Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

He moved out of the house within the week, having rented a small room two bus-rides away on the other side of town. Each month he posted most of his wages into the house through the letterbox. One year passed, and then two; two-and-a-half. He lived in squalid conditions and days would at times go by without him having talked to anyone. His world was so reduced that half an eggshell would have served as sky.

He met her and the children only a handful of times, either by chance or very reluctantly. When he saw her coming up the stairs one day he locked the door from the inside and pretended to be out: she banged to be let in, aware of his presence perhaps, and was eventually forced to say out loud through her tears that she was bringing him the news of his mother’s death back in Sohni Dharti.

Although they both wept in each other’s arms for over an hour, and although he sent her back with the reassurance that he would be there in the house with her and the children before the week was out, he was still not there months later. One day in the snow-buried March of 1978 he came to leave his wages for her at the little seafood shop where she had started work not long ago; he had made sure that it was an hour when she would not be there — the other shop assistants would pass the money on to her. There was no one at the counter and he sat down to wait in the warmth. Outside, the day was as white as a new page, and there were icicles as long as spears. As he dozed and half-dreamed, the shop turned into a kaleidoscope brightly filled with black-and-cobalt-blue fragments whose reflections produced changing patterns on everything, including himself.

The winkles had escaped from their tank.

They were roaming because the urge was on them: on the coastline a hundred miles away the tide had come in, and things of all kinds were emerging from the sand to feed on what the sea had brought in. The small shelled creatures in the seafood shop had not been away from the beach long enough for their internal rhythms to adjust yet, and they had begun to explore, having lain motionless till now as they would on the beach— retreating underground and sealing the entrances to the burrows as though holding their noses shut at the low-tide stink.

The other life of the planet had broken through into the one being lived by the human beings, that immeasurably vast life for which the humans were mostly an irrelevance.

Shamas watched the nightsky-blue creatures surrounding him. The tide had come in far away but the sea had flooded the interior here. He let the beautiful lapis lazuli creatures leave the tank and make their magnetized way up the walls, explore the windowpanes like a child’s eye losing concentration and beginning to roam the page of the textbook, paint wet trails on the foliage of the plants like a tongue on a lover’s skin, and climb onto the tables to go on slow voyages.

The shop assistant came out from the back and said she hadn’t remembered to secure the lid of the tank in time for the tide.

She gave him a letter which Kaukab had left for him, and, as she hurried from corner to corner to pick up the blue shells, she asked Shamas to hand over the money but he said there was no need because he had just decided to go home to Kaukab for good.

He picked off the shells from the chilled glass panes of the window. Shamas helped contain the homesick beach-creatures and afterwards glanced at the letter: it was from Jugnu; he wrote that he was thinking of leaving America and coming to live in England, that he could be there with them by early summer. Shamas reached in through his coat and placed it in the warm breast pocket of his faded rose-red shirt and began walking through the wet sugar-and-salt of the snow, back towards Kaukab and Charag and Mah-Jabin and Ujala. Following ghosts of buried roads.

He’s back on the bridge, on his way back home this time with the new set of Saturday newspapers. He’s in solitude’s bower, looking down at the water. The sunrise is the colour of the insides of fruit, bright and wet-looking. And the morning air is looser on his face, unstill and the opposite of heavy, as before a storm.

This was where he met Suraya. He lifts his fingers to his nose to see if they retain the scent of her scarf but all he can smell is the newspapers. Would she really come to the Safeena this afternoon?

The river flows. Poorab-ji, from the Ram and Sita temple down there on the bank, has come to see him twice since that morning back in January. A good, kind friend and man, he had puzzled Shamas nevertheless when they happened to meet right here on this bridge at dawn some years ago. It was Sunday and a small group of Saturday-night revellers — young white men and women — had come down the road, smelling of alcohol, hair and clothing awry, on their way back to their homes from some late party. Laughing, the still-drunk boys had chased the loud girls and they had let out shrieks and shouts as they all went on their merry way. The look of distaste — revulsion — on Poorab-ji’s face had surprised and disappointed Shamas. No doubt Poorab-ji had just seen sordid promiscuity on display, debauchery, lewdness, whereas for Shamas there was hardly anything more beautiful than those young people, fumbling their way through life, full of new doubts and certainties, finding comfort in their own and others’ bodies.

And more wonderful still the single sheet over two lovers on a bed.

When he gets back home he can see that Kaukab is up because on the tabletop there is a wet ring made by the base of a teacup, shining in the morning light. The sun had picked out the course of tears on Chanda’s mother’s face in this manner that day she approached him on the bridge.

He goes to the dresser and looks in its drawer to see that Kaukab has taken her pills and tablets: after Chanda and Jugnu had disappeared Chanda’s mother was said to have “just given up,” neglecting to eat and refusing to take medicine; and he sometimes fears Kaukab will begin to behave in a similar way, neglecting her knee and blood complaint. Satisfied, he replaces the bottles of tablets without making them rattle.

She now enters the kitchen, rosary in hand, the beads the size of pills— her own medicine. “I thought I heard someone. Doors have taken on a new meaning now: any one of them could open any time to reveal Chanda and Jugnu. Don’t you agree?”

For Kaukab to think of Jugnu is to always see a moth or a butterfly around him, somewhere towards the edges, the way Charag — her artist son — scores his name in the corner of his canvases, in the wet layers of paint.

“A cup slipped from my hands and broke earlier,” Shamas tells her. “I think I managed to get most of the shards off the floor but you’d better not walk barefoot, especially. . here, and also. . over here.”

“It was the last of the set I bought all those years ago.” She lifts the lid of the bin to briefly look at the porcelain pieces. “I remember it hurt me to buy it because I thought we would have to leave it behind in England when we moved back to our own country. It seemed like a waste of money. I was reluctant to buy anything because our time here was only meant to be temporary. But things didn’t turn out the way we thought they would. Decades have passed and we are still here. Hazrat Ali, may he forever be sprinkled by Allah’s mercy, used to say that I recognized Allah by the ruins that were my vain plans for my life.”

Shamas shudders. And then he says, “I think last night I dreamt I was crossing the Chenab towards Sohni Dharti.”

“For the past three days I’ve dreamt that I am travelling towards Mecca but, even though I can see the city on the desert horizon, it never comes any closer. I always wake up before reaching it.” Her voice breaks in her throat. “Each night I’ve gone to bed asking Him to let me sleep until I get to the sacred city but to no avail.”