Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

After Easter he went home more and more often, wishing to tell his parents he was no longer a student, but came back to London without having had the courage to tell them. He heard Kaukab say to Shamas that the boy is probably being bullied by racist thugs at university and is coming home to escape them.

He would reveal the truth to them several months later, at Christmas, the house smelling the way it always did in winter, of fabric conditioners and washing powder because the day’s washing was drying in the kitchen.

“A painter is not a secure job. When we came to this country we lived in broken-down homes and hoped our children wouldn’t have to,” Kaukab said.

“Mother, I am struggling because I am young. That’s all.” The skin above her breasts sagged, a funnel of wrinkles narrowing to where the division between the two breasts must be — nothing like Stella’s new precisely stretched silk. This evidence of his mother’s frailty and helplessness made him want to reassure her. “Mother, please don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

“At least Allah is smiling on me as far as my daughter is concerned. Her husband loves her and she’s happy.” There was not an hour in the day when a letter was not in progress to Mah-Jabin from Kaukab, in blue aerogrammes or on loose sheets in fat envelopes that bore the stamps on the left corners — Kaukab always forgot that the stamps were fixed to the right-hand corner. Mah-Jabin’s own letters were happy when not ecstatic.

Even though she was many thousands of miles away, Mah-Jabin was closer to Kaukab than Charag, who was only a train journey away. She could imagine Mah-Jabin’s life, against a background she had thorough knowledge of; Charag’s life, on the other hand, was beyond her imagining — he was lost to her.

Stella remained a secret from everyone at home until Jugnu came to London to visit him while he was at art college. Charag hadn’t wanted to tell him because he knew Kaukab wouldn’t forgive Jugnu if she ever discovered that Jugnu had known about Charag’s “sinning” and kept it from her. He was sure that his father wouldn’t have a problem with it either but he couldn’t confide in him due to the same fear.

The sky is so blue it appeals to the sense of touch. Soon it will be blue and gold. He rounds one of those small reed-covered islands that drift about the lake’s surface and now discovers that he has swum straight into another swimmer, also naked, badged with a small leaf above the left nipple, her hair floating in the water, curly and heavy-looking like seaweed. Her breasts are supported high by the water as though being cupped by invisible hands. “My Allah,” the woman whispers, and he can see that her pubis is shaved clean like a Muslim woman’s is supposed to be. She cannot swim away and simultaneously conceal her breasts and groin with her hands, and so she splutters and goes under, her foot brushing his penis where there is a dab of aquamarine from when he had had to urinate whilst painting yesterday. In trying to assist her he loses the rhythm of his own stroke and now it is he who’s underwater, amid the silt and rotting foliage, fingers tangled in her long tresses. All bubbles and olive-coloured skin, she manages to break away and swims off as he comes up and expels the water from his windpipe and nose, blinking away the grit in his eyes. He treads water as he watches her arrive at the shore in the distance: she stands up and turns to look in his direction, the sheath of liquid swinging off her arms and hips in long tassels, dripping brightly from the tips of the breasts.

He waits until she has run off into the trees before beginning his own journey to the shore. Going along a path more daisies than soil he begins to put on his clothes. He cannot see her anywhere. He shivers. From the car parked under a nearby street lamp, he takes a net of oranges, his sketch pad, and a dozen pastel-sticks held together by an old wristwatch like a comic-book time-bomb, and returns to the lake, sitting on a piece of driftwood that is heavy for its size the way a lobster is. He sketches the mist. In the dawn light the paper is a soft luminous blue, and his hands are soon covered with pastel dust, and it is also there on the ground where his blowing has carried it in sweeps beyond the edge of the paper; the fans of coloured dust on the ground are as though his breath petrified and preserved. White, and grey, green as a surgeon’s gown, and the chalky-red of a school’s cracked clay tennis court.

Consumed in succession, he notices, each new orange has a flavour subtly its own, different than the last. Putting away the pastel sticks and the drawings, he closes his eyes, feeling that all the stars have been sieved out of his bloodstream for now.

He knows that his art has become uninspired of late, needing new direction. It’s the thing that he has invested in most passionately, and he knows that his dissatisfaction with it could lead to the profoundest crisis within his adult self.

“Forgive me, but I hadn’t meant to startle you,” the voice comes from behind him.

He turns and finds her standing a few yards away, fully clothed, a gauzy veil covering the wet hair and shoulders. Has she been watching him? He thought she had fled the vicinity. “Are you all right?” he says. “I was too engrossed in my thoughts to hear anyone else in the water.”

“Me too.”

The small daisies growing on the path beneath her feet look like a stretch of living stars — the narrow earthen path between tall grasses that leads to the entrance of the Urdu bookshop owned by his father’s friend.

She waves away an insect, blinking those sleepy eyes.

To bring a car to this place at the height of summer would be to have Gypsy moths come out of the pine trees and lay eggs on the tyres.

He is not sure what to do or say — she’s just standing there looking at him — and so he begins to collect his things.

“My name is Suraya,” she says, and hesitantly takes a step towards him. “Did you find the water too cold?”

He shakes his head. He has never really known how to act in the company of an Asian woman: it’s always been his understanding — the result of his upbringing — that reserve and aloofness is the best way to behave towards them.

She is perhaps in her late thirties, and extremely beautiful to him, Italian-looking, Spanish, Latin American; she says: “I used to swim in the lake when I was a child and couldn’t resist going in an hour or so ago, thinking no one would see me. I returned from Pakistan at the beginning of the year, and have been waiting for the water to warm up ever since then. My patience ran out finally.”

He stands up, clutching his things. “What were you doing in Pakistan?”

But she says, “The lake, I missed terribly, and the woods beyond it, in spring, full of bluebells — I longed for them both in Pakistan.” She points to the sketches he’s holding: “May I see those?” And while looking at them, standing beside him, their clothes almost touching, she says, quietly, “I was married to a man in Pakistan. I have a little son there. But my husband got drunk one night last year and divorced me.” She is looking intently at the pages, avoiding his eyes, not willing to see the expression on his face. “He’s repentant and we both want things to be the way they were, but according to Islamic law I cannot remarry him until I marry someone else first. The new man would have to divorce me soon after we marry and then I’d be free to marry the father of my son again.” She’s staring at a fixed point on the page in her hand. “Are you a Muslim by any chance? What’s your name?”

Charag takes a step away from her.

“I miss them both so much.” She’s still not looking at him. “Are you married?” There is a faked nonchalance in the voice.