Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“I would like that, yes. We’ll look for the birds the way my brother used to look for butterflies. His name was Jugnu by the way—”

“Please don’t feel you have to tell me things you’d rather not.”

“No, I want to. I’d like to.” He looks straight into her eyes and says: “So how shall we arrange to meet again?”

As he watches her leave along the path lined with tall grasses, he wants to run after her and tell her why he is fond of parakeets. But he stops himself, deciding he’ll tell her the next time they meet. “Do you know the story of Hiraman the rose-ringed parakeet and princess Padmavati?” Hiraman, the talking rose-ringed parakeet, found fault with every beautiful maiden that Rajah Ratan Sen thought about marrying. He said to Rajah Ratan Sen, “One mustn’t settle for the ordinary. Across a distance of seven seas from your majesty’s palace, there is a land called Serendip, ruled by Rajah Gandhrap Sen. And the name of the Rajah’s daughter is Padmavati. Delicate as a lotus. Radiant as the morning star. Her scented locks a monsoon cloud and the parting in them, leading to her brow, is the path to heaven itself. That brow: as spotless as the moon on the second night of a month, shining through nine regions and three worlds. Eyes like two fish playing face to face. Her glances: like two wagtails fighting on the wing. Her hips wide as an elephant’s brow. All forms of beauty are determined to cling to her the way a green pigeon grasps a twig as it leans down to drink water from a stream, for it thinks everything on earth unworthy of contact, continuing to hang upside down from branches even when killed.” Padmavati’s attributes and virtues so captured Rajah Ratan Sen’s imagination that he eventually lost his entire being to her description and set out to look for her. .

Shamas walks around the Safeena, thinking of their next meeting, how he would tell her that — to his mind — Hiraman the parakeet represents an artist, they who tell us what we should aim for, they who reveal the ideal to us, telling us what’s truly worth living for, and dying for, in life.

Now and then he opens a book he had seen her look into earlier.

Having got off the bus, Chanda’s mother stands under the cherry tree by the side of the road, on the outskirts of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, surrounded by the green slopes of the hills, while a flock of rose-ringed parakeets knives by overhead. Her husband — who had alighted with her — has gone somewhere beyond the curve of the deserted road through the hills. The grass at her feet is clogged with the faded drifts of pale-pink cherry petals. She looks at her shoes: they bought these shoes together, mother and daughter, two years ago.

She can see her husband coming along the bend in the road, muttering to himself, shaking his head, looking pallid in the lavender shadow of the hill’s green shoulder. The couple have just been to visit their sons who are being held at a prison an hour’s bus ride away. They had got off the bus at this remote location because Chanda’s father thought he saw someone disappear around a tree — giving chase to a butterfly. Jugnu? They had broken their journey home and hurriedly disembarked at the next stop. She had remained under the cherry tree and he had rushed back up the road, towards where he had caught the fleeting glimpse of the butterfly hunter. In his long absence she has let herself cry out loudly into the air, letting out the sorrow she had felt during the visit they have just paid to the prison: one of their sons was beaten up yesterday by white inmates— his left arm and jawbone are broken, and his face is bruised beyond recognition. He can’t tell on the people who did that to him and has told the prison authorities he had a fall.

She smiles to hide the traces of her grief from her husband, so as not to upset him.

“It was just a boy,” he says, drawing up to her, “with a paper aeroplane.” He looks around as though he has found himself in the middle of an ocean, searching for the shore. “But I did see someone else. Shamas, standing beside a stream. And I think there was a woman with him. Or at least I think they were together. She was standing a little distance away.”

“Allah! Are you sure?”

“I don’t know. No, I am not sure. Has another bus passed since?”

“Yes, but it was one of those that turn into Annemarie Schimmel Road, going towards Muridke, instead of carrying on towards the Saddam Hussein bus station.” She takes out a handkerchief from her handbag red as a lobster shell and passes it to him — the exertion has brought out a bath of sweat. “Was the woman with Shamas white?”

He shakes his head. “It’s probably nothing. Isn’t it from Muridke that a holy man has been summoned by that family on Faiz Street, to come and exorcise their daughter of the djinns?”

“Yes. He’ll come soon,” she replies. “She’s not behaving appropriately towards her family and husband. Last night I found myself wondering whether that was what was wrong with our own daughter — the djinns possessed her and caused her to rebel.”

He wipes his face with the handkerchief, his breath steadying slowly. He seems to have found his bearing now that he is close to her: her side always welcomes him back from being just one of the many to being the lead in the play of their life, even though certain areas of her mind are not the right shape to accommodate him. When he is not with her he is alone even if surrounded by people. Whilst sticking price-labels onto the packets of spices he would shout from behind a row of shelves,

“Chanda’s mother, how much for the packets of fennel?”

“Twenty-nine p for the small ones, 51p for the larger,” she would answer from the counter, “and must you ask me every time?”

“It’s just an excuse to hear your voice, my beloved.” He would stand up and wink at her from across the tops of the shelves, or from around the white-and-blue pyramid of sugar bags. She would quickly conceal her pleasure behind her veil; oh, what was she to do with this husband of hers! She would reprimand: they were adults, parents of three children, but he persisted in acting like a teenager at his age and insisted she behave as though the world was her bridal chamber and every day her wedding night. Many summers ago, after she had got carried away with the nail-clipper the day before (as everyone does from time to time), she had asked him to peel an orange for her, her own fingertips slightly raw, and he had taken that to be a cue for the establishing a ritual: from then on, the moment new oranges arrived in summer, he peeled one of them and left the fleshy star in a plate with a pinch of salt on the cash till beside her, the segments arranged and the plate chosen with care because the first bite is always with the eye. The customers would elbow each other, smiling, as he selected the heaviest and darkest fruit from the boxes, but it was as though she was the only one who noticed their mirth.

But there is scarcely any laughter in their life anymore.

Now he says, “I was so sure it was a butterfly collector: it looked just like a butterfly from the bus, and the boy was tall enough to be mistaken for a grown man.” He indicates the direction he has come from: “There is a group of them — young boys. Some are fishing, using rods and reels. Some swimming.”

Standing under the cherry tree, she wonders whether she should broach the subject of the two boys, and then says, “I couldn’t bear to see him all stitched up — those black knots were like spiders poking out of his face. All those bandages and that arm in the sling.”

“Even the other one looked thinner.” He nods after a while.

“He said, ‘The year is getting hotter and I can smell the mangoes ripening over there in Pakistan — even from behind all these doors, each with a padlock on it weighing a kilogram.’ ”