Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Chanda’s sister nods. “Where are you living at the moment?”

The girls points out the tower through the glass window, the other hand playing with the locket around her neck.

Chanda’s sister-in-law turns around but, on seeing that a customer is approaching the shop, quickly tells the girl to go to the fruit section. A whirlwind of plaits and scarves and balloons with Freedom for Kashmir printed on them, her daughters come down from upstairs, ready for the mosque.

She serves the customers, keeping an eye on the girl with the locket, and when the shop is empty again after five minutes she goes over to her, beside the basket of strawberries, a hairy leaf sticking out of the brilliant baubles here and there.

“You should not have left your country,” she says to the girl, who raises her eyes briefly at her, chewing the corner of her mouth, but doesn’t say anything. “Don’t you miss it?”

The girl stops what she’s doing, all life gone from her hands which she rests on the fruit, and then decides to speak her mind. “I shouldn’t have left?” she says angrily. “You lot who have legal status in a rich country don’t know how lucky you are!”

Chanda’s sister-in-law is taken aback. “I am sorry, I just wondered whether you wanted to go back after making some money.”

But the girl doesn’t seem to be listening. She looks at Chanda’s sister-in-law with fury. “You don’t understand what things are like back there for most of us.” One balloon had slipped from the hands of the little girls and is floating against the ceiling above them, slowly drifting. She gives it a contemptuous glance. “Freedom for Kashmir, indeed. Pakistan can’t afford to feed the people it already has within its borders, and yet it wants more people, a bigger territory. The same goes for India of course.”

“Someone was just handing those balloons out on the street,” says Chanda’s sister-in-law, trying to placate her. “And I didn’t mean to offend you by what I said.” She knows she must give the impression of agreeing with the girl’s opinions. “Every other day there is news of a group of illegal immigrants meeting a disastrous end.Those bastard prime ministers and presidents and generals — both Indian and Pakistani — they should see what people have to go through to reach a place where they can earn a decent living. They should ask those people whether they want freedom in Kashmir or a chance to live with safety and with food in our bellies in their own country.”

No longer enraged, the girl says quietly, “They should’ve seen how the group I was with came to this country, how we ran through snow, were fired on, across border after border after border, abused, slapped.”

Chanda’s sister-in-law takes the bag the girl has been filling and begins to add heaps of red strawberries into it. “You hear about such things every day — people wading through filthy sewers and flooded rivers, leaving dead or dying people behind on mountainsides to be picked at by crows and vultures.” She leans closer: “Now listen, you are a Pakistani and so am I. It’s my duty to help you. If you need anything. .”

But the girl is staring past her shoulder with disbelief in her eyes. Chanda’s sister-in-law turns around and the bag of strawberries falls from her hand as she watches the building collapse several miles away in the distance. With a soundless shout the girl pushes her away and begins to run towards the door. She shouts again, failing once again to produce noise, as though her words are unable to cut the air. She runs along the road that will take her to her destroyed home, the locket leaping around her neck. There are several people outside the shop and since some customers have also entered the premises, Chanda’s sister-in-law cannot go after her, which would obviously hint at some connection between her and the girl. She watches her disappear from her life. She lets out a moan at the opportunity she has just lost.

“Now what have I come out for?” says the woman who is standing at the counter, thinking aloud. “I am so forgetful. If I don’t lose more things it must be because my belongings have some determination of their own to stick by me.” Her daughter — dressed in a sparkly orange frock, the colour of Irn-Bru — pulls at her veil and tells her she wants two ice-lollies, one strawberry, one lime, but is told to behave herself or she’ll be given away to a white person who’ll make her eat pork and drink alcohol and not wash her bottom after going to the toilet — forcing her to use only toilet paper. The child is disturbed by the horrors disobedience can lead to and agrees to accept only one lolly, moving towards one of the glass coffins and looking in, chin resting on the edge of the freezer.

Chanda’s sister-in-law comes and stands behind the counter, smiles emptily at the customer. Presented with all the choices below the Perspex sheet, the customer’s little girl forgets the white horrors and lifts two lollies out after all. The mother sees this and shouts: “If you don’t behave, I’ll not only give you away to the whites, I’ll give away your brother too. They’d make sure he doesn’t learn to drive when he grows up and has to sit in the passenger seat while you drive. Do you want a eunuch like that for a brother? House husbands, if you please! The mind boggles at the craziness of this race.” Visibly disturbed, the girl shakes her head and puts the lime back. The mother, meanwhile, has spotted another example of bad upbringing: “Oi, you,” she shouts at the boy wearing the green shirt of Pakistan’s Cricket World Cup team, “I am talking to you, whoever you are. Yes, you, green. It is not a cupboard, it’s a fridge. Decide what you want first and then open it.” She shakes her head at Chanda’s sister-in-law: “The way he was just standing there taking his time, the cut-price Imran Khan. You are too kind, sister-ji, letting them get away with murder.” She narrows her eyes: “Just tell me it was him who scattered those strawberries on the floor over there and see how I teach him to clean up after himself, I don’t care whose son he is.”

“I’ll clear that myself,” Chanda’s sister-in-law says quietly, unable to stop thinking about the lost girl. The leaves of the strawberry plants are hairy like grape foliage, reminding her of the vines that used to grow in her childhood home in Pakistan. Her father had planted them but her mother always complained of the leaves they dropped on her clean floor. When he fell ill she saw her chance and cut them down. She was halfway through when suddenly the courtyard was filled with about a dozen sun-birds, screeching and circling the fallen arbour. They had fed on the grapes and had probably made nests somewhere under the large leaves. The girl with the locket had been like that minutes ago; you grieve in that manner only when your home is destroyed. In his room her father screamed and waved his hands in the air like birds above his bed but her mother kept axing and sawing.

The sister-in-law looks at the column of dust rising towards the sky in the distance, like a battle between djinns in the desert. We’ll find another suitable young woman —she tells herself.

Shamas waits for Suraya at the Safeena, the interior filled with the previous six-hours’-worth of midsummer heat and with the odour of paper and ink. Today was one of those hot days that are a reminder that the world is powered by the sun. But the first thunderstorm of the summer has begun, the raindrops coming down fast. It looks as though the heat and the sunlight would be scrolled up and put away for the next few hours, the shower washing away the constellation-like hopscotch grids that the children had drawn on the pavements.