Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

He says, “Just the other day a young man came to the mosque, saying he was an illegal immigrant from Pakistan and that he was looking for his brother who had come to England some years ago and hasn’t been heard from since.”

“Did he leave an address where he could be contacted?”

“No. He said the missing brother has a single hair of real gold amid the normal black ones on his head. But, no, he didn’t leave an address. In any case, there are many others like him. We’ll have to keep our eyes and ears open for similar people.”

The vanilla-yellow and apple-green bus lurches and winds its way through the town centre towards its destination, stopping every now and again at the piano keys of a zebra crossing, its reflection passing across the glass of shop windows the size of cinema screens, and they sit wordlessly side by side, their faint reflections out there making them feel they lack the quality of presence.

She places her sun-sheathed hand on top of his, very tenderly, and rests it there for a while. Whatever has happened to her has happened to him too.

When the passengers begin to disembark at the station, they both remain seated as though dazed. “Her soul will never forgive us,” she says quietly. And then they watch as Shamas comes down, on his own, followed by three other passengers. “We were obviously mistaken,” Chanda’s mother says. “He and the woman were not together.” The woman is the last passenger to come down from the upper deck.

“Did you see how beautiful she was,” Chanda’s mother whispers as she gets up to leave. “Allah, she was like a houri.”

Lost in their own thoughts, neither of them had noticed that at the end of the journey it was Suraya who was holding the bright-green parakeet feather.

It’s the task of insects to pollinate flowers. But Shamas remembers being told about a rare plant that is found only on a remote hilly island, and how soft paintbrushes are employed to collect and transfer its pollen from flower to flower: the insect that had performed that function until quite recently has become extinct — an insect unknown to man. It is agreed that the plant couldn’t have survived through the ages without the now-missing insect. No one knows what it was. The flowers are the only indicator that it must have existed until quite recently.

They are like flowers placed on a grave, mourning an absence.

As the late-May evening darkens towards night, he, walking towards the lake, takes in the rich fragrance hanging about the roaming inflorescences of a buddleia, the whir of a moth reaching him from somewhere inside the grey-green foliage like a burst from a sewing machine.

The hazy perfume decides to accompany him for a few steps while, above, the moon drifts companionless. Since meeting her at the Safeena that afternoon in early May he has seen and talked to Suraya a further five times, never arranging the next occasion too definitely or firmly, and never knowing if she would come but always expecting that she would.

They have remained formal, almost shy, and there hasn’t been even an instant’s physical contact, because between them lies a glass bridge. So far there have been no consequences and therefore, at times, he finds it difficult to believe in the reality of the entire matter. He has read somewhere that, although the constant stimuli of daytime experience keep us from noticing it, we are dreaming at low levels all the time.

Each time he has met Suraya his sense of betrayal towards Kaukab has been stronger than before. It is not as though I am leaving her: he had tried to reason with himself early on; but he is too old to be deceived by an argument as feeble as that: he is leaving her — he’s just not moving out of the house. Each journey towards Suraya has required a lion’s heart, and he has tried not to think about Kaukab’s reaction if she ever finds out.

The moon is still quite low and the junk shop is stuffed to capacity with its dusty reflections, one hanging in each peeling mildewed mirror. Stars and a number of constellations are visible in the darker parts of the sky, and looking up he remembers that the powdery galaxies are supposed to be the dust raised by Muhammad’s winged mount as it carried him to the heavens for an audience with Allah on his Night Journey. He steps over the crooked transparent vein of a small stream. He is walking towards the cluster of large and costly lakeside houses where flowers bloom by the hundred and the unopened frond tips of the giant ferns look like fists of red-haired gorillas.

The family in one of the houses is descended from a holy man in the Faisalabad region of Pakistan. Among the followers of the revered ancestor of the lakeside family had been the forefathers of the devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — the man referred to by one London critic as the best and most-powerful singer in the world today, and by another as one of the three or four truly sublime voices of the twentieth century — up there with Maria Callas and Umm-e Kulsum.

Whenever he can, Nusrat attends the annual urs celebrations at the shrine near Faisalabad to humble himself before the ancient saint. The saint must have shown some kindness towards his ancestor, all those centuries ago, but no one can tell exactly what it was; nor is this specific detail relevant to Nusrat — you don’t recall the taste of your mother’s milk but that doesn’t mean you didn’t need or drink it at one time. It is also his way of honouring his own ancestors: if they thought the saint was worth venerating then their descendent is willing to trust them.

Nusrat’s growing fame in the world has meant that he is in England this month, performing a number of concerts before flying to Los Angeles to record the soundtrack of a Hollywood movie. Immediately before that he was in Japan, filming a television special; this had coincided with the annual Faisalabad urs and, regretting that he could not attend the shrine this year, he has instead decided to visit the descendants of the saint during his stay in England.

Tonight — while the aspidistras in the dark gardens open their flowers so that they can be pollinated by snails and slugs — the awe-inspiring voice will perform its ecstatic songs in a white moonlit marquee behind the lakeside house, to an audience of all-comers. Suraya will be attending. And Kaukab.

He told Suraya about the concert during a brief encounter earlier today: the girl whom Shamas saw on the riverbank with her secret Hindu lover a few weeks ago — the young couple looking for the place where the disembodied human heart was found — has been beaten to death by the holy man brought in to rid her of djinns. While Shamas was at the house of the dead girl’s parents earlier today, a house filled with mourners and people come to pay condolences, he had found himself alone in a room with Suraya for a few moments. Like everyone else she was dressed in the palest possible colours so as not to offend the dead and the bereaved with reminders of the joys of life, the joys the dead girl and those whom she has left behind will never now experience themselves. Suraya was looking for the roses and the jasmine blossoms. “They are to be added to the water to wash the body,” she explained, and he had handed her the canvas bag full of crimson and white blossoms lying in a corner of the room, blossoms as bright as bee-eating birds. Here and there a small frail-winged insect clung to a petal with its gold-coloured legs. “I saw children picking them earlier from our front garden, blowing away the aphids, carefully picking up any petal or blossom they dropped on the ground,” he said to her, “and I couldn’t understand at first who had sent them or why.” And then he had found himself telling her about Nusrat’s recital tonight — his way of asking her whether she would come. She hurried out of the room, leaving him wondering whether the subject of songs and singing wasn’t deemed inappropriate by her in the house where a funeral was being arranged. But he was anxious to see her again and hadn’t meant any disrespect to the helpless girl who had died so brutally. She was killed during the exorcism arranged by the parents with her husband’s approval. The holy man reassured the family that if reasonable force was used the girl would not be affected, only the djinn, and that there was no other way to drive out the malevolent spirit than by beating the body it had entered. The girl was taken into the cellar and the beatings lasted several days with the mother and father in the room directly above reading the Koran out loud. She was not fed or given water for the duration and wasn’t allowed to fall asleep even for five minutes, and when she soiled herself she was taken upstairs to the bathroom by her mother to be cleaned and brought back down for the beating to continue. The holy man heated a metal tray until it was red hot and forced her to stand on it. It was obvious that she was possessed because she began to speak in Punjabi, her mother-tongue, which she had never spoken with her parents, the cunning djinn inside her realizing that the holy man could not speak English and could only be reasoned with in Punjabi, pleading for mercy.