Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

The sister-in-law goes to the stairs and shouts up that it’s time for the girls to have their lunch and get ready for the Koranic lesson at the mosque. “And don’t forget you have been asked to bring £1 each for the fund for the Bosnian refugees.” She returns to the counter, coming past the two waist-high freezers for packets of frozen foodstuffs, topped with Perspex roofs that slide open like the glass coffins of fairytales. Her parents-in-law have told her about the scheme to send a fake Chanda and Jugnu to the police in order to have the charges against Chanda’s brothers dropped — and she is fully on board. When her father-in-law told her about his idea, the afternoon he and his wife returned from the visit to the prison, he mentioned that not long ago he had met a young man at the mosque who was going around looking for his brother, a boy with a strand of gold growing amid the hair on his head. “The last message the family got from the missing boy with the gold hair was from here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, so this is where he is searching. If only I could bump into that young man again — he would be perfect,” said Chanda’s father that afternoon; and then, luckily, on the night of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s performance, they found him in the crowd, drunk, in despair because it’s unlikely he’ll ever find his brother. When Chanda’s father approached him, he said, “Whenever the exiles talk of their homeland, tears well up in the morning’s eye — that’s what dewdrops are. It’s a line, uncle-ji, from a song by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a poem by Wamaq Saleem which Nusrat set to music.” His pupils dilated, he was in no condition to talk, and so Chanda’s father has asked for his address and gone to talk to him the following day. He has agreed to help Chanda’s family with their subterfuge — being deported back to Pakistan by the police for being an illegal immigrant, but happy with the money the family will pay him. They have to be careful: no one must see him in their company — no one must think they have anything to do with the tale.

Once the family has found a girl they’ll send them both to the police station. Finding a girl is proving more difficult. It’s usually men who leave for other countries, being stronger, bolder, the world being slightly easier for them to negotiate than it is for women.

The shop’s door opens. The child standing in front of the shop door, munching a just-bought bar of chocolate, his mouth and gums coated with sweet mud, is brushed aside by a group of women. “Who are you, the door man?” one says, and enters the shop without waiting to hear his “I am just waiting for that tower block on that hill in the distance to fall down — it’s derelict and empty and is gonna be blown up this afternoon.” The women are outraged that he has failed to apologize for obstructing them. But they dismiss him and enter, because: Children? Who is happy with their children? Who? A hand is waved in the air to challenge the others to produce an example from the whole world. “No one. That’s who. Look at the poor Queen and what her children are doing to her.”

“Dragging her through dirt is what they are doing to her, sister-ji.”

“Dragging her by her feet. ”

“By her hair.”

“Through dirt and through mud. And she a woman who rules the country. ”

“Making her a laughingstock.”

There follows a few minutes of silence in which the flowers on the fabrics fume hot and angry at the irresponsibility of the young. And then the women spread out across the shop, between the rows of free-standing shelves that fill up the floor space, stopping instinctively to tidy up a row of fruitcakes that are yellow and full of dark raisins and sultanas which make them look like blocks cut out of leopards. Here and there, there are baskets of fruits and vegetables, apples with the red cheeks of Japanese babies, mangoes, guavas, foot-long sections of sugarcane imported from Pakistan, the few sticks perfuming this enclosed air the way the cane crop can perfume the air of an entire village when it ripens. Eggs are usually here, next to the fruit, but in summer they are moved elsewhere because otherwise the customers say their omelettes turn out to be papaya- and pineapple- and melon-flavoured.

Over the next half hour the shop becomes so busy — women arrive to be served at the fabric counter too — that Chanda’s sister-in-law has to call her mother-in-law down for assistance, the customers asking each other about whether this deep red linen would suit my dark complexion, whether this shop stocks the print they saw Shamas’s wife, Kaukab, wearing last week, whether this stripe-covered georgette was the same as the one they saw hanging on the washing line on Jinnah Road. .

Suraya, examining a packet of Multani clay to be used as a face mask, looks up on hearing Shamas and Kaukab’s names, and looks towards the fabric counter. The clay, from the Pakistani city of Multan, is also used to clean the marble façade of the Taj Mahal; she replaces it on the shelf and crosses over to the fabric counter and — while wondering why the woman behind it gives her a second glance as though she’s trying to recognize or place her — points to the material that apparently Kaukab wears. She remembers being a girl and becoming extremely fond of a teacher at the Muslim school just because she saw her wearing the same print as her mother. Now she wonders whether at some deep level Shamas’s affections would be roused on seeing her in the same material as his wife.

His wife when she was younger.

But couldn’t it also remind him of Kaukab in another way: renewing his love and sending him back to her, repentant of his infidelity.

She looks at the fabric indecisively. He has told her about the sometimes-vague sometimes-sharp antagonisms within his marriage to Kaukab, and she hasn’t let on that she’s more on her side than his. She sounds like an Allah-fearing woman, and Suraya has begun to wonder whether she would eventually be able to appeal directly to her, reminding her that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had had more than one wife.

“It would look beautiful on your skin tone,” the woman behind the counter — Chanda’s mother? — says as she asks her to measure enough material for a shalwar-kameez.

“Thank you,” she says as she takes her package and turns away, the shop suddenly noisy with children’s toy spaceguns. These are imported from the East and their bleeps and peows are much louder than the ones that are manufactured here in England, deafeningly so.

A group of middle-aged women are already on to the life-intoxicated boys who are pulling the triggers of the spaceguns — and suddenly everything is markedly silent. Wearing wronged and martyred expressions, the boys are now brought to the relevant mother and made to stand still with threats and pinched looks.

She smiles. She’ll tell Shamas about these boys this afternoon. She has noticed that he loves talking about his children’s childhood, the things they did and said. He won’t be drawn on the subject of them as young adults, or much on what they are doing now. It is clear to her that their growing up was a time of strain and tension for him: there must have been arguments with Kaukab about how they should be raised, so that now he prefers to think of them as young children.

When he mentioned that his elder son, Charag, was an artist, she had wondered whether he could be the same young man she had met beside the lake back in spring, but then he said that Charag doesn’t live in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and hasn’t visited this year.

She moves among the shelves, elated by the sights and the smells, picking up small boxes and jars, mesmerized by the pink, the blue, the red, the green, the orange, the yellow, the silver, the gold, unscrewing and sniffing the small roll-on vials of perfume, sandalwood, saffron, jasmine, rose. It’s like being a young girl again.