Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

He wants to touch her — wishing to siphon some of her pain into himself — but knows he’s not allowed; he mustn’t. (For many years now, similarly, every time he touches Kaukab he feels he is committing a sin.) He cannot bear the thought of not being able to see her anymore. In the future how would he know what has become of her (just as he doesn’t exactly know what’s befallen Chanda and Jugnu, where in India his aunt Aarti is)? He tells himself once again to stop being selfish, to stop thinking about the consequences of her departure on his own spirit and inner life. What matters is Suraya and her predicament.

“Please don’t make me look for someone else,” she says. “Please don’t make me humiliate myself with another. Please.”

As though a storm has carried her away, she’ll leave in a while and he’ll never see her again, will be alone with the Cinnabar moth dressed like a woman from the Subcontinent. She’ll vanish from his life, a small figure dressed in blue hurrying through the rain, in the grey, blue-black and white downpour, leaving him behind surrounded by the wallpaper deer in their flame-of-the-forest bowers, out past Scandal Point and then under the high cable that brings electricity to the Safeena and is twined this month by the pure-white-flowering bindweed, the arrow-shaped leaves dripping with rain.

“No.”

“Would you like some time to think about it? Ten days, a fortnight?”

“My answer would still be no.”

“Say no then, not now. I have ordered the Koh-i-Noors for you: they’ll arrive just in time and I’ll bring them. Meet me here one last time, by our Safeena, our Scandal Point. Let’s decide on a day.”

She kisses him on the forehead before leaving. She is a believer, and sex outside marriage is one of the greatest sins in Islam. He has an image of her going home after their meetings and frantically scrubbing herself.

He stands at the window, and the sight of his face — reflected ghostlike on the glass pane — fills him with disgust: she must have loathed him secretly, at what she had to do to regain entry into her real life. How the feel of these hands must have repulsed her! In her eyes he was a beast letting loose his lusts on her flesh. Licking those orchid-sap stains from her breast and thighs. He hates himself for acting like an animal, a bull rejoicing in the cow. Clouding the glass with his breath, he makes himself disappear.

Before she left, she asked to be forgiven for her husband threatening him with violence over the telephone last night; and she said she forgave him for deceiving her earlier this afternoon. But he cannot silence the accusations inside himself the way it is said that deer are troubled by the musk that springs from their own bodies, that sometimes, driven insane, they begin to describe circles around themselves, start to run madly in the deserts and the forests in the hope that they may locate the origins of that encircling perfume, that they may discover the reasons why it clings and seems to chase them.

There is dandelion fluff caught in a spider’s web, out there, looking as though the arachnid had taken off a fur stole and hung it in one corner of its dwelling (as little Ujala said once; or was it something he’d read in The First Children on the Moon —he is aware that a part of his consciousness is influenced by his father’s magazine, looking at the world as though it is a bright toy). A lapwing sounds from somewhere around the lake—. . bewitched. . bewitched. . The high bindweed has folded its flowers to prevent the rain from diluting their perfume and nectar. Now and then giving a lazy flutter to its brilliant cerise wings, the Cinnabar is still there: the wind has changed direction and the creature is now being lashed by water drops; he goes out and brings it in, placing it on a shelf beside a book with a bluebell-coloured jacket, reminding him also of the blooms of a Pakistani jacaranda tree. The colour of her veil.

There is nothing he can do to help her.

There on the opposite shore of the lake, in the dense trees, is where the ghosts of the two murdered lovers are said to wander, calling out to him, aglow, giving out a light without heat like fireflies. Pale eyes change colour soon after death — Caucasian pupils appear a greenish-brown — and he wonders what colour Chanda’s eyes became after her murder, she whose eyes used to change with the seasons. Her ghost’s belly is said to be brighter than the rest of her, an indication that it contains a luminous child, the child that died with her.

Time makes memories of everything. Would he forget Suraya, her memory coming to him only occasionally? But he doesn’t think he has enough time to be able to forget her, because many decades are needed for such processes, and he is too old now. This one will go with him to the grave.

Beside the Safeena stands a leafless tree resembling an antler, as though a deer buried there is beginning to emerge free of the earth’s grip, and it is there that Suraya awaits Shamas’s arrival. She shakes order into the garlands printed on her clothing, the August sun blazing around her. How hot it burns. A summer breeze comes in from the lake’s surface, from the sharp slopes of tight purple heather and patches of willow herbs with bright pink light clinging to them.

The agreed hour has come and gone. So his answer is no? But even now there is a vague hope that perhaps he’ll come here eventually— having changed his answer to yes after all. She tries to hold back her tears when she realizes how absurd the thought is. And now, as the drops of sweat slide down her body, activating the nerve-endings, there is a surge of anger: how dare he reject someone as intelligent, beautiful and desirable as her, how dare he not come! And she recriminates herself for her temper — Satan the Stoned-One is aware of her pride and vanity and takes full advantage whenever he can. Yes, you need to be confident and self-possessed in life, but only a little. There are limits you shouldn’t go beyond. There are some substances that are regarded as medicines up to ten drops, but are included in the list of poisons on the eleventh.

Her quick temper is a trait she seems to have passed on to her little son. “Why did you go to that house anyway,” he said last night on the phone. “It’s all your own fault.” Shocked by the authority with which he accused her, she suspected that her mother-in-law had started filling the boy’s head against her. He must hear things around the house and streets all the time too. Had he said something as objectionable and insolent as that to her while she was in Pakistan, she would have slapped him, hard, knocking all the brazenness out of him. When he grows up will he torment her with his accusations, ever wilder, ever more obscene? She shudders. She fumes at his grandmother, and her husband, he who had dared to hit her, beat her. Three days ago, she had found herself fantasizing for a few moments about how delicious it would be to taunt her husband, to torment him, torture him, by giving him all the details of her lovemaking with Shamas, telling him he was a better lover than him. But — she had mused — surely that would jeopardize my getting back together with my son. But then she had come to her senses: My Allah, Suraya, you love your husband and are a worshipper of Allah — where have such thoughts come from!

She hears a sound nearby and looks up, her heart full of hope, but it’s only the wind brushing past the reeds.

She’s dizzy from the sun. The thought suddenly panics her that Shamas has been waylaid by some friends of her husband’s. My Allah, he’s lying in a ditch somewhere, dead to the world.