Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She pressed it to her breast.

Too often though, she feared to touch it

Lest it disappear.

She dies with her head resting on the crescent shape.

A girl in the audience, moved to tears, is weeping to herself as Nusrat sings in a pain-filled voice. Shamas recognizes her: according to Kaukab, she is married to a first cousin brought over from Pakistan, and their first child was born with one lung smaller than the other, while the second child has no diaphragm in his torso, and, in the sixth month of her third pregnancy, she has recently learnt that the foetus has failed to develop ears; she has to have a scan every day. As she weeps now she is, no doubt, asking the soul of the pious and ancient poet-saint — whose verses are being sung by Nusrat — to tell Allah to lessen her burden. I speak to you, my brother in far generations. . The women hold her, striving to console, their faces on the whole more still and troubled than the men’s.

Shamas can see Chanda’s parents in the group of listeners, near the white globe of a lantern that is being circled by a yellow-bodied Large Emerald moth. He must avoid eye contact with them. The Large Emerald alights and begins to skim scuff flutter along the upper slope of the white sphere, and, coming to the round opening at the top, it drops down into the lantern like someone throwing himself into the mouth of a volcano. Shamas has heard that one of Chanda and Jugnu’s murderers has been attacked in the prison; and for some days now he has been expecting Chanda’s parents to approach him, needing help to have their son moved to another prison. They cannot speak English themselves and are among the many people who require Shamas’s help and advice every day in negotiating a path through their life in England. At his office he and his staff have to explain various procedures to men and women who are unemployable in two languages, loathed in several, who know no English or are too intimidated to walk up to someone white-skinned for help.

But they haven’t approached him yet. Perhaps their daughter-in-law is an English speaker and has taken charge of matters? Nevertheless, he must let it be known, through Kaukab, that Chanda’s family are welcome at the office any time they need assistance. A curl of smoke is issuing from within the lantern where the yellow-bodied moth has obviously been incinerated by the burning bulb. He needs to sit down — the idea that he has to help the two murderers! But he must: he must let Chanda’s parents know that they shouldn’t hesitate before asking for help. Nor is there any need to approach him directly if they don’t want to. He doesn’t own the office, he just works there.

There are flames in his breast. Like a jet of air from a bellows, each breath he takes fans the fire inside him. He needs comfort and looks around. He doesn’t want to have to think about Chanda’s brothers— terror in his heart as he imagines the two lovers’ last moments on earth. Earlier today, at the burial of the girl, he was told by someone that human remains were found outside the church in the town centre by road-digging labourers yesterday. The news was to Shamas’s skull as axe to wood. But he has since learned that it was probably a very old grave. If the bones are less than seventy years old the police are required by law to investigate how the person died.

He stands listening to the music. People are jubilantly throwing double handfuls of banknotes at Nusrat as he sings. A young woman gets up and, dancing there and back, goes to place a rose in Nusrat’s lap; her open movements of pleasure are seen by some as a lack of womanly restraint and they win her disapproving looks from a number of people in the audience, male and female.

Shamas’s gaze — running past three teenaged boys whirling slowly in one corner, their arms entangled in the soft antlers of smoke rising from incense sticks, their mirrored caps glittering in the pale light — finds Suraya in the seated crowd of women. He notices with consternation that a number of other men are looking at her every few moments, taken by her beauty.

Suddenly the amount of light in the place increases, as when lightning flashes during the day: she turns around to meet his eye briefly.

Nusrat’s voice has now become the fabled Heer. Given in marriage to a man she doesn’t love, she is inexplicably feeling drawn to the wandering ash-smeared mendicant who has appeared at the door asking for alms. She doesn’t yet know that it’s her beloved Ranjha, the flute-playing cowherd. Don’t anybody call me Heer, says Nusrat-Heer in a pining tone, call me Ranjha, for I have spoken his name so many times during this separationthat I am become him. . Her brothers — in collusion with the rest of the family, and the corrupt holy man of the mosque — are going to poison her eventually for abandoning her husband for Ranjha. She would condemn them with her last breaths, the poet-saints of Islam expressing their loathing of power and injustice always through female protagonists in their verse romances: Heer didn’t consent to her marriage to the man she didn’t love — refused to say “yes, I do”—but the mullah conducting the ceremony had been bribed by her family and he said that he had seen her give a nod, and that that was sufficient as a sign of her consent. In their turn these verses of the saints — because they advocated a direct communion with Allah, bypassing the mosques — were denounced by the orthodox clerics, so much so that when the poet Bulleh Shah died the clerics refused to give him a burial, leaving the body out in the blazing sun until hundreds of his enraged admirers pushed the holy men aside and buried him themselves. Even today the Sufis are referred to as “the opposition party of Islam.” And always always it was the vulnerability of women that was used by the poet-saints to portray the intolerance and oppression of their times: in their verses the women rebel and try bravely to face all opposition. They — more than the men — attempt to make a new world. And, in every poem and every story, they fail. But by striving they become part of the universal story of human hope — Sassi succumbed to the pitiless desert but died with her face pressed to the last sign of her lover.

Shamas watches as three women in the audience — one of them carrying a half-asleep child holding a doll with a moustache drawn on in biro — get up and leave the gathering: they belong to a sect that forbids this music and devotional singing, but since their disapproving husbands are restaurant waiters and wouldn’t have been home until after two a.m. they had decided to come to see Nusrat; they have obviously lost their nerve and are returning early.

Kaukab had arrived with the three women in their car, and, with a glance and a raised hand towards Shamas, is leaving with them. He catches up to her — out in the narrow street with its cattle-like crowding of parked cars — to say that if she wishes to stay she should, that he will arrange for someone to take her home later, but she says she would prefer to leave with her friends; the strong perfume of the incense has given her a headache.

He needs to be with her, agitated and forlorn after his thoughts of death. As Kaukab stands next to him, her face partly averted, her demeanour guarded, he can tell she doesn’t wish to be polluted by his breath: she tolerates, with melancholy weariness and faintly visible disgust, the glass of whisky he allows himself a few times a month.

He’s alone as Kaukab drives away, alone under the stars that are nuclear explosions billions of miles above him. He watches as a shooting star traverses the night sky, reflected like the sweep of a razor in the paintwork of several metal roofs. According to Islam, when something important— favourable or disastrous — is about to happen in the world, and Allah is arranging the final important details with the angels, Satan moves closer to the sky to eavesdrop: shooting stars are flaming rocks that are thrown at him to drive him away; and they therefore should be read as the imminence of a momentous occasion.