Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“Forgive me but I have to go,” Charag says and extends his hand to take back his sketches. But she doesn’t move. The neckline of her tunic is embroidered like the young gypsy’s in the first version of Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller, her hand pointing to the girdle of Venus on the palm of her unsuspecting victim’s hand while she gently removes the gold ring from his finger, having beguiled the innocent boy with her beauty. The subtle thief.

“If only I could find someone suitable. I meet with the matchmaker regularly but haven’t been successful so far. As I said, it’ll only be a temporary arrangement. And, of course, we wouldn’t have to be compatible in age. The Prophet, peace be upon him, was nineteen when he married a woman of forty.”

And he was in his sixties when he consummated his marriage with a nine-year-old, thinks Charag.

She asks him: “How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.” But his voice doesn’t come out. He stands dumbfounded, this encounter beyond anything he could have ever imagined for himself — or for anyone else, for that matter. He gently takes hold of the sketchbook. She lets go but not before a tear the size of a pear seed has slid off her cheek and fallen audibly onto the paper.

It was the first sound you heard upon coming into this world: women — screaming, cooing, reassuring, out of control, in charge, shouting in pain, in pleasure, laughing, sobbing. Charag sometimes feels that to come to this old neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, these Asian streets and lanes of his childhood, is like entering one large labour room, full of the voices of women expressing a spectrum of emotions. It is like being born.

He doesn’t know what to do with the tear as it lies glistening on the paper. Should he brush it away or shake it off, but wouldn’t that hurt her needlessly, be too graphic a rejection of her proposal?

He watches it soak into the paper.

“You are very talented.” She looks at him at last and produces a large smile, her eyes raw and red. And she decides to make one last effort: “I’d like to see more of your work. Where do you live?”

He is seized by an embarrassment so acute it seems to be organic in its origins — a pain almost, arising from the very meat and membrane of him. Of course what’s taking place can hardly be termed seduction, but he recognizes in her desperation something of his own earlier anxiety and amateurishness regarding contact with the opposite sex. The culture she shares with him is based on segregation, and on the denial and contempt of the human body, and in all probability this is the very first time she has “propositioned” someone.

And just as he is about to walk away, she becomes resigned:

“You are an artist,” she says. “Tell me, can you paint this.”

He knows that by “this” she means the humiliation she’s just suffered, the despondent clumsiness to which her circumstances have reduced her, and the longing she must feel for her son and husband.

“Can you?” Her pain stares out of her eyes.

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I can try.”

She nods, wipes her eyes with her veil, and slowly walks away from him.

He goes back to the car and sits there for a few minutes.

Soon the rays of the sun would go in through the windows and ignite consciousness in every house of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, the caterpillars climbing the milk bottles on the doorsteps to drink dew off the foil tops. He’ll stay here, looking out at the sun on the lake for a while, and then go into the town centre for breakfast — before beginning the journey back to London.

Shamas, on his way back from the town centre to fetch the Saturday papers, very soon after dawn, sees countless single threads of spider silk shining on the riverbank, sagging between tall reeds like lovers holding hands. They gleam and the eye wishes to return to them like favourite verses in a book of poems. A swarm of grey insects spins in the air, keeping to a funnel shape almost as if it believes itself to be trapped. He is crossing the bridge, and the river — down there — seems to drink the sunlight, sucking at its warmth. The grass is so rich there that it would creak underfoot. Down there was where the two lovers were looking for the place where the human heart was found: Kaukab says that the girl’s mother is convinced that she has become possessed by the djinns — that is why she won’t accept her new husband. Shamas has been careful not to tell Kaukab about his chance encounter with the girl and the Hindu boy — their secret trysts must remain a secret.

This river is a recent stream compared to the rivers of the Indian Subcontinent: the Indus, its far bank wedded to the horizon, is an ocean-wide stretch of water that remembers thousands of years of history. And the river of his childhood — the Chenab — could rise by several metres during the monsoon.

He built a small boat for himself during his early teens, naming it Safeena, which meant both a boat and — in archaic use — a notebook; and he would take it out to sit in the cattails and the narkal reeds and the pan-grass of Chenab’s shallower regions, reading, the sounds of the migratory waterfowl coming to him from the other side of the green curtain if it were winter, the flocks arriving from the Himalayas at the beginning of October in minute-long V formations.

This year’s butterflies would soon begin to emerge — a season heaving with life, the air above the river slightly fragrant like a garment still carrying the odour of its vanished owner. And now a piece of red cloth with a silken sheen, giving off a pronounced honeysuckle scent as though it had been used to swab up spillage from the perfume flask, floats across his vision, about to fall into the water. Instinctively he reaches for it before it disappears, and as he’s bending over the low wall towards it the newspapers slip from his grip and fall into the water below, changing colour instantly as the water soaks the paper. He’s suddenly lighter, his muscles relieved, the fingers holding nothing but that scarf which has butterfly blue lozenges along its crenulated edges. He looks around. The sun laughing in her glass bangles, a young woman is looking at him from a few yards away. He holds out the scarf towards her.

“Thank you.” She whispers quietly. “I am sorry about your newspapers.” And immediately she turns and begins to move away from him, twisting the retrieved scarf and using it like a ribbon to collect and secure her hair in a loose ponytail at the base of the neck, her skin that pale rust-brown colour that white jasmine flowers take on at the end of the day.

Propriety dictates that he should not attempt to detain her but he hears himself say abandonedly, “It’s a beautiful morning.”

She stops — no doubt as staggered by his boldness as he himself is— and, turning around after a while to face him, nods her head which is a mass of curls, a few of which are already escaping the scarf and tumbling onto her shoulders. Small, fine-boned, she is perhaps in her late-thirties and is wearing a primrose shalwar-kameez with a wide length of see-through chiffon draped about the body to serve as a head veil when required. Her expression conveys a mark of consternation and she looks around, perhaps to make sure that this encounter is being observed by someone, that she is not too alone here with him, or perhaps to make sure that they are not being observed.

Feeling ashamed for having given her cause for concern and irresponsible for not keeping in mind the risks to her honour before addressing her, he raises his hand part way to his forehead to bid her farewell in the courteous Subcontinental Muslim manner and quickly turns around to go back into the town centre and get more newspapers.