Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

According to the report in The Afternoon the coroner found the arms and legs broken by a cricket bat. The front of the chest had caved in as though she had been jumped on repeatedly.

His beard large enough for peacocks to nest in, the holy man has been arrested and will probably be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, and the mother and father would perhaps receive a decade or so each for being accessory to the killing.

In the neighbourhood there are as many opinions about the death as there are mouths:

Amid the young: “I went to school with her and she was fine with us, her friends. She must’ve acted strangely only at home. And I too wouldn’t be caught dead speaking my parents’ language — even though I can.”

Amid the old: “What kind of mother is she, hmm? What kind? How could she eat herself when the girl was going hungry? He beat her with a bicycle chain.”

Amid those in the middle years: “These holy men are crooks, the kind who are aiding the white people to blacken Islam’s name. I myself was exorcised and it was successful. Look how healthy I am now, while before I used to have terrible stomach pains and used to black out all the time.”

Some of these Shamas heard today at the girl’s house and during the burial, and some were told to him by Kaukab. Shamas has been careful to control his rage and grief when talking to her about the killing because he knows that Islam requires her to believe in djinns, in witchcraft, in spirits. She too has quietly preempted his objections, saying to herself earlier today but within his hearing, “ This holy man was a charlatan or incompetent, and the diagnosis that the poor girl was possessed could have been wrong — but that doesn’t mean there are no djinns. Allah created them out of fire — it’s stated plainly in the Koran.” Almost everyone in the neighbourhood believes in such things. Only today Kaukab said that, while she was at the shop buying hibiscus-flower oil for her hair, a woman had nervously approached her and, having casually opened the conversation by asking her if she knew a way of getting out eye-kohl stain from white linen, had asked whether her husband’s name was Shamas: “The children are going around saying that in the lakeside woods a pair of sad ghosts wanders, luminous, like figures stepped down from a cinema screen, a man and woman, his hands and her stomach glowing more than the rest of their bodies.” Kaukab and Shamas both know about this rumour, but now there is a new detail: “And they call out repeatedly and quietly to someone called Shamas without moving their lips.”

The air is filled with the perfumed longueurs of an Urdu lyric as Suraya arrives at Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s performance. Troubled and tender, Nusrat’s voice is singing its moon song inside the glowing white-canvas enclosure on which the blue foliage moving in the warm breeze has draped its slurred shadow. Faces, alike as coins in their attentiveness, are turned towards him, the arena lit intimately with pale paper lanterns containing electric light-bulbs.

Suraya was getting ready to come here when her husband and son telephoned. While she was speaking to her boy he said, “You are wearing your gold earrings, aren’t you, the ones Father says look good on you? I can hear them jingle.” Yes, she was, and after telling him that he was a clever young man, she had taken them off, feeling she was betraying her husband by ornamenting herself for another man. But after the shocking news her husband gave her a few minutes later, she had decided to put them back on. Her mother-in-law is planning to find another bride for her husband. Suraya had almost screamed out in pain but then the old woman had come on the phone to tell her that a man needs a wife: “How long is he supposed to wait for you?”

The pendant earrings tinkle gently on her ears: she needs them, has adorned herself for Shamas. Apart from the encounter at the dead girl’s house earlier today, the two of them have met several times since going out to see the flock of rose-ringed parakeets, and she has even persuaded him to recite fragments of his poetry, has brought her mother’s old car back into use to be able to get to him more conveniently, and they have even had a small argument (about his irreverence towards Islam: “Whenever I said something that my mother perceived as contrary to Islam,” she had told him, deeply shocked by his words, “she would respond: ‘Speak softly! My Allah lives in my heart and He will hear you.’ ” And when he persisted with his reasonings she had snapped at him, deeply offended, telling him that the limited proofs and illusory understanding of this world couldn’t cast a veil upon Allah: “The water’s surface does not stop a plunge.”) But she has been unable to decide what her next step should be.

Nusrat and his party of eight musicians are on a slightly raised dais at the front, the bright Persian carpet under them as intricately patterned as the foil around Easter eggs, the wool flashing its sapphire and lapis lazuli. The complexity of this music requires years of dedicated training and absolute coordination within the party as a whole, but the resulting melodies and rhythms are so immediately appealing that they are loved and memorized even by children — like Suraya’s own son; and since children are always included in family outings and occasions in the Subcontinent — the concept of babysitters being alien — there are several of Nusrat’s younger admirers here tonight, a four-year-old recognizing him upon entering the marquee and shouting to his mother, “Mummy: Nusrat! Look, there!”

Suraya’s mother-in-law said: “He’ll marry another woman now and when you are finally through your own difficulties he can marry you too. Islam allows him four wives.”

“I won’t tolerate another woman as a rival wife,” Suraya had roared down the telephone. “As Allah is my witness, I’ll kill her.”

But isn’t that what she will be asking Shamas’s wife to do — share him with her, even if briefly?

Her hands shaking, she steels herself as she listens to Nusrat who is singing a love lyric, and when he comes to the word “you”—denoting the earthly beloved — he points to the sky with his index finger to indicate and include Allah in the love being felt and celebrated — a lover looking for the beloved represents the human soul looking for salvation.

Time is running out for her. She turns and searches for Shamas in the crowd: something (what?) must happen soon. Tonight.

What have you written under my name in the Book of Fates, my Allah?

Shamas locates Kaukab from where he stands at the back — she has made her own way here with a group of neighbourhood women — and then, with the same glance, he spots Suraya, shadowy in olive-green silk, poised as a cypress, the moonlight smiling in her glass bangles.

Nusrat is in the Thal desert of Southern Pakistan, a sandstorm raging about him, many centuries ago: he is the beautiful Sassi, the young woman who was born to a Brahmin priest but had been placed in a sandalwood box and floated down the Indus because the horoscope predicted she would bring disgrace to the family by marrying a Muslim; she was found by a Muslim washerwoman and raised as her daughter. Now, grown up, and become lost in the burning dimensionless Thal, she cries out to her beloved Punnu, looking for any sign of him as the howling gusts tear at her clothes. Punnu had mysteriously disappeared from her side during the night and she had set out to look for him. .

The tips of the tabla-player’s fingers are moving on the skin of his drum very fast like a skilled typist’s on a keyboard.

The birth horoscope of Sassi had also said that her story would be told for many centuries to come.

She will die in the desert, but not before a single footprint left by Punnu’s camel has provided some hope, the last sign of her beloved: