Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

With a riot in every vein, she walks up to the Safeena and watches Shamas sleeping on the floor; the two orchids he’d been carrying when he arrived — a gift for her, obviously — are set beside his head, their ruffled edges aglow: he had dropped them outside but had gone out an hour later to retrieve them, one miniature reflection of them shining in each of his eyes. There are beet-coloured almost-black marks on one of the orchids— injuries suffered by the petals when they were dropped, or when the fingers pressed too deeply on to the thin succulence.

He has told her that his father was a Hindu and the terrible persecution he suffered in Pakistan; and so she wonders whether, to gain his sympathy, she should tell him that at school she herself had fallen in love with a boy of another religion — a Sikh — and that her mother had taken her out of school. But now suddenly she is ashamed: Such cold-blooded shrewdness, Suraya! What would Allah think? — and she lets out a whimper in desperation. But what am I supposed to do: become nothing more than his sex slave, and then when he tires of me, go and find another man so that he can pasturethe black scorpions of his eyes on my nakedness? But, no, no, she won’t allow herself to exploit the horrific death of Shamas’s father. He has mentioned something about his wife’s brother wanting to marry a Sikh woman back in the 1950s, and it was obvious that his sympathies lay with the two lovers (she herself had, of course, approved of the actions taken by the young man’s family: imagine, marrying a non-Muslim!); and so she decides that she should tell him about her own young Sikh love, and that her disgusted mother had taken her out of school and enrolled her into a girls-only Muslim school, the segregated school where daughters could be taught traditional values like modesty and submission. The headmistress — and founder — of the Muslim school lived in the outlying suburbs and drove to the poor neighbourhood every morning, having dropped off her own daughter at a private co-education school; the Muslim school wouldn’t do for her girl but was good enough for “these” people. While her own daughter sang about the pussy cat that went to London to see the Queen, the girls at the Muslim school sang, Fatima, Fatima, where have you been? I’ve been to the mosque with Nur-ud-Deen.

Suraya had resented being sent to the Muslim girls’ school, but that was just a young person’s petulance, she knows now. She is glad her mother took her out of the co-education school and sent her to a place where they taught her to fear and love Allah, made her think of the afterlife — saved her soul.

Yes, she will tell him about the Sikh boy: it would be another layer of sympathy for Shamas to view her through. But, of course, she can always use the girl who was buried today: Shamas has told her how he had seen her in the company of a Hindu boy — a conversation about those two secret lovers can be easily steered towards Suraya’s own forbidden love. And now once again she is ashamed and distressed at how she is having to exploit the dead to free herself from her predicament. She holds her head in her hands as she remembers that the exorcist had made the poor girl urinate on to an electric heater so that she fainted from the shock she received.

She realizes that a wet scrap of paper — obviously part of the torn letter she found bobbing on the water earlier — has been sticking to the side of her neck from when she washed herself in the lake: on the piece a whole sentence is legible, undissolved—

They say that the heart is the first organ to form and the last to die.

A clock’s three strikes spread across the lake’s surface like ripples. She should awaken him and drive him home. This much time away from home can just be explained— a group of us men got together and ended up talking after Nusrat’s performance —but he cannot be away from home all night. She remembers how she used to lie awake at night when her husband went out drinking, every sound in the night making her think a ghost was about, that the djinns were abroad, or that he had arrived home intoxicated at last, each thought filling her with more dread than the last.

“Jugnu?” was Kaukab’s first thought when the telephone rang in the middle of the night, two nights ago, making her sit up in bed and feel for her slippers so she could go down into the pink room and pick up the receiver. She was already halfway down the stairs before Shamas could emerge groggily from the room he sleeps in. But there was nothing on the line except static, as though the call was from somewhere far away. She recognized it from the telephone calls to Pakistan. She insisted on staying by the phone — and kept Shamas with her too — in case it rang again, but it didn’t.

But there it was again yesterday, in the afternoon this time, with Shamas at work and she on her own in the house. The first time there was that dry sand-like static for several seconds before the line went dead but the second time someone spoke, a man, saying incoherently — shouting almost — that, “I want you to stay away from my wife!” and “We may be divorced but she’s still mine, you behan chod !” The man sounded drunk and so Kaukab had hung up. She was reluctant to enter the pink room when the telephone rang again about an hour later, but she had been unable to help herself eventually— what if it’s Jugnu? Ujala? “Listen,” the man sounded a little calmer now, “just marry her and divorce her as per her plan, but don’t touch her, don’t you dare lay a hand on her body. I know according to Islam she must properly perform her duties and obligations to her new husband before he divorces her, but you won’t ask her to do that, will you?” Soon he worked himself into a rage again: “Don’t even think about asking her to do her wifely duty before divorcing her. Leave her honour intact. Make no mistake: I lived in England and have friends there and so I can easily have your bones broken, you dalla. ”

It was obviously a wrong number and she presented it to Shamas as that when he came home in the evening — he had made vague noises as he always does when she tells him about her day. She didn’t tell him what the man said or that he was definitely drunk because she’d rather not admit to him that alcohol can be bought in a land as pure as Pakistan, that people there drink it too. He might see it as encouragement.

But it was he who answered the phone in the middle of the night last night and when she came down she found his face pale. He seemed as though he was about to pass out. He said, “It was nothing. Go back to sleep,” when she asked him who it was, and so she had assumed it was white racists who sometimes ring up at odd hours to threaten Shamas because he works for the Community Relations Council and the Commission for Racial Equality.

Now Kaukab is walking towards Chanda’s parents’ shop. Could the call she received have been made by one of Chanda’s former husbands, who — unaware that the couple has disappeared — is angry that Jugnu has become her lover? He made the call to Shamas and Kaukab’s house because he thinks Jugnu still lives with his brother?

She’ll have to ask Chanda’s mother if one of her daughter’s former husbands is still in love with her.

But what was all that about marrying and divorcing? And how did he get their telephone number?