as she lay beneath him, her nipples the colour of her pink lips — his own were the dark tawny colours of his own lips.

At the tip of the penis, the dot of starlit ache — which had to be kept in place and referred to periodically to maintain the erection, but was never to be dwelt on because then it would spread and lead to climax — was growing larger.

His mouth looked for the oiled berry. Her taste came and went tidally salt and sour in his mouth, as eloquent as weather.

When he fell through the sensation and opened his eyes he was surprised to find her there.

And he could not hold her close enough.

The smell of his armpits was on her shoulders — a flower depositing pollen on a hummingbird’s forehead.

They detonated the remains of each other’s orgasm with fingers and tongues, areas of their bodies sticking together with sweat that was like the weak glue that holds segments of an orange together.

And all through the Christmas break — in a distrust of memory which upon reunion proved itself unfounded and thereby intensified the pleasures of reunion — he thought he would not remember her face when they met again. The house in Dasht-e-Tanhaii was silent that winter. Icicles dripped outside like washing. The nights brought a chill from the lake that added to the cold and stayed all day in the air that did not move. Mah-Jabin had married a few months earlier and gone to live in Pakistan, and Ujala had no one to quarrel with.

He could not have given Stella his phone number, and longed to talk to her, to touch her. A fear had been breathed into the house once when a girl from school had telephoned Charag about homework: he hardly ever left the house after school but his mother had suspected a girlfriend behind that one phone call. She didn’t know (nor would he himself for a while yet) what it meant to have a girlfriend, that a relationship was replete with subtleties through which intimacy and commitment were demanded and demonstrated, that you were supposed to meet regularly, even daily, introduce each other to the parents. Kaukab extended what she knew of Pakistani women — who were drenched in patience, and were grateful that they had found a man no matter what his behaviour — to cover all women.

The magnifying glass through which he was kept in sight was burning him.

The hook of Stella’s bracelet had given his penis a small wound: when it began to heal the scab rubbed against the fabric of his underpants and whispered her name.

Back in London in the new year, he burnt matchstick after matchstick into an ashtray as he told her about his wish to paint. She listened as the sticks continued to burn, each flame sucking the thickness out of the wood and growing fatter itself; they went off and bent and remained luminous at the tip, looking like streetlights. She was wearing the jacket of his pyjamas, he the bottom half.

She told him he had to abandon his Chemistry degree immediately. “Simple.” How light the burden of one’s life became in the hands of a lover! She told him what he had to do and made plans for contingencies, showing him he was several moves away from disaster — he who had always thought that he could make one wrong move and sink.