Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

He stands at the window and watches the Cinnabar moth that’s sheltering against the pane on the other side; its forewings are the darkish brown of milk chocolate with markings in an arresting red, one of those vibrating shades that you can get drunk on by just looking, but the hind wings are entirely red. He remembers Jugnu smiling and saying the Cinnabar have been paying attention to the way Pakistani and Indian women dress: the upper body is covered with the kameez -shirt which is made of a fabric printed with designs — flowers, geometric shapes — while the shalwar -trousers single out one of the main colours of the kameez.

The rain sounds like the stridulating of grasshoppers. Bubbles— nothingness lightly wrapped around nothingness — dot the lake’s surface out there. He blinks and now Suraya is running along the edge of the lake, her veil blowing about her, and she smiles at him as she spots him in the window, strands of her hair and the red-silk scarf rising up into the air behind her, the scarf that she must love so much, wearing it as she does all the time. The water and the afternoon sky and the stones visible in the shallower parts of the lake are all grey, blue-black, white, and in those shallow areas the mosses too look dark, those long emerald-green and slimy strands which trailed between the toes of his children like thongs of delicate sandals when they paddled in the water with the hems rolled up.

She lets out a surprised cry when he moves forward into the rain and takes her into his arms, the rain falling on them both. With a laugh she pulls away from his kiss and brings them both into the shelter of the Safeena, the world out there gleaming as though just finished and taken off the easel.

“I looked but couldn’t find the gold Koh-i-Noor pencils that I said I’d get you so you could begin writing poetry again,” she says, shaking water drops out of her hair.

But with quick speed he takes off her clothes, the dusty and stained lampshade filling the interior with yellowish candle-warm light, her skin the colour of paled jasmine. On her elbows on the snake-and-ladders rug, her lips married to his, she suddenly lets her head loll back away from him, disengaging their mouths, and he goes down past her navel to the pubis. His abruptness and speed make her release a sound of surprise and protest occasionally but then her breathing stills like a river and the pairs of deer in their red flame-of-the-forest bowers on the walls turn their necks to look at her.

“Your husband telephoned last night.”

She has been rearranging the clothing she’s put back on, and turns to face him only after several seconds. It’s as though the true meaning of what he’s just said becomes clear to her very slowly like a bubble rising in honey. “I love my son, my dear dear son, and my husband, Shamas,” she says weakly.

“When you decided to sleep with me the first time, was that a kind of down-payment? Giving me a glimpse of what was to come if I married you?”

She steps up to him, and her hand moves several times towards his shoulder, to touch him, but she withdraws it in the end. “Allah placed you in my path that morning on the bridge to help me when you retrieved my scarf. I knew you were a good man. .”

“Someone easy to manipulate?”

“I had no choice. I would do anything for my son and husband. Love is the only thing that inspires boldness in a woman.”

“I thought you were being bold because of what you felt for me, while all the time you were just boldly degrading yourself for the love of your husband and son.”

“A man is allowed four wives simultaneously, Shamas. You could. .”

“Had you worked out all the details? What was the plan?”

“I swear by my eyesight that there was no real plan. I eventually wanted to tell you everything.”

“Let’s leave love aside — I am no fool — but did you even like me or care for me a little?”

She looks away, but then says with sudden rancour in her voice:

“Did you have a plan: what did you think the outcome of our meetings would be? Were you going to leave your wife for me?” She seems to think that she shouldn’t expect from him a song — a lament — about the suffocations of marriage and the heroic defiance involved in refusing its hypocrisies, because she continues: “I know without you having told me that your wife is the most important fact of your life. I made decisions in a dazed state just like you.” She continues in a more amenable tone: “Shamas, you know that a man can have more than one wife. .”

Yes, he knows that. A man came to Muhammad and said he was unhappy. The Prophet advised him to get married. He returned some time later, married, but still complaining of unhappiness. Muhammad said, “Get married again.” The man was back after a while, twice married — and happy.

“I know you are angry, Shamas. Don’t think I didn’t care for you — I haven’t slept with anyone besides my husband.”

“I am just trying to understand what you were doing. How were you hoping to have me divorce you after the marriage?”

“I didn’t think that far ahead. I didn’t know what I was doing then just as I don’t know what I am doing now. I close my eyes and wish all of it into non-existence, beginning with me going to the house of the enemy that day in Pakistan. I walk around missing my son, my husband, mourning my mother, begging forgiveness from Allah for committing sin with you, and, yes, I ask Him to forgive me for deceiving you.”

“I don’t think you are to blame. And don’t forget you went to that house to save that young girl’s life.” He turns towards her where she’s lowered herself onto the rug beside him: he touches the edge of her veil.

“I wonder sometimes about my motives. It was perhaps all vanity on my part. I wanted to be the centre of attention in that small restricted place, wishing people would think I was brave enough to save a girl’s life, exposing the criminal acts of her uncle, and, perhaps, even bringing an end to a decades-old feud. Maybe all this is Allah punishing me for my pride and vanity. I was so tired of living in that little place, I wanted to be looked at, appreciated, wanted stimulation.”

“These are very human failings. Don’t feel bad.”

She talks on in a low monotone: “I could speak English, I was quite pale-skinned, I had more knowledge of certain things than anyone else in that village. I pretended to be superior at times. That my mind had access to the higher secrets of life was, of course, a charade, a pretence.” She gives a little laugh to ridicule herself. “Knowledge! I was corralled up in that wretched third-rate Islamic school for most of my learning years, committing to memory the names of all the Prophet’s wives. I know how pedestrian my intellect and my understanding of life really are, how basic and limited my knowledge of life is. I was— am —terrified of having my ignorance exposed whenever I talked to someone who is really educated, someone like you.”

“I don’t know anything.”

She ignores him again, “Of course I could have been something. But to become that would have required long demanding work, a life dedicated to the pursuit of it—”

“And even then nothing is guaranteed.”

“I liked the look of awe and admiration on my husband’s face when I quoted — not always accurately — something from one of the poems I knew because, yes, it flattered me a little, and then the very next moment I was filled with shame and disgust, because I know no one acquires real knowledge because of vanity. ”

“Don’t torment yourself like that.”

“Do you know what the matchmaker said to me back in spring, after I rejected every prospect she had presented me with? I said none of them were good enough for me, but she smiled and said, ‘On the contrary, my haughty and proud beauty. I have a feeling that you want someone to whom you could feel superior. You feel that these are too good for you.’ I wonder if there was an element of truth in what she said.”