Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Tomorrow at dawn, at the Safeena ?

No, he must pretend that he has to go to the mosque, to see how matters are there, and then telephone her from a street telephone-box.

“You just can’t believe your luck that you have the chance to defame and ridicule Islam at last,” Kaukab says to him bitterly as he tells her he is on his way to the mosque, having given Suraya enough time to drive back to her house. “I feel sorry for the poor pious cleric-ji, who has to interrupt his worship and do the rounds of the police station because of that junior cleric.”

He is suddenly filled with rage. I don’t think she’s foolish in the least. Do you?

Kaukab meets his fierce look equally fiercely, and continues: “You want to go back in there and unearth more shameful things, no doubt. I always wanted my husband to frequent a mosque, but never thought it would be like this.”

He closes the door, resisting the urge to bang it as loudly as he can, and steps outside. But Suraya’s telephone continues to ring interminably without answer.

Tomorrow at dawn, at the Safeena.

Shamas learns that a galaxy was stolen during the night.

Some figures came out of the warm night. They waited behind a screen of camomile and foxglove to let a freight train cross the tracks two or three feet away from them, the dust-covered petals shaken loose by the draught and flung onto their faces. And then they crossed over into the open countryside beyond to move towards the section of motorway cordoned off for repairs, sweating freely under their clothes in that damp herbal darkness. They bent on the tarmac and, working with cheap toy flashlights, prised out the cats’ eyes embedded in the motorway lanes, reaching back and dropping each star-like bead into the rucksacks fitted onto their backs. The silent group of thieves worked undisturbed for many hours in the darkness full of the late-summer heat and in the morning the authorities discovered that more than three thousand sockets had been emptied.

The police remain perplexed, Shamas heard on the radio as he woke up, the motive for the theft of the galaxy incomprehensible, the case one of those cases that will probably remain unsolved.

Walking towards Scandal Point to meet Suraya, Shamas sees that the honeysuckle and the woody nightshade are displaying both flowers and berries, as though torn between the seasons. The year is about to enter its last phase.

He tried to telephone her last night but there was no answer.

To think of Suraya is still to bring about a chemical change in the blood, an instant physical lightness slow to ebb like the effect of an intoxicant, and there have been mornings when he has known upon waking that he has dreamt of her, even if he couldn’t recall the details.

There is a faint citrus smell in the dawn air as though he is in a room in which an orange has recently been eaten. Soon, come autumn, the sun would be cooler and the sky would darken daily. Kaukab’s roses and jasmine — the ones “Perveen” had been pretending to admire while she loitered outside the house yesterday — will die for another year in about five or six weeks, each round rosehip with its tall crown of long hairy sepals looking as though a berry has fused with a grasshopper. Their colours would be as bright as sunlight on a bag of boiled sweets.

He cannot contemplate a termination, but what is the alternative? They will have to talk. A child isn’t what even she wants. That was not why she was with him.

Surely she could not have lied about the pregnancy? Perhaps she wants to hurt him — plant pain in someone —for the injustice she has suffered in recent months. Powerless, demeaned, and discarded, her spirit poisoned — she must dream of revenge and mayhem. He goes under a birch tree whose foliage will begin to yellow soon and by November will lie on the ground under the white-skinned trees like bags of potato crisps spilled by children — oh, how everything must remind her of her son! The boy is said to have — beautifully — observed on the telephone during the summer that “Little whales live in our garden hose, spouting arcs out of its punctures when it is in use.”

He feels ashamed for entertaining the thought that she might be lying. No, everything he knows about her tells him that she’s not lying. The trees drip last night’s raindrops on him as he goes. In a few weeks it would be like being surrounded by wounds — the red leaves of autumn. The light is already mellower, each ray only half full: the summer was a time of things in light, while autumn is light on things. Kaukab was preoccupied with thoughts of “Perveen” all yesterday evening: “She said she lived on Habib Jalib Street. .” (She doesn’t — the house she inherited from her mother is on Ustad Allah Bux Road.) “Shamas, she was as beautiful as your mother, may she rest in peace, but she seemed Allah-fearing with it, not that I mean to speak ill of the dead. . She is a widow, her husband was a poet she said. . I wonder, Shamas, if her parents or older relatives worked with us in the factories back in the ’50s. .”

Coming home from work two days ago, walking slowly through the town centre, Shamas noticed that the photographer to whom all the Asian immigrants used to go to have their portraits done, back in the late 1950s, and the 1960s and 1970s, is selling his shop. He must have thousands of negatives, chronicling the migrants’ early years in this town, he had remarked to himself in passing; and now — as he walks towards Scandal Point to meet Suraya — it comes to him that the town government should buy the negatives from the photographer for its archives. Today is Saturday, and so first thing Monday morning he’ll see what has to be done to set the process in motion, and later today he should visit the photographer in town to tell him not to dispose of the negatives until he hears from him next week. The negatives are far too important to end up at a landfill site.

Suraya. He remembers something Kaukab has often accused him of in the past: that he retreats from the problems around him by thinking about his work. And now he wonders if he’s trying to drive Suraya from his thoughts — yet another disowning and banishing of her. No, the thought of the negatives came to him just now out of its own accord— that’s all.

He edges away from a small Japanese knotweed tree of whose pale cream flowers — looking as though dusted with custard powder — he had tried to discover the smell of a few years ago, and found himself taking in a lungful of decay, suppuration, the shock throwing him back on his heels where he had reached up with his neck stretched like that of a hanged man’s. Perfumes come from plants; it’s animals who produce disagreeable odours, humans included. Musk, honey, milk — these are as much an exception in the animal world as those tropical plants said to produce blossoms smelling of festering flesh or this Japanese knotweed around whose shimmering flowers he had cupped both hands that day, the way a young man kisses his first girl. He’ll never now kiss her mouth again while his penis is engorged and sticky at the tip like a bull’s muzzle, or lie with her head on his chest while from somewhere nearby comes the summer noise of a bee that’s got stuck inside a snapdragon flower, a panicked wing-thrash, as it tries to back out. According to her, what she did with him was a “sin,” and she, according to her, will have to bear the “stigma” of that sin “till Judgement Day and after.” She’ll view the pregnancy as the beginning of her punishment.

There must be a way that the baby in her womb can be saved. He will not — cannot — marry her, but perhaps she could have the baby and live here in England while they begin a custody battle to get her boy away from that wife beater.