Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“As I said, my children are perfectly happy and so am I.” He is trying to suppress his anger, his earlobes hot.

“You may be happy but is your wife?” A voice comes from behind Shamas.

He turns around and sees that two men are standing ten yards away from him, and behind them, a further ten or so sun-filled yards along, on a narrow cement path that cuts through the swathe of wild grasses and late-summer’s imperfect blossoms, is a car, three of its four doors open. Maple leaves glisten above it, those at the lower edge of the canopy moving rhythmically to and fro on their long stalks like the pendulum of a clock. All this is glimpsed in the sweep of the gaze, but Shamas’s eyes have returned to the two men because they have begun to walk towards him.

And the man who had been talking to him takes a step nearer to him too, aggressively. The two men arrive and in turn take his right hand into their own in an enforced shake, smiling.

He is not used to this: the people he has dealt with up until now have left their authority at the door when they entered his office. All three of these however are standing too close to him, and he is starting to tremble, experiencing a kind of vertigo and an unpleasant lightness in his feet — an awareness of being close to the edge of something.

He wonders whether Suraya’s husband could have sent these people.

Maintaining his composure — he does not wish to appear undignified in front of these strangers — he steps out of the cordon they seem to have made around him and begins to walk away at a controlled pace. But they, obviously unconcerned about what he may think about them, break into a little run as they try to keep up with him and he is brought to a halt as all three overtake him and block his way. It could almost be playfulness— but he is beginning to think that it is not a game but a blood sport.

One of the two who had been waiting behind him earlier says: “Shamas-ji, you are happy with the situation but your wife came to us several months ago, a year and a half ago to be precise, to see if we could track down her son Ujala, and before that, four or five years ago, she had wanted us to see if your daughter Mah-Jabin hadn’t fallen in with bad company. She told us in passing that she was devastated when Mah-Jabin left her husband, despite the fact that like every other decent mother she had told her daughter that the house you are going to — the house of your husband and in-laws — is Heaven but you are not to desert it even if it becomes Hell, that as far as the parents are concerned a daughter dies on the day of her wedding.”

The second of the new arrivals says, “Your wife did not want you to know about the fact that she had visited us obviously because you don’t have a mother’s heart in your breast and wouldn’t have understood. A mother misses her children when they run away so she wants them back.”

“Some women in the neighbourhood had put your wife in touch with us — she is, of course, a very polite and pious lady. In the end, on both occasions, she didn’t want to go through with it, but we were very distressed by her plight. She said her children were the other half of her heartbeat.”

“Now,” says the second new man, his face pitted around the mouth, scars from the beard of acne he must’ve had as an adolescent, “is it fair that you wish to deny other families the service your own family contemplated using not long ago? Why are you trying to blacken our name, asking awkward questions through your office? We are but humble slaves of our community.”

The more the man talks the more terrible it is for Shamas. Once again, and for an instant, he thinks this isn’t really happening, that his total disbelief will presently set reality straight and make these men vanish. He looks at the talking man’s empty hands as they are balled into fists that are now being aimed at his face, his head, his ribs. The newspapers fall from his grip. The other men join in with blows of their own. When he cries out in pain, they hit him harder, on the kidneys and belly, and he does not know where to put his hands. A metal finger ring grazes his face and the pain is as though a line had been drawn on his face in sulphuric acid.

The blows came harder and faster but then, as though he is being hit by a single person, they begin to come after measured pauses, the men deciding, calculating carefully where to hit him before doing so — they are obviously people who understand the reality of violence and inflicting pain.

He can no longer breathe through his nose and as he lies there, the newspapers, torn or whole, scattered all around him, he feels a mouth draw close to his face and say,

“This is just a mild warning. Next time we’ll deal with you in a Pakistani way. Watch out or I’ll crush you like this”—he makes a fist and squeezes it tighter—“and lick you off the palm of my hand.”

“And don’t go to the police about this — unless you want people to find out about what you have spent the whole summer doing with that whore of a woman at the bookshop.”

Another voice adds, “In that small room it must’ve been hot as a pistol that’s just been fired but, no doubt, the sweat these two worked up kept them cool.”

“He said earlier he had to be somewhere. Maybe the dirty shameless bitch is waiting for him over there as we speak, her fat tits at the ready, the knot of her shalwar ’s drawstring loosened.”

There is the sound of laughter. “Perhaps we should go and see.”

“Look at him. He’s trying to growl at us. I think we are hurting his feelings by talking about her in this manner. She’s obviously so pure that angels can use her clothing as prayer mats. In fact that is why she’d take off her clothes and put them on the floor — to let the angels praise Allah on them — while he shoved his cock in her mouth or got her arsehole ready with fingers dipped in oil.”

One of Shamas’s eyes is looking into the ground and the men vacate the second eye’s view, moving away. There is a red pricking in both his eyes, both have caught a fresh glimpse of the humiliations Suraya went through with him in order to be united with son and husband. How she must have loathed him during the hours she spent with him, he who was under the impression that she was with him out of her own choice, had yet to be told the truth about her circumstances by her!

He lies there with an ear pressed to the ground (down there where Chanda and Jugnu are turning into clay) as though trying to listen out for something, as though he’s a traveller in a fairytale who’s heard someone call out to him while he was crossing a forest, someone buried alive by a sorcerer who will be freed and jump out of the hole when the traveller digs deep enough.

He feels the sun creep up on him. Someone with a stick-crazy dog will come upon him soon, he reassures himself; those animals and their masters are constantly taking each other places, the dogs’ fur covered in inch-long bits of grass like wrong-coloured stitches on a garment; the dogs wrapping their leads around their owners, revolving and describing circles like a lighthouse’s beam. Or one of those figures he always sees from a distance, busy with a boat and its triangular sail at the edge of the water, their legs spread like a wishbone, ripples of breeze running across the material of the sail like the flank of a cow twitching away flies, in Pakistan.

Shamas lies on the grass after the voices of his assailants have receded into the distance, the newspapers rustling around in the descending silence, touching his skin, a ripped-up piece dyed crimson red with blood — his, for he can taste the salt in his mouth. He cannot keep his eyes open and feels very sleepy all of a sudden, very tired, eyes heavy and unable to focus. He makes an effort to move his legs but is unable to and closes his eyes. .