Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She cannot remember the last time she had the courage to walk into Chanda Food & Convenience Store, and now too her determination dissolves, her steps growing slower as she nears the front door, and then she continues on along the road. She has heard about how one of the family’s sons has been battered beyond recognition in jail — all thanks to her own brother-in-law — and she fears abuse if she goes into the shop now. But she also knows that earlier in the year Chanda’s mother had approached Shamas to tell him of a possible sighting of Jugnu in Lahore: that encounter was perfectly civil, she reminds herself, so she needn’t fear rudeness if she enters the shop. And of course Chanda’s mother had greeted her politely five weeks ago when they found themselves standing next to each other at Nusrat’s performance: they had remained there for a few moments — a little awkward, yes, but still — and Chanda’s mother had told Kaukab that she and her husband had seen Shamas in the outlying hills not long ago, holding what looked like a rose-ringed parakeet feather. “Parakeets, here?” a woman within earshot had said, “Allah, how I miss those birds!” and Kaukab had seized on the opportunity to move away.

She remembered the comment four or five days later and asked Shamas about the feather but he said that Chanda’s mother must be mistaken. Kaukab had agreed: “Her daughter’s death has hit her very hard. I fear for her sanity at times.” There are words to describe all kinds of bereaved people — widows, widowers, orphans — but none for a parent that has lost a child: it’s a fate too terrible for even language to contemplate.

She builds up her resolve after twenty yards and begins to walk back. Should she go in?

Suraya, on her way to see Shamas, brings the car to a halt when she realizes that the shop she’s approaching on her right is owned by the parents of Jugnu’s dead girlfriend. Her curiosity roused, she sits in the parked car wondering whether she should go in. There is still enough time before her meeting with Shamas, who had called her unexpectedly this morning asking to see her.

She looks at the coming and going outside the shop. She has had to be intimate with Shamas a further six times since that night at the Safeena after Nusrat’s performance. But she is becoming surer of the dividends. Two days ago she even told her husband the name of “the very promising candidate” she had earlier mentioned to him and his mother. He got her to give him the man’s address so he could have him scrutinized by the people he used to know when he was in England. She hadn’t wanted to give him that information but had relented after he asked for it repeatedly because she didn’t want him to think she was being contrary or disobedient, lest he refuse to marry her again, or go ahead and marry some other woman that that mother of his is no doubt searching for even now.

She cranes towards the mirror to check her appearance. Belonging to a hairy race, she had her entire body waxed last week, and has also had electrolysis on her face; all this she had somewhat neglected over the past few months. Shamas says he finds talking to her a comfort and a delight, that beauty isn’t what he wants in a woman; but, like all men, he is as muddle-headed as a child: what he means is that beauty alone is not what he wants — a woman must be intelligent as well as beautiful. An intelligent but plain woman won’t do. And so Suraya has started to pay attention to her physical appearance. And, yes, it must be admitted that there are times when she enjoys his compliments concerning her beauty, a sense of well-being spreading over her for a while, before she is reminded of her adversity, of her husband, her son, her Allah.

A woman goes by her car for the second time in five minutes. Her hair is clumsily dyed at home and the parting in the middle shows the stains on the scalp.

The tumble of Suraya’s own hair is gathered up at the nape of the neck by the narrow red-silk scarf that she dislikes; but she has it upon her each time she sees Shamas because it must remind him pleasantly of the first time they met, “the cares of all the world falling out of my hands,” he’d joked during their last meeting, referring to the newspapers.

The interior of the car is filled with the heated scent that she has sprayed on her clothing and blue-purple veil, the colour of bluebells. She knows Shamas’s daughter Mah-Jabin was sent to Pakistan to get married: she must have missed things about England when she was there, just as she, Suraya, had when she was in Pakistan; and so this afternoon she plans to use the colour of her veil as a segue into talking about her homesickness in Pakistan — aligning herself with his daughter in an effort to deepen his fondness. She had looked through her wardrobe carefully to find something that was the colour of bluebells, something that would lead to the necessary transition in the conversation.

She watches the women and children go in and out of the shop, the July sun burning. She knows by now how good a heart Shamas possesses. Not long ago, while talking about the neighbourhood, he seemed to shock himself by the desperation of most people’s lives here, family life frequently reduced to nothing more than legalized brutality. He counted nineteen mentally ill people in his own street, the street book-ended on one side by a house where lives a middle-aged Sikh woman whose husband left her and their twenty-year-old Down’s syndrome daughter and went back to Amritsar to marry a young woman of twenty-five, the wife saying, constantly, “May God keep the coffers of Queen Elizabeth filled to the brim, for she provides me and my daughter with food and housing. I don’t care if she is holding on to our Koh-i-Noor diamond so tightly her knuckles are white!”; and on the other end, by the house occupied by the Sylhet family, whose mentally ill father has been missing for several years, and the once-proud factory-working mother is now devastated because the young son has walked out of university where he was training to be a doctor and has taken up radical Islam, grown a beard and proclaimed everything from democracy to shaving cream unIslamic.

Of course the matter of Chanda and Jugnu has filled Shamas’s own house and his own life with grief.

He said — and she was filled with an immense love for him at that moment, fantasizing for a moment about being his wife forever — he said, “Did I do all I could to make sure those around me didn’t come to any harm? Has there been a time when I failed to condemn the pernicious excesses of the wicked, the unjust, the exploiters, robustly enough in the past? Was I unaware of their lethal nature because I myself had not been unduly affected by them yet, the way I am now that Chanda and Jugnu have been murdered?” He read a line of Syed Aabid Ali Aabid,

Chaman tak aa gaee dewar-e-zindan, hum na kehtay thay.

I did warn: the prison out there has been expanding slowly, and now its walls have almost reached your own garden.

His melancholy voice singed her heart. And this is the good man around whom she has been made to weave her web of insincerity and chicanery?

Overcome by remorse, she sits in the car and wonders if she should get out — but now she thinks of her son, and, her resolve and conviction strengthened, decides that she probably should go in and walk around the shop, perhaps buy some material for a couple of new shalwar-kameez s. Surely from amid the bazaar-like hustle-and-bustle she could glean some information that she might be able to use?

After the ting! of the bell above the door has announced a customer’s departure, Chanda’s sister-in-law is alone in the shop. She looks out onto the street, watching as Shamas’s wife goes by, surely for the third time this afternoon, but perhaps she’s mistaken. The shop is as wide as it is deep, is the converted ground-floor of the house in the upper rooms of which the family lives. She can hear footsteps in the ceiling — her little daughters, and parents-in-law. The shop front — behind her — is almost all glass, and she casts an occasional glance over each shoulder to keep an eye on Kaukab. If Allah let the dwellers of Paradise engage in trade, I should choose to trade in fabrics, for that was Abu Bakar the Sincere’s profession —reads the sign nailed to the wall above that fabric counter to the left of the sister-in-law, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Here there are shelves loaded with bolts of cloth with a long counter under them and the floor is littered with sequins and glitter-dust that have come off the fabrics, swept by the feet into galaxies and milky ways. Colours and prints go in and out like the seasons in this part of the shop. Two scissors hang from strings like a pair of dead birds, upside-down, drained of blood. Rolls of cloth — each forty-five inches tall — lean against the counter, the loose edges of the materials trailing, like a queue of very thin and very tolerant women wearing saris.