Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“Your English is better than mine,” he says.

She waves a hand dismissively. Dressed in blue, she stands under the cherry tree with him beside her: the immortal rocks and boulders watch them from across the road.

She smiles. “Yes, in a month, when the mangoes begin arriving, we’ll see if we are allowed to take some to them. Brazilian mangoes are available now but I don’t get any music out of them.” Plum-stone, peach-stone, apricot-, mango-, cherry-: when the children were younger, each year at the beginning of autumn when she cut back the rosebush that grew in the corner under that window she found a heap of soft-fruit stones they had dropped there from above during the summer, the earth directly below the two boys’ bedroom.

Seeing that he hasn’t said anything in response, she places her hand on his shoulder. “You mustn’t let your heart ache too much. Let’s trust Him to help us out of this predicament.”

Where are you? You don’t even have the safety of a grave, lying somewhere exposed to the wind and the rain and the sun and snow.

The sons say they didn’t do it but they are certainly said to have boasted of it. One said, “I’ll admit to anyone that I did it while wearing a T-shirt saying I did it with a picture showing me doing it.” And the other that, “They were sinners and Allah used me as a sword against them.” Chanda’s mother wants to go into their souls with a lighted lamp to look for the truth. People say they admitted to having done it, but people also say a lot of other things.

“The bus is here.”

Though the sky here is a taut blue now, it must be raining somewhere in that direction because the vehicle is wet. Climbing aboard, they exchange greetings with the Pakistani driver, pay, and take their seats. The group of boys that had been fishing on the riverbank up the road are occupying the back seats, giggling and talking noisily in a huddle, smelling of grass and mud and moss, rods and hoop-nets leaning at various angles between them. Chanda’s father knows the reason for their noise and the laughter they are trying to suppress but failing to, the shoulders shuddering like someone operating a road drill: they are looking at the torn pages of a pornographic magazine they had found scattered on the bank, assembling or rotating the pages, tilting their heads. They were looking at them earlier when he had walked up to them, and what he had mistaken for a butterfly was not a paper aeroplane — as he had claimed to his wife on returning to her, having backed away from the boys in shock and embarrassment — but a coloured scrap from a page that the wind had snatched from a hand.

The bus driver lives not far from the shop; his wife had told Chanda’s mother that Chanda’s father had said to him his daughter had died for him the day she moved in with Jugnu, that he would allow no sinner near him were she hundred-fold his daughter, that she — shameless baggage— may have gone missing but she was not missing from his home, and that he was proud of his boys for what they had done. She has not confronted him with this. The neighbourhood is a place of Byzantine intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds. And so it is possible that the bus driver had lied, that his wife had, and also that Chanda’s father had actually said those words or something similar, helplessly, to save face in judgemental or belligerent company, implied these words with expressions or uttered them explicitly with the tongue, feeling himself encircled; “Yes, yes, what had to be done was done. Now leave me in peace.”

There are times in this life when a person must do or say things he doesn’t want to. Human beings and chains, it is the oldest acquaintanceship in the world.

She rubs the glass of the window, and it seems to him that she is trying to erase the outside world. He begins to read the Urdu newspaper, and therefore they are both occupied when the bus stops and two new passengers come on board and begin to make their way to the upper deck.

“That was Shamas!” Chanda’s mother whispers, tugging at her husband’s sleeve. “And there was a woman with him!”

He lowers the paper. “Where? Do you think it could be one of his secretaries. A white woman?”

“No: one of ours. The very one you must’ve seen. What would he be doing out here with his secretary? They’ve gone upstairs. She was wearing a Kashmiri jacket, and he was holding a green feather. Looked like a parakeet’s.”

“Are all the sons of that family like that — defying conventions, doing what they please?” Chanda’s father says with quiet indignation. “They can do what they like with white women — we all know the morals they have— but at least leave our own women alone. You would think it was their mission to corrupt every Pakistani woman they come across.” And he adds decisively, “In my opinion they are still infected with their father’s Hinduism. Lord Krishna and his thousand girlfriends, indeed! And they jeer at our Prophet, peace be upon him, for having just nine wives!”

She sighs: “Maybe we are both mistaken. May Allah forgive me for thinking badly of others. Perhaps they were not together. I didn’t see any contact between them; did you, earlier?”

He shakes his head in a quick no, because he is still angry: “I am not sure I would accept his help even if he offered it. His brother corrupted my daughter! All this mess — it’s their fault.”

The bus stops after twenty minutes and the driver, leaning out of his seat, asks the young anglers at the back to disembark. The amount they paid on boarding doesn’t buy them the distance beyond this stop.

Every other passenger looks back briefly, including the man who had got up to leave at this stop.

With their riverbank-odour of moss, soil, young leaves, and the smell of the river water in which two of them had been swimming earlier, all five of the children have fallen silent and are frozen in the attitudes in which they had been caught by the driver’s demand.

The driver unbolts the little metal door next to his seat and comes out into the aisle that is littered with used tickets bearing marks of footprints, like cancelled stamps on a letter. “Get out, please, or give more money if you want to go more. I remember how much you paid.”

The boys, their clothes a fruit-bowl of colours, protest ecstatically and state their destination. They are testing life to see what they can get away with, and how.

“Show tickets, please.” He walks past the man standing before the open door and goes down the aisle towards them, their voices becoming louder. The stationary vehicle is slashed by the sun’s rays and it is like being inside a diamond.

The tickets are produced and he is right: “Please give 25p more, each. Haram-khor! No, no, then out please! You make trouble for me. Or 25p more, each. I ask nicely. Behen chod. ” All six are speaking at once and it is an equally matched quarrel: each side finding a fitting arrow to return to the other’s accusation.

“Oi!” The man standing at the front of the bus shouts, startling everyone. “Oi, Gupta, or whatever it is you call yourself, Abdul-Patel. Mr. Illegal Immigrant — Asylum Seeker! Get back into your seat.”

The driver looks back, stunned. The boys’ protests fall to a murmur, their exuberance sinking like suds.

“Get back now. Come on, quickly,” he points to the driver’s seat and jerks his finger as when an adult orders a child. “Stop wasting everyone’s time.”

“But, please, I lose my job if inspector comes suddenly now. .,” he wheedles. “Each need to pay 25p more after this stop. . please. .”