Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“A lot of Persian poems are about flowers and spring.”

“Yes. My younger brother visited Iran some years ago, and he said that the abundantly flowered arrival of spring in that country cannot fail to inspire even a casual observer. I personally think that it would be difficult to find more rapturous descriptions of spring than those in the poetry of Qani.”

“Is that the brother who. . was. . murdered?” She looks down at the floor.

“Yes, and I am sorry once again for revealing that to you so clumsily earlier.”

“Please think nothing of it. May I ask how it happened?”

He doesn’t want to distress her. “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“I understand.” She turns to the shelf and gives herself over to the books.

He looks at the afternoon. “I think I saw the butterfly I have been chasing fly in here,” Jugnu said — once, when both he and the bookshop’s owner were still here. Out of breath, he’d come into the Safeena holding his green long-handled butterfly net like a flag. Shamas had pointed to the Urdu translation of Madame Bovary on the shelf and said: “The only butterflies in here are the ones in there.” Jugnu went out to continue his search, but he returned to the Safeena later and picked up Madame Bovary: “Now. I do remember that there are butterflies in here. Three, I think — the first black, the second yellow and the third white.” And five minutes of turning the pages later he announced: “Yes, they are still here.”

Shamas turns his attention to Suraya again. He feels she may have taken his last comment as a rebuke, but he cannot think of how to make amends: she’s perusing the books, head bowed, her back turned to him determinedly. Shamas shifts his gaze and fixes it on her so that their eyes would have to meet even if she slightly alters the position of her head. He smiles at her when that happens — as though making up with a lover after a fight — and nonchalantly points to her Kashmiri jacket:

“Do you know why paisley is so linked with Kashmir? No? Imagine two lovers quarrelling in that region. Her footsteps formed paisleys when she hurried away from him in distress. He searched for her forlornly in the forest glades where luminous orchids arose from the”—it is too late for him to stop—“spilled semen of mating animals and birds, where the urge for existence forced creepers and vines towards faraway chinks of sunlight, where the branches quivered with living songs and at sunset the sky turned red as though the departing sun had heaped rubies on the day’s shroud. And it was the paisleys imprinted amid the low flowers that eventually led him to her. He was the god Shiva, she the goddess Parvati, and when he found her he commemorated their union by carving the Jehlum river as it flowed — and still flows — through the valley of Kashmir in the shape of a paisley.”

“Thank you,” her eyes dance as she smiles. “That is beautiful.”

And, buoyed by her smile, he indicates the Chughtai books in her hand and says: “Chughtai drew the jacket design for my book of poems, back in the 1950s.”

“You published a book?” She’s electrified and almost gasps. “And Chughtai ?”

“He was a great friend to the Lahore publishing world.” He looks at her. “And as for my book: it was ready for publication but nothing came of it.”

“Why? Do you have the poems in a notebook, perhaps? I’d like to read them.”

“No, there is no copy of the manuscript. My wife had the only copy but that was. . destroyed. And I am not sure whether I remember them accurately myself anymore.” He pictures himself laying out Kaukab’s wedding dress and writing out the verses in a notebook — in a safeena ! — for Suraya to read; but, of course the wedding dress was reduced to ashes all those years ago.

“You must try to remember them,” she says, and adds with a smile: “Some day I’ll come to the Safeena and ask you to recite for me, like Wamaq Saleem. The only difference being that ours would be a private reading, for one.” She approaches him with the two volumes by Chughtai, holding them in the crook of her arm like a college girl. “I’ll take these. I looked for them in Pakistan but the village where I was didn’t have a very well-stocked bookshop, as you can imagine.”

“What were you doing in Pakistan?” Her hair is secured by the length of silk he had retrieved for her yesterday: at lunch the red insides of a Moroccan blood orange — one of those fruits that always produce intensely scented urine — had reminded him of the colour of the scarf.

So he has a wife, she who had the only copy of his book of poems. But he could still marry her because a Muslim man is allowed four wives.

Suraya had wondered, before coming to the Safeena, and has wondered during her visit here too, about how much she should reveal to him. Should she tell him everything about her situation — I am looking for someone to marry temporarily. . But that would frighten him. Should she wait until they are better acquainted — until she has “a better hold on him”? And how will she get him to divorce her eventually? At home she had burst into tears at that. Dear Allah, why can’t I understandthe reasons behind your laws? It’s the man who deserves to be punished if he has uttered the word “divorce” as idle threat, in anger or while intoxicated, and, yes, the punishment for him is that he has to see his wife briefly become another man’s property, being used by him. But why must the divorced wife be punished? Nothing is more abhorrent to a Muslim woman than the thought of being touched by a man other than her husband. She hides her body like a treasure. But if she wants her husband back she has to let another man touch her. This is her punishment: a punishment she deserves, perhaps, because she did not know how to teach her husband to be a good man, how to teach him to control his anger and be a good Muslim, stay away from alcohol?

But Suraya knows she’ll be able to go through with every humiliation and degradation eventually, that she’ll let another man — Shamas, for instance — touch her because she doesn’t want to go through life without her son and husband: she’ll be one person’s friend, another’s confidante, someone else’s mistress — but she is their everything.

“I was married to someone there. I am now divorced,” she hears herself tell Shamas now, in answer to his question. “I have an eight-year-old son who is with his father.” That’s it for now. She feels drained. “I don’t know when or if I’ll go back to Pakistan. As things stand I have no one and no plans.” She pays for the two books but she cannot leave without first arranging their next meeting. She has been thinking quickly for the past few minutes, but nothing has come to her. She tries to find a way to prolong her presence here while thinking.

And, of course, she mustn’t let him think that the next meeting is her idea — it’s possible that he’s the kind of man who likes to be in control (and most men are; women just have to orchestrate the events to let men think they are in charge).

“It’s just occurred to me that the noise you heard earlier could actually be a bird and not a child’s whistle.” And she tells him how a flock of Subcontinental rose-ringed parakeets is causing havoc in the gardens and orchards on the outskirts of Dasht-e-Tanhaii. She saw them herself last week. About thirty in number, they are the descendants of a pair of Indian rose-ringed parakeets that had escaped from their cage some years ago.

“I am very fond of those birds,” he tells her, “but I haven’t seen one for decades now.”

“I wouldn’t mind taking you to where the flock is,” she says (perhaps a little too abruptly?).