Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Her hands tremble, the Koh-i-Noor pencils rattling slightly in their box.

No, no, Shamas is not lying somewhere, dead or dying —she reassures herself, with no cause for this optimism but the compassion of Allah.

But now, once again, there’s anger: what if he hasn’t come to any harm but has rather become afraid that he might be beaten up by her husband’s friends, and has not come to see her out of cowardice?

The anger at him is such that it makes her want to go to his house immediately. But, suddenly restored to sanity now, she knows that she must resist the impulse — any confrontation would endanger her chances of being accepted by Kaukab. Over the past four days she has found herself circling his house at odd hours, but every time she has remained clearheaded enough to withdraw. Once she caught a glimpse of the woman who must be Kaukab.

She recognized the roses and the jasmine in Kaukab’s front garden: they were added to the bath water in which was washed the corpse of the girl beaten to death by the exorcist.

Another sound and Suraya tells herself not to look up and have her hopes smashed again— he’s not coming, Suraya, but you are a strong and resourceful woman: with Allah’s help you will cope with anything: You don’t need Shamas —but her resolve fails within seconds. .

Semen was found on the mosque floor late last evening.

It’s almost a year since Chanda and Jugnu disappeared. This time last year they were in Pakistan. Shamas looks down at his own and the missing couple’s house, from the slope at the back, at the base of which the narrow lane and the stream are. Here the ground rises to form an angled backdrop of sycamores and hawthorns that throw shadows through every back window at sunrise, the earth here deep with zigzagging twigs, green and scarlet berries, mouldy winged samara and rain-rusted leaves lying under the trees like The Moral: at the bottom of a fable. The scent of hawthorns in bloom in May is as thick inside the house as out, the air drowsily astir in summer with the weightless seeds of the poodle-tail dandelion clocks.

Yesterday morning — a few hours before his meeting with Suraya — he went into the mosque to consult the cleric about Muslim divorce laws, to see if there was any possible way out for Suraya other than having to marry someone and obtain a divorce from him. The cleric wasn’t in the building, though children were chanting their lessons. Shamas thought he might be upstairs and was moving towards the stairs when he heard a child’s cry from behind a closed door. “Uncle, I don’t want to.” He went into the room and saw one of the junior clerics, a bachelor in his fifties, with his erect penis in a child’s mouth.

Shamas shouted out and grabbed the man. Soon every official of the mosque was in the room and Shamas was told respectfully to go home, that the matter would be handled by the mosque. He left, insisting the man should be handed to the authorities, but by early afternoon, as the time approached for him to travel to Scandal Point to meet Suraya, concerned that the police had not approached him for a statement, he returned to the mosque only to discover that nothing had been done.

He came home and called the police himself to report the assault: he had to wait for an officer to visit the house. He would make it to her just in time, he reassured himself — but when the police did arrive he couldn’t get away from their questioning and procedures.

As the investigative process got under way, other details emerged of previous assaults on children involving the same man. A group of mothers had, two months before, confronted mosque officials, saying the man had assaulted their children, but they were told that the scandal would give Islam and Pakistan a bad name, that the man would be prevented from doing it again, that if the police got involved and shut down the mosque no one would teach their sons to stay away from the whore-like white girls, and that their own daughters would run away from home and wouldn’t want to marry their cousins from back home, that the Hindus and the Jews and the Christians would rejoice at seeing Islam being dragged through the mud. Some of the men had just laughed at the women and told them to go away and get the dinner ready for their husbands; others were even more contemptuous and told them to stop cackling like hens in the place of worship, adding that a woman should be a creature of the home and the night, and had no place outside in the world of men.

The mosque denied any attempt to cover up the man’s activities. “This is the house of God and if anyone had known about it, it would not have been tolerated,” the cleric said to the police. “The females say they complained — but then they get excited over everything and are not very intelligent, they don’t know what they are saying.”

There was no way for Shamas to contact Suraya and arrange to meet elsewhere. It was early evening by the time he was free: and by then it was too late. He tried to telephone her several times but there was no answer: she was either not at home or chose not to answer.

Police were sure that the samples they took from the floor of the room in which Shamas came upon that terrible scene were the assaulter’s semen.

He was devastated that she got his final answer in such a cruel manner, and he has been wondering whether he should try to contact her again today — just to explain his non-appearance. But, surely, a telephone call from him now would raise her hopes for the first few seconds as she hears his voice. And then he’ll have to dash them again.

He doesn’t know what to do. He stands still, unwilling to move any muscles, almost believing himself to be a column of separate parts that would scatter at the smallest movement or vibration.

She had said: “I had to degrade myself with you. In our religion there is no other way for me to be united with my beloved son.” She of course regretted the first thing, not the second: a system conditions people into thinking that it is never to blame, is never to be questioned. We have to beg, say the beggars, the accursed belly demands food: it is the fault of the belly, not the unjust world that doesn’t allow enough sustenance to reach the bellies of everyone through dignified means.

He climbs down into the back lane, carefully leaping over the stream, and goes into Jugnu’s back garden. The deep blue of a peacock’s neck, a denim jacket of Jugnu’s was washed by Chanda and hung out to dry in May last year: a wren began building a nest in one of its pockets and the garment was allowed to remain on the line, Shamas taking it off only in October, removing from the pocket the small bowl constructed of one dead leaf each of maple and sycamore, one of elm, which he recognized due to its lopsided nature — one-half bigger than the other — and three leaves from the apple foliage; there were dandelion whiskers, and several consecutive layers of spiders’ web trying to separate which was like pulling apart a sheet of two-ply tissue paper or entering a well-starched shirt. There was a piece of the purple thread that Kaukab had used to sew a kameez a few months earlier. The earth around him was covered with yellow leaves being dropped by the trees, the edges of everything giving out pulses of sunlight because last night the glint-slippered frosts were abroad. Berries, like chewy pearls, were everywhere. And no one knew where Chanda and Jugnu were.

Shamas crosses over into his own back garden, thinking about Suraya waiting for him at Scandal Point, beside the Safeena, holding the Koh-i- Noor pencils in her hand. Years ago at the Safeena, while he was sitting in convivial geniality with the shop’s owner, both locked in a habit of concentrated silence, a recently read paragraph or poem always in their heads like tealeaves releasing flavour in two cups of hot water, Jugnu had come in with a butterfly net to ask if there was an Urdu-language Ulysses: “A moth circles the light in the brothel sequence. I wonder which Urdu word for moth they would use— parvana or the more prosaic patanga ?” Shamas said he remembered a path by Browning where lichens mock the marks on a moth, and small ferns fit their teeth to the polished block, but he didn’t recall a moth in the Circe chapter of Ulysses. “Are you sure you are not thinking of the kisses that flutter about Bloom in Nighttown? He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers, fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing. ” Jugnu joined in with a laugh of pleasure: “ They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins. Yes, but there is an actual moth in that chapter also. Bloom wears the Koh-i-Noor diamond on the fingers of his right hand at one point in that chapter.”