Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

And then with a great lunge of effort, like a hosepipe whipping into an arc of frenzy as water enters it at great pressure, he makes his body stand upright in tearing eagerness, jerking his head up away from the ground with a burst of energy: in a congestion of tender impulses, he tells himself that they are definitely on their way to harm Suraya — she who is so gentle and careful that she touches everything as though it were a part of her— and he must stop them.

Suddenly life matters again.

He can see the three of them walking towards the car and is surprised that he hasn’t been lying here for longer. He limps after them in enthusiastic dizziness, everything a blur and everything perfectly clear. His progress wavers because he cannot walk in a straight line. He has to alter his direction every other second to bring them to the centre of his vision. They slide in and out of view periodically, in unexpected directions and diagonals. He drops and picks up again the torn bundle of newspapers that he had obviously felt compelled to collect and bring with him, not wishing to waste them, not having any memory of the time he made the decision to gather them up from around him before setting out. Perhaps he has vomited — his breath smells — but he has no memory of that either.

He steadies himself and moves towards them like a bubble flowing helplessly towards a drain. His heart clubbing away inside, he is not sure whether he is groaning but they do become aware of him eventually and stop and turn around.

Kaukab feels herself being watched from above.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that whenever a man’s earthly wife makes difficulties for him, his seventy-two houri wives — waiting for him up there in Paradise — sigh regretfully. If ever her man wishes to copulate with the earth wife and she makes excuses or shuns him, the houri wives curse her all night.

The houris reserved for Shamas are cursing Kaukab from up there, because she has just stumbled out of the room where Shamas is lying, a month after his beating. Twenty-five of the past thirty days he has spent in hospital. He still gets delirious sometimes and has attempted to undress her just now, asking her to touch him between the legs, fondling her breasts, wanting her to show him the scattering of moles on her upper thighs that he loves. More than once over the previous weeks while she was visiting him at the hospital, he asked her — in delirium — how she feels about another baby. And several times he called out to someone or something called “Pleiades.” And twice he tried to struggle out of the hospital bed saying, “I have something urgent to attend to at Scandal Point.” The one in Shimla?

She has of course refused him intimacy before, but each time she has pretended — yes, pretended, she admits tearfully — that it was not a sexual advance, a request for access to her body, and has therefore remained relatively free of guilt, and free of the fear of Allah’s retribution, but the recent touches and caresses have been explicit.

Shamas is bruised everywhere on the surface and there are innumerable internal injuries, the doctors saying he is lucky to be alive, and his fae ces has been quite liquid like bird droppings since the attack that he has failed to explain to anyone, not remembering anything about it, some people in the neighbourhood saying that without doubt the perpetrators belonged to Chanda’s family, that it is their revenge for the fact that, come December, their sons are facing a life sentence because of Shamas’s brother.

A woman from the neighbourhood — who recently has been accompanying Kaukab to the gynaecologist because Kaukab has reached that age where her womb is slipping out of her vagina and must be either surgically removed or stitched back to the inner lining of her body — said, “When I heard the news my heart was as a porcelain plate dropped from a high terrace. May these bad times be short-lived and Allah take you both into His compassion once again soon.”

She has just given him lunch and is now bringing the tray downstairs, the plate glowing in the enclosed staircase: it is part of an old set and she knows that bone china is partly bone, and goes yellow with age due to the phosphorus in the bones. That afternoon a month ago, when he came home clutching tattered newspapers to himself, he looked as though he’d been in a room full of glass cases when an earthquake had struck, and that those cases had contained venomous snakes. His face was swollen and when she saw him there was a split-second of confusion as to his identity before she recognized him — by his clothing. He was dribbling as though an egg had just cracked in his mouth.

Her womb — the first dress of her daughter, the first address of her sons — is a constant source of pain these days and she comes down the stairs carefully. She tells herself that she must bear up patiently, that a person is like a tealeaf: drop it into boiling water if you want to see its true colour. She reads verses from the Koran when the pain looks as though it is about to increase.

By the white forenoon

And the brooding night!

Thy Lord has neither forsaken thee

Nor hates thee.

Since midmorning there has been a distant buzz in the air from the grass-cutting machines at work on the meadow-like slopes behind the house. The wildflowers there are receiving their second cut of the year, and, all afternoon, a scent which is a compound of sap and shredded petals has been swirling down the hill, having a leavening effect on the atmosphere.

She’ll make some rice pudding for Shamas this afternoon because he has asked for something sweet, and goes to check that there are pistachios in the cupboard. And maybe she should taste Shamas’s food— despite the fact that it is Ramadan and she’s fasting — to make sure that the things like spices and salts are in proportion. Allah — ever kind, ever compassionate — says that if you are a slave, a servant or a wife, and your master, employer, or husband is a strict man, you are allowed to taste the food you are cooking for him during your Ramadan fast to see that the salt and spices are according to his preference, to prevent a beating or unpleasantness. Shamas doesn’t mind, but — since he is not well— perhaps her violating the fast would fall into the category of wifely devotion and love, and be excused.

There are no pistachios, and she wonders if she should go to the shops to get them, though Shamas’s claw managed to scratch her painfully between the legs before she escaped; as it is, nowadays it’s hard for her to even stand up sometimes.

Kaukab hasn’t informed her children of their father’s beating because she is afraid they would believe the rumour of Chanda’s family’s involvement and do something improper or illegal. Her children are mild-mannered with the exception of Ujala, but that sight upstairs will move anyone to do something drastic. She imagines various horrible scenarios like one of her boys ending up in prison like Chanda’s brothers for having committed a violent crime.

“O just think how that girl Chanda managed to destroy her entire family,” a woman said recently — the day Shamas got beaten up, in fact.

That the man who was equally responsible for the ruin of the shop-owning family was dear to Kaukab did not prevent the woman from saying this out loud in front of her, because everyone knows that Kaukab had disapproved of the two sinners. Kaukab and the women had been sitting in Kaukab’s front garden — which is the sunny side of the street in the afternoons — and peeling and preparing vegetables, discussing various matters. Just then a bird had started to shriek somewhere nearby, so that Kaukab and the others had had to cover their ears; and then realizing that the bird was in the lilac tree beside the garden gate, a woman threw an enraged slipper in that direction. They were stunned when a rose-ringed parakeet—“Here in this country?”—emerged and flashed away, the slipper getting stuck in the branches, a few heart-shaped lilac leaves falling out onto the ground. The bird paused for a few moments on a telephone wire to smooth its plumes, sprang up and then disappeared into the sky. “They were said to be flying about on the edges of Dasht-e-Tanhaii but now they are spreading into town, it seems.”