Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Muslims do burn lamps on graves and the moths they attract are said by some to be angels, the spirits of the departed by others, or lovers in disguise come to say prayers for their beloveds’ souls. “Fireflies, here in England?”

The boy takes another tentative few steps, fearful of protocol. “Yes, there have always been rumours of their sighting in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, but last week they were confirmed.”

Shamas waits until the boy has reached her and kneeled down, and then he withdraws. In Shamas’s thoughts, the girl — during her last few days on earth — appears as the moon threatened by the dragons of the eclipse — surrounded by her criminally stupid parents and that monstrous holy man. He goes back the way he had come, and when he arrives back at where he’d met the boy he sees that there is a heart lying in his path, there, in a patch of moonlight falling from the foliage above, a heart sliced neatly into two halves: the two pieces are lying next to each other— the inner chambers are exposed in cross-section, curved and muscular. Shamas backs away when the two halves are suddenly and weakly illuminated as though from within. The red light colours the ground and only then does he see that they are two orchids fallen from the cluster the boy had been carrying. The firefly that had alighted on them has just given a pulse of light — it arcs into the air and vanishes, leaving behind a blinding smear on Shamas’s retina, a long trail slow to fade. He picks up the two blossoms, looking around for other fireflies, remembering how he captured those luminous insects in his childhood and kept them in glass bottles topped with perforated caps to make lanterns that quivered like liquid. A mass of them moving in the distance after a monsoon shower: the points of light opened and slowly closed like mouths of fishes. The air would be alive with responsiveness, and he could see them even with his eyes closed: in the darkness they conferred a facial vision that the blind are said to possess — a trembling warm sense of something there, nearby.

Could the presence of fireflies be the origin of the stories about the two ghosts wandering in the lakeside woods? He sets out again carrying the blood-coloured orchids. And now he remembers how a few days after his father’s death, all those years ago, he had one night found himself walking towards the Hindu temple where his father had set himself on fire. He remembers seeing a cluster of fireflies in the distance, there near the temple: the edges of leaves, or various sections of the insects’ own wing beats, could be seen by the light, faintly. But then something made him frown— the creatures were standing still, unmoving, as though a spell had been cast over them. When he drew close and saw the cause of that stillness, the fright had sent him — a grown man — running through the darkness. He remembers the sight to this day: each of the hundred or so insects had been pierced onto the thorns of the tree that was home to the birds known as the “butcher birds” because they impaled their victims on to spikes to kill them or to eat later. The speared fireflies had been alive, in the process of dying.

No, no, he must resist these thoughts of death! He speeds up madly to make a way out of the cemetery, going along the paved paths between the graves, getting lost, needing a map of this labyrinth, a flaw in the net to burst through, this net made up of almost a thousand knots. He needs Suraya. His teeth are bared and ache with dryness as does his epiglottis. The faster he runs the louder the noise inside his chest as though being produced by a dynamo attached to his legs. The tips of thorns of various bushes break and become lodged in the weave of his clothing as he thrashes his way forward. Where has Suraya gone? He’s back on the lake’s edge where the sand-grains glitter because all impurities have been washed out of them by the waves’ motion. The beautiful radiant-skinned girl is no more and the boy was wearing black clothes, black as the wisp of smoke that remains when a flame is snuffed out. And now suddenly he knows where Suraya is: his search has stopped being a search and become a journey. Taking the moon with him like a balloon on a string he is walking towards the Safeena, towards Scandal Point, a mile and a half away. He feels he’s moving further and further away from death with each step he takes towards her, holding a broken heart in his hands, pushing aside the blue brocade-and-velvet of the foliage as he shortcuts through the trees and grasses, the wetness on his fingers and palms making him think that a bunch of overripe cherries must have burst in his hand when he gripped a low branch for balance in the darkness, but then he remembers that it’s only May and that the fruit won’t appear till August, and he realizes that the wetness on his palms and fingers must be the sap that the two flowers are releasing, and he continues, the passage through the vegetation now narrowing like the neck of a bottle, now widening to bring him at last to the stir-less vicinity of the Safeena. He can see no one.

The night awakens at the sound of her earrings.

She is here as he somehow knew she would be, waiting for him. Going past the reeds’ thicket of knives, he walks into the black lozenge-shaped moon-shadow thrown by the Safeena and lets it close over him like water. In the darkness he gently wraps his left arm around her neck and lowers his mouth onto hers, his other hand letting go of the orchids so that they fall at her feet, and then this free hand sinks up to the wrist in the curls of her head, her skin giving off the scent of birch bark and almonds. Bright gnats of static electricity dance in her hair and he tries to prevent the pulsing world of fireflies from invading his mind. She struggles at first but then kisses him back and he leads her to the Safeena. She’s life. The angel of mercy. A clock-tower strikes one somewhere far away and the fragrance she’s wearing is an olfactory smear in the hot dry air. He is aware of the noisiness from her lungs and of the difficulty she is having breathing in an orderly manner. When Zeus came to lie with Alcmena he stretched the night to three times its length; and so he too now wishes for dawn not to arrive at the appointed time.

Up to her waist in the water, swaying with the coming and going of the buried giant’s heartbeat, Suraya washes herself in the darkness. The reeds lick her skin as she weeps quietly, desperately cleaning herself between the legs, on her breasts. “My Allah, please forgive me for what I have done. O Compassionate and Merciful One, forgive my sins.” She scoops up water and rubs her body hard and fast, recalling the details of her debauchery. From outside the Safeena had come the buzz of a night-flying bee while he touched her everywhere, sowing little fires on her skin, small detonations, and from the wallpaper the pairs of deer in their red flame-of-the-forest bowers turned their necks to look at them, their noses depicted by black heart shapes. On the snakes-and-ladders squares of a Sindhi rug, he kissed off the pale red orchid-sap that his hands had smeared on various places of her body when he helped her undress — the saliva a magical liquid erasing bruises from her body. He whispered, saying he was surprised that he was already familiar with her breathing when he placed his face against her body. “This small shadow that your earlobe casts on the side of your neck is also known to me.” They lay side by side, adrift in a boat, borne along by their story. “I should open the window a little so that the three butterflies of Madame Bovary can fly out at dawn to feed on the nectar outside.” “What?”

She weeps among the reeds, scrubbing herself, while he is asleep indoors. She told her husband over the telephone that she has a most-suitable candidate and that he and his mother should give her a few more weeks before deciding on a new marriage for him.