Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“Come here.”

Whipped, the driver takes a few steps. “I lose my job. . They make trouble for me. .”

They look at each other, a border lying between them.

“I’ll pay you — here — how much?” He opens his wallet. “Come here, I said.”

The driver returns to his seat without another word, is paid, and the man gets out ostentatiously after saying, “Show us some respect. This is our country, not yours.”

The white passengers continue to look out of the windows. Chanda’s mother’s heart bangs hard and painfully against her chest. Her face and, inside her clothing, her body is burning, her blood flooded with heat.

“I hope the driver won’t take his humiliation out at home later today,” says Chanda’s mother as the bus moves on, “lashing out at his own children, and the wife.” But the bus suddenly halts now on the side of the road and the driver comes out once again into the aisle, avoiding the eyes of the passengers. He opens the door and goes out. One minute, two, three, four and then five pass, the passengers becoming restless, and then a few of them get up to go to the front and notice that the man is sitting by the roadside, on a rock beside a flowering shrub, with his head in his hands. There are several quiet “Excuse me”s to attract his attention but he won’t look up.

No one knows what to do. “Please come in, dear,” a white woman tentatively sticks her head out of the door and says, but he does not respond. She stands with her hand pressed to her mouth, and then Chanda’s parents watch as Shamas comes downstairs with a puzzled look on his face, still holding that bright green feather. He goes out and they watch him talk to the driver and a few minutes later the man comes back in. “There is something you can do about it. Report it to your superiors,” he tells the driver in Punjabi. “Report it and then ask them to begin a record of racial incidents on the buses, racial abuse towards drivers. Come to my office tomorrow. We’ll also take up the matter with them.” The man nods and gets back behind the wheel.

Shamas glances at the other passengers and then he goes back upstairs.

“Do you think he saw us?” Chanda’s mother asks.

“That woman in the paisley jacket was standing in the stairs, waiting for him. But it could be just another anxious passenger. No?”

She assents with a nod, “I suppose.” The bus resumes its journey. Neither says anything during the many minutes it takes for the bus to arrive at the ring road around the town centre, the vehicle’s turnings and movements jolting the passengers lightly like bottles in a crate. The little anglers at the back begin to collect their nets and baskets and harp-stringed rods, and it is suddenly discovered amid much merry howling that the bait tin had been left half open.

It is the pearl hour of late afternoon, mildly radiant, and the bus passes the roads lined with shops on either side. The boys scented with the green-leafed world are walking on their haunches in the aisle, looking for the maggots between the passengers’ shoes, grinning widely as though each holds a slice of melon before his face. Chanda’s mother lifts her feet up with great anxiety, holding them away from the carrion-eating worms, kin to those who have fed on her dead daughter.

“I can’t help wondering if something is going on upstairs,” Chanda’s father points up towards the metal ceiling.

“Don’t,” she shakes her head. “He’s a good man. See how helpful he was to the driver? And I remember how polite he was towards me when I approached him with that harebrained idea that dawn.” She looks at him. “Don’t frown — I give you my word that I won’t approach him again.”

Chanda’s father is frowning, has grown more thoughtful: I thought Chanda and Jugnu had sold their passports to another couple and decided to stay behind in Pakistan. . But why couldn’t it have happened? Why can’t they persuade a couple to go to the police and say they entered Britain on Chanda and Jugnu’s passports? But: he shakes his head — who would agree to do such a thing?

As he sits there the first few details of the subterfuge begin to fall into place: “Oi, Gupta, or whatever it is you call yourself, Abdul-Patel. Mr. Illegal Immigrant — Asylum Seeker! Get back into your seat. .” Illegal immigrants! Couldn’t they get a couple of illegal immigrants and pay them to go to the police with this story?

He turns to his wife: “You just said it was all a stupid idea about a fake Chanda and Jugnu coming to England and all that, but I don’t think it is. Not really.” Uncharacteristically demonstrative, he leans in closer to her. “I have been thinking. Why can’t it have happened? Who’s to say it didn’t?”

“My Allah! Are you saying Jugnu and my Chanda are alive?”

“I don’t know. But why can’t we get a man and a woman to go to the police and say they entered Britain on the passports they had been sold by Chanda and Jugnu in Pakistan? No one at the airports checks to see that the photographs match.”

“That is exactly what I said to Shamas.”

“I think we can do this.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Who will agree to go to the police and say such a thing?”

“The country is full of illegal immigrants. We’ll find a couple and pay them to do it.” He is talking and thinking fast, the adrenaline coursing the veins. “The police would deport the couple, obviously, but I think they will be happy to go back to Pakistan if we pay them. We’ll pretend we have other candidates available for the two vacancies so they won’t ask too high a sum.”

“That still doesn’t explain where Chanda and Jugnu are.”

“But the story proves that they were not killed by anyone in our family. Why should Chanda’s brothers be in jail if she cannot be located? It’s not their fault.”

Chanda’s mother shakes her head. “It won’t work. There are too many inconsistencies.”

“Name one.”

“Allah, you are being serious about this?” she says, aghast.

“Deadly serious.”

“Chanda’s ghost will never forgive us.”

“Let’s take care of the living first.”

“Such heartlessness!” She bursts into tears. “Men! How can you say that about your daughter?”

He doesn’t respond immediately, waits until she’s exhausted her tears, her breathing beginning at last to stretch deeper. “I do have a heart,” he says quietly. “I saw the wounds and the bandages on my son earlier today, and you yourself said we have to do something to ensure their safety, didn’t you? I won’t ask Shamas. So we have to do something ourselves.”

She doesn’t reply immediately, “They are my sons too.” She sighs and then asks, “What if the fake couple agree to go to the police, and do go, but then later decide to tell the police that we had put them up to it? We could all go to jail. Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”

He considers this for a few beats and then shakes his head: “We’ll just deny it. It’s their word against ours.” He thinks about it and adds: “We’ll pay only part of the sum to the couple to begin with. We’ll give the rest only after they have done their work and are about to be deported.”

“Or we could say they’ll get the remainder of the money only in Pakistan — only once they have been sent back there.”

He nods. “That’s even better.”

He has enough money in bundles of banknotes. The boys had been part of a group that had managed to smuggle in heroin from Pakistan some years ago, hidden in fruit and vegetables. No one in the family knew and when they had told him about it he had made them promise never to do it again. The boys’ friends — one of whom owned a curry house — had set up a dummy company, importing seventy-four boxes of guavas and loquats and jamun and shaftalu and mulberries and falsa on one occasion, and forty-six on two others. Heroin with the street value of about £750,000 had been brought into the country but the boys had participated only on the first occasion — their job was to go to a motorway car-park, meet the man who had collected the boxes from the airport, and bring the boxes to Dasht-e-Tanhaii in their own van.