Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Mangoes the colour of copper pots have arrived in the shop, she says, £3.60 for a box of five, as have guavas whose flashing pink insides are like a burst of poetry and the red pears which everyone is always reluctant to peel because you want to eat that colour, wishing eyes had tastebuds.

A woman in the neighbourhood has received a letter from the wife of the Bengali family who used to live in the house next door — before Jugnu bought it because the family had decided to go back after their son had been beaten to death in a racial attack by the whites — and in the letter she says that she was totally devastated to hear that her old neighbours’ daughter Mah-Jabin has cut short her lovely long hair.

The Indian and Pakistani mothers of growing daughters are asking the shopkeeper to stop importing a certain English-language women’s magazine published in Bombay. They deem it vulgar and pornographic because in this month’s issue a young Delhi wife had written in to say that she had recently given birth to her first baby and that her husband, saying that her vagina was too loose now, had taken to entering her where she was tighter; the letter was to the medical-advice page and the woman had wanted to know if there was any way she could tighten her vagina, or failing that, perhaps some way could be suggested to make what her husband now does to her not hurt as much.

The parents of a seven-year-old Muslim child — who had recently begun to be educated, at home and at the mosque, about various sins and their punishments — had been summoned to the headmistress’s office yesterday and informed that the boy had been telling his white school-mates that they were all going to be skinned alive in Hell for eating pork and that their mummies and daddies would be set on fire and made to drink boiling hot water because they drank alcohol and did not believe in Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him.

Someone has heard someone else say that Chanda was pregnant at the time of her murder and that, like Jugnu’s, the foetus’s hands were lumi nous, that they could be seen glowing through Chanda’s stomach and clothing.

Music and talk from the radio tuned to the Asian station accompanies the two of them as they clear the table after lunch. There’s a phone-in about the problems of life in England:. . Are you tired of being treated like a coolie by the whites? Give us a call. We would also like our younger listenersto contact us. Are you in a rage, one of those unemployed, newly bearded, mosque-going misanthropes they are writing about in the newspapers; the kind of guy who is either still a virgin or married to a non-English-speaking first cousin brought over from a village in Pakistan or Bangladesh, the guy who lives with his parents, hides outside his sister’s school to see if she’s talkingto boys, and thinks she shouldn’t be allowed to go to university. Give us a call on. .

He settles down after lunch to look at a local health authority pamphlet that has to be translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati — he will do the Urdu. Tuberculosis was thought to have been eradicated in the 1960s and all medical research into it was stopped in the West while it continued to rage elsewhere in the world, but now it is resurfacing in the poorer neighbourhoods (those pockets of the Third World within the First) of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, New York and San Francisco. He remembers the mobile radiography units parked outside mills and factories and the Employment Exchange thirty years ago. The rate of infection was above average in the migrant workers because they had poor nutrition and lived in over-crowded lodgings, one inhaling the germs coughed up by the other. Many of them live in similar conditions even today — over half the houses in this neighbourhood were declared unfit for habitation seven years ago — and they must be warned about the dangers of infection. And the regular trips back to the Subcontinent also expose them and their children to a greater risk.

He works for most of the afternoon, and then walks through a lace of insects to open the bookshop soon after three o’clock, under a sky filled with widely separated white clouds shaped like forest animals. On a wall the graffitied initials of the National Front have been modified by Asian youths so that they now read: NFAK RULES — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan being the world-renowned Pakistani singer of Sufi devotional lyrics. Beside the path that will convey him to the lake, a day-flying Cinnabar moth flutters away to safety inside the Oxford ragworts. He cannot see the lake yet but the white-paper scraps of the fluttering gulls hint at where it lies ahead.

The thought of Suraya has been with him constantly during the previous hours. As he walks under the blue-and-white forest of the sky, he realizes that he has been standing on knife-blades of impatience all day, waiting for this hour to arrive, even when he was a thousand leagues under concentration, doing the translation an hour earlier. He has been thinking of her, yes, but there has also been the fear that someone had seen her talking to him and that she is even now — somewhere — being harmed for it. This terror has been hurtling around inside him like a grenade with the pin pulled out. From time to time his breast narrows and his strength diminishes.

He unlocks the shop and goes in. The eyes of the deer on the wallpaper shine like little lamps draped with blue veils. The small creatures sit two by two, surrounded by branches of the flame-of-the-forest, the petals curving like the beaks of parakeets.

As he waits for her to walk out of the deserted spaces of the afternoon, the sun striking the lake’s silver at an angle, a part of him hopes she won’t come. He had drawn pleasure by talking to her, and she too had seemed animated several times, but he is too aware of the dangers. He is reminded of an Urdu saying which advocates caution when in the presence of something beautiful or pleasurable: Don’t forget that serpents haunt sandalwood trees.

From the door of the Safeena, he sees her arriving, and as she reaches Scandal Point and moves towards him he wishes he hadn’t opened the shop this afternoon too: he is relieved to see that she is safe, but he now suspects that someone (a husband or brother or — after an inch-long story in the inner pages of the Urdu newspaper which said that a middle-aged woman was found with her neck broken in a village outside Lahore — a young nephew) has followed her and is hiding nearby to confirm his suspicions about her.

“I went to the door because I heard a strange musical noise,” he explains to her. “I have heard it all day. Either it is a strange bird or a shop around here has recently stocked a new kind of whistle that is proving very popular with children.” She is wearing a fresh set of shalwar-kameez and the same paisley jacket cropped at the waist. He raises his hands to indicate the shelves: “Fiction there. Non-fiction from here to here. Poetry there. And the few books on art there.” And he tells himself to remain silent from now on so she can look around and leave as soon as possible— for her own safety. They say it’s hard to kill a fellow human being. Don’t aim at the victim: aim at something on the victim — the knot of a tie, a flower printed on the dress. Would they aim at one of the paisleys, with its tiny ruby centre, before pulling the trigger, they who had watched her talking to him this morning and have followed her here this afternoon, they who are hiding just outside now?

She picks up the large mustard-yellow Muraqqa-e-Chughtai from the shelf — a volume of the Mughul Urdu poet Ghalib’s verse illustrated with paintings by Abdur Rahman Chughtai — and says quietly, “Oh, you have this.”

“Yes. Originally published in 19. . 28. There is Naqsh-e-Chughtai beside it — same text but different paintings, from 19. . 34.” He remains in his chair, telling himself not to draw close to her: between them lies a fragile bridge of glass. “Can you see it? The dust-jacket is grey and shows a deer sitting beside a small cypress tree growing out of a jewel.” He must try to remain quiet and not point out any more books to her. She moves along the shelves of Urdu and Persian poetry, opening and closing the volumes, and after a while says to him,