Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“Have you given any more thought to a visit to Pakistan?”

“We’ll go for a visit of course, but I refuse to settle there permanently even though there is nothing I would like better. There is nothing on this planet that I loathe more than this country, but I won’t go to live in Pakistan as long as my children are here. This accursed land has taken my children away from me. My Charag, my Mah-Jabin, my Ujala. Each time they went out they returned with a new layer of stranger-ness on them until finally I didn’t recognize them anymore. Sons and daughters, on hearing that their mother is dying, are supposed to come to her side immediately to ask her to cancel their debt, the debt they incurred by drinking her milk. It is her privilege and her right. There is nothing more frightening for a person whose mother has just died in his absence than to learn that no one had asked her whether she released him from the debt of milk; you are supposed to beg her to lift that mountainous weight from your soul. I can’t see any of my children doing that when my time is near. Perhaps Allah is punishing us for leaving behind our own parents in Pakistan and moving to England all those years ago.” She shakes her head and says after a silence: “Weren’t you a little too long with the newspapers? Was the shop not open yet for some reason or did you wander off on one of your walks?”

He panics as though he’s been caught stealing. “Yes, the shop wasn’t open yet,” he tells her abruptly. I look forward to seeing you this afternoon at the shop —she, Suraya, had said just before they parted.

No, he won’t go to the shop today. He cannot believe he has just lied to Kaukab, and he doesn’t understand why he has done it.

Kaukab moves towards the stairs. “I won’t move to Pakistan. What would my life be then? My children in England, me in Pakistan, my soul in Arabia, and my heart—” She pauses and then says: “And my heart wherever Jugnu and Chanda are.” Her eyes fill up with tears as she declares this last, knowing the look on Shamas’s face is saying “Really?” She knows no one will believe that she misses Jugnu and prays for his safe return constantly; she would have been overjoyed had he made his union with that girl Chanda legitimate in the eyes of Allah and His people. The only way, it seems, she can convince the others of her loss regarding Jugnu is by renouncing Allah and His injunctions, by saying that what Chanda and Jugnu were doing next door was not a sin. But how can she renounce Allah?

She goes upstairs, and Shamas lowers himself into a chair. He tries to bring Suraya’s face before his eyes. Doesn’t she look a little like a younger Kaukab, the Kaukab he married when he himself was that young poet in Lahore? He wonders whether he had given her his name after she had introduced herself. And now he feels ashamed at this absurd train of thought. This is madness. But it was as though she herself had wanted his company. He sees other women, other women he finds attractive, during the course of his daily life, the way all men do, but, after he has registered that fact, remarked on their beauty, nothing comes of it because nothing can — they are not interested in him. Why would they be? He would have ignored this morning’s encounter similarly, but she seemed to want to be near him. He wishes he had shaved before going out this morning. No, no, this is insanity. Surely this is how teenage infatuations are born — he must act his age. She is much younger than him, by twenty-five or so years at least — she was probably born around the time when he was in his mid-twenties, writing those love poems. He takes a deep breath and tells himself to pull himself together. No, he won’t go to the Safeena this afternoon.

Relieved at the decision he’s just made, he lets out a small laugh at the madness of what he has just been thinking, and the weight of the world is suddenly off his shoulders. In one of Jugnu’s butterfly books, he had last year secreted a prostitute’s telephone number copied from the classified columns of The Afternoon; he gets up and finds it now, but then, filled with wretchedness, tears it up. He flicks through the book for possible distraction and comfort. There is a butterfly called Sleepy Orange. . In the woods of Siberia and the Himalayas there is a Map butterfly, and an Atlas moth in the islands of south-east Asia. . And other names, even stranger: Figure of Eight. Figure of Eighty. . One of the rarest gems on the planet, there is a butterfly in the wooded hills around Sikkim called Kaiser-e-Hind — the Caesar of India. . The thought of the magazines glimpsed in the newsagent comes to him, and he wonders whether he should take a bus to a shop in a faraway area and buy a few. If Kaukab ever discovers them he’ll say they must have been lying hidden since the time when the boys were growing up. But what if she checks the dates on the cover? And he burns with shame as he remembers that two or so years ago, his flesh aching with eager longing, he had found himself going through the things his teenaged sons had left behind in their rooms, lifting up the carpet, feeling for a loose floorboard, sending an arm out under the mattresses, hoping one of them had forgotten to throw away a magazine.

The lake has the subdued glow of antique satin. Suraya stands on the xylophone jetty and looks at the names and initials lovers have carved on the wood in Urdu, Hindi and Bengali as well as English. The gouged dots and full-stops are the size of dimples on a doll’s knuckles. The wood is so skin-smooth that as she touches it she has a feeling of being stroked by it in return.

A wet late-spring dawn, Sunday, an emerald-and-grey hour, and nature is at its most creative. She should have come here yesterday afternoon, to visit the Safeena, as she promised that man on the bridge; but in the end a feeling of wretchedness had overpowered her. She is ashamed still of how she had approached the young artist here a few weeks ago. It had been her young son’s birthday the previous day, over there in Pakistan, and she had become desperate to change her situation, to fly and be with her son and husband. She had wept through the night, overcome by fear, doubts, and self-pity, with short nightmare-filled bouts of sleep, and just before dawn had entered the chilled waters of the lake.

The scent from the pine trees saturates the web-soft air. The solid world seems to have dissolved, leaving behind only light and atmosphere — a world made from almost nothing.

She walks over to where she had forced the young man to have a conversation with her. There are bits of his orange peel, nearly dried up and curling, on the shore, their brightness muted for now. Colours have long and slow births on such spring dawns.

The matchmaker has shown her no one she finds suitable. A number of them are illegal immigrants or asylum seekers who want to marry her to get official residential status in Britain. And amongst the legitimate citizens, not many are willing to go through a temporary marriage; and those who do, almost salivate when they see her, happy that they would be allowed to paw at her soon like a prostitute bought for a short while.

The matchmaker tells her not to lose heart: “Have you seen the way men look at you? Indian, Pakistani, and whites, and the blacks —ha, they can dream. They all cannot resist a second glance. And, no, you are not too old. Some white women of your age aren’t even married for the first time yet.”

She approaches the water and washes her hands. She has just been to her mother’s grave with a bag of potting soil and two dozen tulips. Her mother had contracted meningitis last autumn during the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and Suraya had left Pakistan to come and nurse her. The divorce was still weeks old then, and her husband had decided that she should stay on in England after the mother’s death: “Marry and divorce someone there, and then come back. I’d feel humiliated if you married someone here, because I don’t want to see another man touch my wife, the woman I love.” She had resisted the idea because she had missed her son, but in the end she had relented. She lives in the house she inherited from her mother.