Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She has the urge to lie down in the black water and stop breathing but the prospect of her son — soon to be on the mercy of a stepmother? — gives her courage to remain living. She has asked her husband to let the boy come to England for a few weeks but he says he fears she won’t let him return to Pakistan. “The laws in the West are favourable to women: the authorities will side with you and I won’t be able to do anything.” And Suraya knows that his suspicions have some basis in truth: if she could have possession of her boy, she would gladly live with the wound of having lost her husband. “Why don’t you both come for a visit,” she’d suggested not long ago. But he had developed an intense dislike of England during the two years he had spent here after their marriage. She had been lonely in Pakistan and had persuaded him to come and settle here. “This country may be rich but it is too different from ours,” he’d declared finally. “We have to go back. A person can’t do anything here that he can freely over there. A dog was asked by another why he was fleeing a rich household where they fed him meat every day. ‘They feed me meat, yes, but I am not allowed to bark.’ ”

She pleads with Allah as she purifies herself. One day when she was a little girl, she had gone home from the mosque in tears, having just learned that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said there would be more women in Hell than men. The girls had been chattering during the lesson and the cleric had threatened them with that information. Weeping, she told her mother that she no longer wished to be a Muslim. She consoled her and explained that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had indeed made that statement but that it had been made good humouredly: in a mosque, when the collections were being made, he had joked with the women who weren’t giving up their jewels to feed the poor and finance the jihad against unbelievers. The moment he made that statement the women stood up and argued with him merrily. But now, amid the reeds, Suraya wonders whether her childhood cleric might not have been right all along: We women are wicked. She had resisted having to do what she had done with Shamas last night, but had she resisted hard enough? Perhaps she should have tried to find another way of resolving her difficulties rather than sinning? But there is no other way.

She shivers with terror as she weeps. The moon’s age-old eye watches her from above, the midges flickering firmly in perfect silhouettes against it — the orbits are strong enough to not let the breeze blow the insects away. She washes her face and wonders if her crying had been heard in there. Shamas said last night that occasionally when she speaks the songbirds in her throat awaken and he can hear the voice that as a girl had sang the poetry of Wamaq Saleem, accompanying itself with a guitar and a peacock-feather plectrum. She can hear those songbirds when she cries now. She gathers up her hair, pulling off the damp locks that are gently pasted onto her shoulders, each leaving behind an impression of itself in cool skin, a sensory shadow in low temperature. The gusts and ripples of breeze can be heard murmuring in the night foliage around the jetty’s xylophone.

There must be a jasmine creeper somewhere nearby because it has shed some flowers into the lake — with outspread fingers she sieves a few out of the water and only now sees that they are in fact small pieces of paper, covered on one side with writing that she is unable to read due to the lack of light. Someone’s torn letter, perhaps.

She sits in the darkness and wonders what her next step should be. Tonight she gave him what he wanted and now she has to ask for something in return. He turned out to be a great sensualist, probing her gently with his tongue and hands so that she moaned in shame and humiliation (and once with pleasure). He was gentler than her husband, whose member had been so large that she frequently suffered from cystitis. Afterwards, as they lay beside each other, he slid his hand out from under her head and gave her a book of henna patterns to rest her head on: “Quite appropriate. Pillows filled with henna blossom are used to induce restful sleep.”

She has taken the first step back towards her son, he who made her feel she was at the place that was the planet’s navel whenever she was near him or with him, the place where the earth was connected to the sky, he who said last month that no one makes zarda the way he likes it, “the way you used to make it, Mother. Grandmother always puts too much raisins in and it’s too gooey.” She could see him waving his hand in indignation, his small faintly hairy forehead creased furiously. Suraya had tried not to laugh out loud. In order to pass on the correct recipe, she’d had her mother-in-law brought to the phone, that woman who perhaps even then was planning to find another “mother” for Suraya’s boy. How she would like to cut off her grey rat’s tail of a braid! She has always resented Suraya, that woman, jealous (perhaps like all mothers) because the wife can give her son the only thing she herself can’t, is not allowed to give by law and by nature. How shocked she was when the day after the wedding she caught sight of Suraya’s back: Suraya had had a flowering vine painted with henna along her spine for the wedding night, from the small of her back up to the spot between her shoulder-blades. Her strong and handsome husband had become excited beyond measure by the surprising detail during the night, but the old woman read it as a sign of decadence.

How many more times should she let Shamas touch her before revealing everything to him. Perhaps last night is already enough? He has told her about his brother and his girlfriend. Chanda too could not marry Jugnu due to the laws about Islamic divorce and women. She wonders whether she should exploit that similarity: would it help her gain his sympathy more readily?

Of course, she was shocked that Chanda and Jugnu’s life ended in murder, but she had been appalled when she heard that they had set up home outside wedlock, sinning openly — but she had hidden her real reaction from Shamas, not wishing to alienate or contradict him. She had kept only the thought of reuniting with her son in mind and let Shamas talk as he pleased, not that the thought of her boy is ever far from her, making life difficult for her. That first time at the Safeena when she was half-looking, half-pretending-to-look at the books of poetry she had come across a line of Kalidasa and had almost had the wind taken from her lungs. In the forest a doe was walking

Slowed by her suckling fawn.

The need to be with her son had resulted in the dazed brevity of the previous days when she cultivated Shamas’s acquaintanceship, ignoring the shudder of doubt and dread, relying on a boldness that has resulted in her committing tonight’s sin. Now, all her bravery has evaporated and nothing remains but guilt and shame, a feeling compounded by the night’s darkness around her, a sense of disaster and doom.

Her head feels heavy as a jar full of pennies due to stress and lack of sleep as she looks out over the dark lake, the surface of the water moving placidly like a sheet of very heavy silk to the left of her. She can smell the wild flowers that grow nearby, the bee- and beetle-filled wild-rosebushes the petals of whose flowers she as a small young girl would stick onto her finger-nails with spittle on the way to school to briefly give herself grown-up fingers. Earrings, necklaces, ribbons, perfume, lipstick. The young girls were learning to be women, to be false, teaching themselves to become the figures in men’s dreams and fantasies. Now she realizes how lost she is at times because a dreamer isn’t there. Well, they can all go to Hell. The only love worth striving for is her child’s, her son’s.