Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“My daughter”—the man has begun another sentence—“thought it was the heart of her murdered uncle.”

It takes her a moment or two to register what he’s just told her. The force of it causes her to raise her hands to her breasts — it’s almost a blow to the heart. “Allah!”

“I am sorry,” he says, looking stunned. “I didn’t mean to shock you, forgive me.”

“When did it happen? Recently?”

“Yes. Please forgive me. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”

Recently. The poor man is living through the death of his brother, grieving, and there she was, planning, working out strategies, wondering whether she sensed in him an attraction towards her! Her eyes fill up with tears because of the disappointment of realizing that he is probably not interested in her — she’ll have to keep looking for someone else. She feels exhausted. And yet there is also a surge of shame, because with a part of her brain she’s also wondering whether it wouldn’t be easy for her to use his grief to her own advantage. She’ll offer him comfort and then he will become grateful to her — yes? She’s filled with self-disgust, her eyes brimming with water. What has she turned into and who is responsible for doing this to her?

“I am sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that. Are you all right?”

“Yes, thank you.” She raises her veil to her face and realizes she’s been holding a piece of the desiccated peel from the oranges the young artist had been eating last month: she must have picked up the cardboard-like fragment from the shore earlier. She lets it drop, and turns to leave.

“I’ll open the Safeena this afternoon if you’d care to come,” Shamas tells her, attempting to delay her departure. “I was out on just a walk now.” Though of course it’s all futile: he didn’t come to the bookshop yesterday because he was afraid of himself, but she hadn’t come either. She had said she would — but she obviously has a rich and full life already, friends, family, lovers. She stops at his words, eyes still swimming. She is obviously very sensitive: the mere mention of Jugnu’s death had produced tears. He can tell her other things too. He envisages a friendship. He’ll tell her how much he regrets never having continued with his poetry, and that he would like to go back to Pakistan now that he’s about to retire, go back and see if he can do something for the betterment of his country. He’ll tell her that he heard about the discovery of the human heart from two clandestine lovers — a Hindu boy, and a Muslim girl whose mother is convinced that she’s possessed by the djinn and is asking around for a holy man who’d perform an exorcism.

“I’ll come, yes. When I was a girl, my father, may he rest in peace, brought me here to a reading by the Pakistani poet Wamaq Saleem.”

Shamas is delighted. “I was among the organizers for that reading.” They were the years of Wamaq Saleem’s exile — the monstrous military regime had succeeded in forcing him out of Pakistan. His books of verses sold by the hundred-thousand in Pakistan and India, and about a hundred people had arrived at the lakeside hut to hear him recite that afternoon despite the fact that the autumn sky was breathing a chilly wind.

“It has been said that Wamaq Saleem did for Pakistan what Homer did for the Mediterranean and what the Bible did for Jerusalem.”

Suraya says, “I remember the women listeners had brought him flowers, containers of perfume, and jars of honey, because just like the Prophet, peace be upon him, it was his favourite food. And men presented him with bottles of whisky and gin. My father had brought an embroidered shawl, and I presented it to him.”

Shamas realizes he’s smiling, feeling light if not lightheaded.

She seems to be one of those people to meet whom is to meet oneself.

She is wearing a short woollen jacket, yellow with white embroidered paisleys, and, lightly gripping it between fingertips, she says: “This was once a Kashmiri shawl, identical to the one we gave to Wamaq Saleem. It was my late mother’s — may she rest in peace — but moths chewed up a part of it. I couldn’t bear to throw it away so I cut it up to make a jacket.”

He wants her to stay but senses that her wish for his company is vanishing like dew by the second, and, as though about to take her leave, she touches the cherry-red scarf at the nape of her neck and says, “Thank you once again for this.” She smiles at him. That mole. Every moment he has spent talking to her has been of great value and worth: an image comes to him of an hourglass filled not with the usual sand but little diamonds. He would like to converse for a while longer but he must go now, fettered by his conscience — that self-arresting chain — because although it has been exhilarating to be in her presence he won’t be able to forgive himself if he becomes a cause of dishonour or harm for her. Someone returning from the mosque after his dawn prayers could notice them together and by midmorning the entire neighbourhood would know, and by the afternoon the whole town due to the communication radios in taxis. And, just as numerous other places and roads have been given Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi names to give the map of this English town a semblance of belonging — amassing a claim on the place bit by bit — this lakeside location would then be named Scandal Point, after the prime rendezvous spot in Shimla, so called because fifty years ago an Indian prince and the beautiful daughter of a senior British official had met there for a long ride together on their horses, their subsequent absence over the following few days scandalizing the town’s white population.

“So, yes, come to the shop this afternoon, if you’d like to look over the books,” he hears himself tell her again, desperately, before walking away. The moment of parting leaves in him an inarticulate ache. He is embarrassed by the kind of impression he must have made on her— someone comically desperate for company. He hasn’t had a conversation with someone about the matters that interest him for a very long time. Talking with Kaukab is, for both of them, frequently another way of being alone, the conversation highlighting the separate loneliness of each.

He has also lost most of his friends from the Communist Party: he used to feel enlivened at the meetings, but almost everyone in the Party thinks the break-up of the Soviet Union would result in a better world, while he himself thinks that one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century is that the Soviet Union disgraced itself, that we danced on Communism’s grave, and so he no longer attends the Party meetings. Additionally, of course, the death of Chanda and Jugnu has made him reluctant to talk to anyone.

Suraya watches Shamas leave. She wonders how bold she should be when dealing with him. Her aim after all isn’t to just interest him in herself — it is to eventually get him to marry her. And while men are happy to consort with women who are forthcoming and assertive, they will judge that trait objectionable in a potential wife.

She has been told that she can be vividly bold; and she herself had read that component of her personality as courageous, but now she thinks of it as adventurousness, perhaps even recklessness, because it is this very trait that has landed her in the trouble she is in. She’d been sent to a Pakistani village to marry a man she had never met, and she admits that she had occasionally behaved in a spirited manner because she knew that her in-laws — and her handsome and loving husband — were in awe of the fact that she was “from England.” Her husband’s behaviour was loving towards her at the start anyway, before his secret drinking got out of control — though she was, even early on in the marriage, frightened by his acts and rough demands when he got drunk, behaviour he had no knowledge of when he sobered up and became gentle towards her once again as though she was a porcelain doll.