Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Inside, in the enclosure lit with parchment moons, Shamas positions himself for the first time tonight to bring Suraya into clear view, but— after their eyes have met and he has felt himself turning red as though fanned into flame by her presence, a smile beginning on his lips — he moves farther away: this is too exposed and public a place for them to get together. He imagines what any scandal would do to Kaukab. What the ideas of honour and shame and good reputation mean to the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh can be summed up by a Pakistani saying: He whom a taunt or jeer doesn’t kill is probably immune to even swords.

Shamas feels a crushing loneliness — he feels old. Sixty-five this year, the grey hair on his head has outnumbered the black for nearly two decades now. And lately whenever he has awakened in the middle of the night and has lain there, awake and alone (Kaukab has slept in a separate bed for some years now), his whole being has filled up with a clean and intense pain: wrapped in private terror, he feels afraid at what’s to come— the inevitable black abyss. Five years? Ten? His heart fragments at the thought. The headboard of the bed feels like a headstone at that hour and he doesn’t know where he is except that he stands far from any friend. His eyes travail until his sight is sore and strained: his vision fails and he sees no new world in the vasts of the darkness. He knows humans are mere shadows across the face of time, stuff to fill graves. He feels he’s walking along life’s road with a thumb extended to hitch a ride on a hearse. And no one has ever reported looking into a grave and seeing a door to another world in one of its sides; in any case, if it exists nobody living may be said to have the key to it.

While the girl was being buried today, someone’s raised voice had brought to a halt the shovelfuls of earth that were being thrown on top of the white-shrouded form lying in the pit: the news had been brought that the dead girl’s fourteen-year-old sister had placed a letter within the folds of the shroud, a message of love for her departed elder sister to take into the next world. Since Islam forbade such a practice — nothing may be buried with the body — Shamas had watched with terror as the men climbed down into the grave and pushed aside the earth to uncover the body. They exposed the soiled shroud to the haze of the afternoon, while the air flowed a sad amber and the bees hovered noisily around the bouquets and wreaths of flowers that were lying around waiting to be placed on the filled grave. The funeral resumed only when the letter had been discovered. “Minions of Satan!” said some of the men through clenched teeth when everyone was walking away from the grave later: the letter wasn’t from the dead girl’s sister — it was from her secret infidel Hindu lover, who had persuaded one of the women who had bathed and prepared the corpse to secrete it into the shroud. “Women and infidels: minions of Satan both!” The letter was passed around, a whole page filled with neat handwriting: “Such filth — what would the angels have thought had they found this upon her person in the grave?”

You, who have gone gathering the flowers of death,

My heart’s not I, I cannot teach my heart:

It cries when I forget.

Shamas caught sight of these words before one of the grave robbers tore up the letter into several pieces and threw it into the lake like a handful of white blossoms — a garland stolen from the dead.

He must stop thinking about death. He needs to touch Suraya, her youth, the life in her, feel her living breath on his face. His eyes search for her now among the members of the audience, but he cannot locate her. Oh, cut off the beak of this bird that says. . beloved. . beloved. . She is a believer and must feel that it’s wrong for her to meet him: occasionally during their meetings he has seen a war raging in her expression, a wild internal disorder, the dinful strife of faith and disbelief.

He changes his position several times within the enclosure but has definitely lost her.

Outside, as he walks out of the marquee, past the roses’ stare, the dark-blue night air is stroking the lake’s surface, the ripples washed with moon’s pale silver light. At dawn the reflections of the sunlit ripples would be projected on to the bellies of the birds that would fly above the lake. Where is she? He is walking away, along the moonlight and glinting water of the shore, Nusrat’s voice becoming dimmer with each step, singing of wounded lovers, dancing proudly in the face of death and ruin. No clear path is available to him in the darkness and the trees creak like ships’ masts around him. His knees touch past tall wild flowers and grasses as he walks on. Where did she go? Only occasionally does he find a curved path that lies like a dismembered limb almost concealed by the tender cirri and tendrils of growth. Like hurrying skateboarders all around him, gusts of wind arrive occasionally, swerving, landing, gambolling and taking off here and there, all weave and waver. He has arrived at the edge of the cemetery, the graves outlined by foot-high fences, scrolling delicately like musical stands. Isn’t it in one of these dreaming clusters of trees that the two ghosts roam, calling out to him without opening their mouths?

He stops because there is movement nearby, and he hears his name being spoken.

“Shamas-uncle-ji.”

The dead girl’s lover steps out of the shadows ahead of him. “Uncle-ji, I am lost. Could you please guide me to her. . to her. . grave. . her resting place.” He’s holding a bunch of orchids in his hands. “I’d like to give her these.” He speaks softly in a voice that is wearing mourning clothes.

“I think I remember where it. . she. . is,” Shamas says, having recovered. “Come this way.”

“I watched the funeral from the trees so I thought I’d remember the location,” the boy says, looking down at the flowers as he walks. “There are almost a thousand graves here but I knew how to find her when I came in the evening, thinking the funeral was over and there would be no one here, but a lot of women were visiting her at that time. I went away and now I am lost in the darkness.”

Shamas nods. Women aren’t allowed to be present at the burial, and must come to the cemetery later. The dead girl’s sister had wanted to watch her being buried but she had been told that it was an impossibility. In her grief she would have rebelled — it was her first direct experience of death so she wasn’t familiar with the rules that must be observed, and she would have thought that her great loss entitled her to break Allah’s law— but it turned out that she was having her period: so they informed her that she couldn’t go anyway because of that reason, because she was in an unclean state. Forbidden to touch the Koran, enter a mosque, pray, even prepare food according to certain sects — that she was impure and polluted during menstruation was something she had known for some time, something she had come to accept by now, her arguments against it fully exhausted. And so she had acquiesced, agreeing to visit the grave later.

“It’s there,” Shamas points to the mound where the wreaths and garlands are dying, furred with shadows. The boy takes a step towards it but stops. In the moonlit darkness his skin looks blue as Shamas’s own must appear to him: the colour of Krishna, the god who multiplied himself a thousand times so he could be with the thousand maidens simultaneously in the night forest — and so all lovers are one. The boy shakes his head: “I don’t really know which rules to observe at a Muslim grave-site. Earlier I thought Muslims burned candles on their graves because I saw a light flickering on her resting place but then it disappeared — it must be one of those fireflies that have been discovered hereabouts.”