Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Allah has decreed that a man can marry any woman who is not his close blood relation. And so under Islamic law, the punishment Suraya’s husband must receive — for getting drunk and for not taking the matter of divorce seriously enough — is that he can have any woman except one. One woman is barred to him, as she is not to other men — that’s his torment. But — such is Allah’s compassion towards his creatures! — she is not barred to him permanently: if the woman who has been recklessly divorced can fulfill the requirement that Suraya is having to fulfill, then the original husband can possess her again. Limitless is Allah’s kindness towards his creation. Allah is not being equally compassionate towards the poor woman who is having to go through another marriage through no fault of her own is a thought that has occasionally crossed Suraya’s mind, along with It’s as though Allah forgot there were women in the world when he made some of his laws, thinking only of men —but she has banished these thoughts as all good Muslims must.

She wonders when the tulips will bloom. It was her mother’s wish to have tulips on her resting place: she did tell Suraya the reason for the request but it seems to have slipped her mind completely. She planted all but one of the bulbs in perfect rows because her mother used to say that only Allah is perfect and that we should acknowledge that fact when performing a task, that we should introduce a tiny hidden flaw into every object we make. “The Emperor Shah Jahan had made sure that there was a built-in imperfection in the Taj Mahal — the minarets lean out by three degrees,” she said.

When she set out at first light, there was an insubstantial rain — it was more a misty drizzle and there was no patter on the drumskin-tight nylon of the umbrella — but now even that has diminished; were she to look up, only one of her eyes would receive a droplet. The lake is girdled by concentric bands of many-coloured sands, pebbles, and, higher up the shore, pine needles; and the water’s edge is softly gnawing at them. She turns and moves towards the hut that stands surrounded by maple trees. Across a part of its side, ivy grows in every direction as though a large can of green paint has been splashed on the wall. This is the Urdu bookshop. She looks in through the window. What was the name of the man she met on the bridge yesterday? Was he a Muslim? The sign above the door is painted in a red as deep as dolphin blood: it depicts a small boat with a pair of oars lying next to each other inside it like man and wife.

She mustn’t despair at her predicament, she tells herself; this is not the end of her life: it’s a chapter.

Shamas is walking towards the Safeena. The drizzle has stopped completely. There is a small clump of reeds on the edge of the lake, and caught in this wet light the blades give out a diffused green gleam: each blade is a giant grasshopper wing. The bookshop is painted a rich brown, the colour of warm spices. In the early days — twenty years ago — it consisted of nothing more than a few boxes of books. It was all spiders and exposed wiring but then it was slowly cleaned up and a wallpaper that was a jungle of flame-of-the-forest sprigs and pairs of deer with powder-puff tails was put up. The walls had had holes in them before that and brightly dusty wedges of sunlight would be found in the interior in the afternoons as though someone had strung geometric paper lanterns everywhere. The roof leaked like a sponge sometimes.

But the owner was passionate about books and people would joke that given enough time he would track down even a signed first-edition of the Koran for you.

He looks up at the sky. Today will be one of those late English spring days that have no independent temperature: it will be hot out under the sun but the body will feel cold if taken indoors.

The owner of the Safeena went to Pakistan at the end of last year to untangle various financial matters concerning the money he had been sending his nephews for over a decade to buy land and property, and he died there, the relatives telephoning the widow here in England with the news three days after burying him. There is a possibility that he had been poisoned: there have been a number of cases recently where a person who had gone from Britain to sort out financial affairs had been murdered and buried by family members and business partners who had been misappropriating, siphoning off, or embezzling the money they were being sent.

The widow gave Shamas the keys to the Safeena when he said he would open the shop for a few hours each weekend until the existing stock sold out; she could then sell the hut. She had waved her hand resignedly, “All I need, brother-ji, is a place to spread my prayer-mat.”

The sun is pale, dripping silver. Fuses lit at random, the lemon-yellow dandelion flowers will be everywhere within the hour. The air smells of morning, of moist sunlight. He approaches the Safeena and stops. Someone — Suraya — is looking in through the windows, that red scarf still holding her hair in a bunch, the blue lozenges along its edge glittering in the morning air like unpurchasable gems, alive with reverberating pigment.

“I am sorry I couldn’t come yesterday, Mr. . Mr. . ” She must try to find out his name, in order to be able to tell what religion he is.

“I am Shamas.”

Muslim. She looks at the marriage finger: there is no ring, but that is no proof because the wearing of marriage rings isn’t really a strict custom in the Subcontinent.

She must try to keep him here, to find out more about him. “Tell me, do you think it was here that the police found a human heart some weeks ago? I overheard some little girls in a shop saying that when the children who chanced upon it had poked it with a stick it had given a few beats. What imagination the children have!” Perhaps he will now make a comment about his own children?

“No, it was closer to another shore, closer to the river where we met, nearer the area where there is a beekeeper from whom the Sultan of Oman bought forty queen bees, chartering a plane to fly them home. He had tasted their honey in a London hotel.”

She nods. The dawn surrounds them both with its green-and-blue, the deep sky above and the almost-luminous new growth of leaves below it. He is surely too aloof and dignified to be interested in her. He is obviously not a factory worker or taxi driver because his hands are soft-looking and almost pink.

“Yes,” he is continuing, “the heart was found in the other direction. A young white man was responsible. It was his dead mother’s and he stole it from the hospital just because he didn’t want it to be transplanted into a black man’s body.”

The information is shocking, and Suraya feels it as such, but she is aware that for several months now she is a little numb to the world, the news about it — no matter how monumental or significant — coming muffled by her own difficulties. Nor can she remember the last time she felt pleasure, genuine gladness that plumbs the soul, as she did when she embraced her son, pressing her nose and mouth into his soft neck, or when she tussled with him on the floor, glad that he was not a girl because you couldn’t be that rough with girls: she remembers her mother stopping in her tracks and sharply telling her father not to play too enthusiastically with his little daughter lest he cause “irreparable physical damage to her private areas,” having warned him many times before that, “If a flower loses a petal it doesn’t grow back!”

She is thankful to Allah that she doesn’t have any daughters.

Her longing for her boy is so great that last month while swimming in the lake, in the predawn darkness, she had had the urge at one point to just let go and sink to the bottom, let the water suck the life out of her while the bright moon watched above. If something doesn’t happen soon, she thinks now, I might still do that: float lifeless above the X-shaped giant’s still-beating heart. She remembers hearing from women in her childhood that this lake requires a sacrifice every six years, and she wonders how many years it has been since the last drowning.