Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Yes, a delicate doll: she exaggerated the shock she felt at the primitive and coarse nature of village life, because it made her husband think she was something special, made of finer clay. She pretended not to understand the codes and mores which governed the daily conduct of the people around her, saying, for example, that she found the decades-old feud with a nearby family ludicrous. Her wide-eyed innocence was found endearing and laughed off, but one day she had gone too far. She discovered that a man — one of the men from the family with which her in-laws had the decades-long feud — had been raping his niece for the past few months and that the matter had come to light only now because the fourteen-year-old girl had fallen pregnant. The entire family accused the girl of having relations with someone and thereby bringing dishonour on the bloodline. She was unmarried but not a virgin! Terrorized by the uncle, she refused to tell who the perpetrator really was. The matter hadn’t yet reached the ears of the world outside the house because the girl hadn’t yet begun to show, but Suraya had been told about it by her servant girl who worked at that house too. Suraya feared the pregnant girl would be murdered any day for disgracing the family. She couldn’t go to the police because, under Pakistan’s Islamic law, rape had to have male witnesses who confirmed that it was indeed rape and not consensual intercourse; the girl did not have witnesses and therefore would be found guilty of sex outside marriage, sentenced to flogging, and sent to prison, marked an abominable sinner from then on, a fallen woman and a prostitute for the rest of her life.

The confidence of her English life still clinging to her, Suraya decided to go to the house of the feuding family to reveal the real truth to them and ask them to be compassionate. She was walking into a conflict decades in the making but she thought she could be persuasive.

She realized her mistake very soon after she walked into the enemy courtyard. She remembers every detail, the time slowing down. The men of the house clustered around her and barred her way when she attempted to leave. People were always losing their way in the thick winter fogs and she pretended she had entered the house by mistake, putting aside her fears about the pregnant niece, her own survival now at stake. Eventually she was allowed to leave the house with her virtue intact; the men did, however, tell her that they were going to let everyone know that they had raped her because it would cast a mark on their honour and their name and their manhood if people thought they had had a woman from the other side of the battle-line in their midst and hadn’t taken full and appropriate advantage of the opportunity.

As it turned out it was as bad as if they had raped her. What mattered was not what you yourself knew to have actually happened, but what other people thought had happened. Her husband and in-laws believed her completely when she said that she was still pure, that nothing irrevocable had occurred in the house of the enemy, but in the end that fact was worthless.

All this pushed her husband over the edge. More and more he began to seek solace in alcohol, saying he needed it to breathe, often coming home knee-walkingly drunk, taking off his cap and waistcoat and attempting to hang them on the shadow of the hat-stand on the wall, his behaviour becoming increasingly volatile so that eventually she was afraid to even let her bangles make a sound, not knowing what would provoke him, though he was always remorseful after his outbursts, telling her how much he loved her, that he just couldn’t get the barbed comments of people out of his head.

There were days when, in his shame, he didn’t want to see anyone: not even himself — he draped the mirror with a cloth. But then there was disgust and rage in him as he handled the veils that came into the house to be dyed because her father-in-law was a dyer: “They are getting shorter and shorter. The women of today are increasingly shameless.”

She could always tell by the sound of the knock on the door at night that he had been drinking and also how much he had had; his language was coarse when he addressed her on these nights, as though he wouldn’t get the full worth of the money he had paid the alcohol-seller if he didn’t call her abusive names.

She tried to resort to her earlier spiritedness, trying to remind him of happier times, but that behaviour now seemed to enrage rather than enchant him, a sign of Western decadence.

One day he slapped her with his coarse rectangular hand. The next day he began to shake her violently: “I know what you did in that house. Admit the truth at once if you don’t want my fist to aid your memory.” He did beat her the next day. And the day after that he waved a knife and shouted, “Your death is hidden in this dagger. . The role of a woman is to give life, the role of a man is to take it. .” The next day he took the final step:

He said the word talaaq three times: I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.

And he pushed her away with his foot. In the morning he claimed he didn’t remember uttering the deadly word in triplicate; and even if he did say it, he certainly hadn’t meant it — but what had been done could not be undone now. The husband — who was the only one in a Muslim marriage with the right to divorce — had uttered the word three times and according to Islam they were now divorced.

There were no witnesses but even then they couldn’t ignore what had happened: Allah had witnessed.

Many drunks were repentant in the mornings when they woke up to find the wife and children weeping at the ruin their life had become a few hours earlier: the husband, intoxicated, had probably had his hands pushed away in the darkness by the wife who was revolted by the smell of alcohol and he had said the word three times in rage. Talaaq. Talaaq. Talaaq. It was as simple as that.

Every day the clerics of the mosques all across the Subcontinent were visited by thousands of distraught couples, and every day the Muslim newspapers — here in England, and there in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — received letters from men who said they loved their wives and children dearly, and that they wanted to keep their family together, that the word talaaq was uttered by them only in anger — but Allah’s law was Allah’s law and nothing could be done.

Nothing except the path Suraya has already embarked upon.

The man — her husband — doesn’t have to marry another woman before he can marry her again. Allah’s law is Allah’s law and cannot be questioned.

Shamas sits in one of the yellow chairs with the newspaper and listens to Kaukab. Having just returned from the neighbourhood shops, she is telling him about the various things she has heard from the women out there as she prepares food in the blue kitchen, keeping up a monologue as she moves from cupboard to dresser to counter to oven. On a tablecloth as white as canvas, she arranges the still life of their lunch. A spring or summer meal is nothing without the freshly beaten coriander-chilli-and-mint chutney, so she had gone to the shops to pick up the mint and the coriander — bushels of the freshest imaginable green secured by stationery-shop rubber bands — and the chillies in polythene bags so finely thin they failed to rustle. She also brought limes that had scars on the peel, made by the sampling pecks of birds, indicating that the fruit had grown on the outside of the tree crown and had therefore been exposed to more sunlight than the ones that had grown concealed within the canopy, the ones with undamaged skins. She halved a lime and rubbed one piece on the plates they would eat out of, to impart a note of zest into each mouthful, and squeezed the other half over the salad of sliced onions and then coated each slice with fiery black pepper so that every curving piece would become as lethal as a sword in the hand of a drunkard.