Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

And then suddenly everyone had their mental activity arrested for a few seconds because they had seen Shamas standing at the bottom of the garden, past the lilac tree, his face and hair bloody, clutching torn newspapers to himself. The women sat as if painted in a picture, wonder settling on them in layers. There were a dozen or so flies around his blood and wounds. And then Kaukab, her tongue feeling dry down to its very root, rushed to the gate and opened it to let him stumble in, the others running forward to assist or staying behind to clear a path for him through the bowls and platters of onions and chillies and potatoes and spinach, the sparrows flying away where they had been pecking away at the peels and the discarded coriander leaves.

Someone ran into the blue kitchen with its yellow tables and chairs to call 999 in rudimentary English, speaking to a white person for the fourth time in her life, wondering whether she should add the word “fuck” into her speech now and then to sound more like a person who belonged to this country, because she had seen her English-speaking children use that word with great confidence, whatever it meant. Kaukab hadn’t been apprehensive at Shamas’s absence from the house: she had gone to sleep after reading the Koran until one o’clock the previous night and she had slept through the alarm that should have awakened her for the pre-fast meal and the dawn prayers. She woke up at ten minutes to nine and saw that Shamas had bathed and gone out. She hadn’t missed him at all, it being a habit of his to spend time in the town library on Saturdays, or take a bus out into the woody areas of the county, or go into his office to do some work — sometimes do all three.

Kaukab cannot find any pistachios in the cupboard. Of course, to make rice pudding without the avocado-green and hot-pink of the pistachios is like making the children wear clothes without colours and sequins on a festive occasion, a festive occasion like Eid which everyone in Pakistan must already have started preparing for, the way people here start getting ready for Christmas weeks beforehand, almost everything in the year planned with that festival in mind.

Pain shoots between her legs, and so she needs to hear Ujala’s voice on his answering machine and moves towards the pink room where the telephone lies; but there is a knock on the door and she finds a neighbourhood woman holding a bunch of roses wrapped in a newspaper, the strong thorns sticking through the paper here and there.

“I have just pruned my roses, Kaukab, but I didn’t want to waste these blooms. I thought they would brighten brother-ji’s room, may Allah give him health. How is he? Be careful, they are sharp.”

Kaukab exclaims with delight and takes the spiky package from her. “He’s resting. But isn’t it a bit early to cut back the rosebushes? I don’t do mine until the middle of October.”

“It is early, but the builders are coming to do some work at my house and I don’t know if I’ll get a chance later on. You know what they say about builders and djinns: once they’ve entered a house they are hard to get rid of.” Instead of a gardener’s leather gauntlet, she is wearing oven gloves for her pruning task, and the cloth they are made of looks Pakistani to Kaukab: a web of embroidery studded with little mirrors like dewdrops. She must have made the gloves herself because there is no home oven-cooking in Pakistan and so no oven gloves of any kind have been conceived.

Kaukab remembers from her childhood the cakes that Shamas’s father used to bake with live coals heaped around the pan, may he rest in peace, remembers how the vanilla perfume would roam through the winter streets of Sohni Dharti and find all the children like someone expert at hide-and-seek.

“I would like to smell these roses,” Kaukab says, “but I won’t. Rose essence is used in several sweetmeats and I am afraid Allah might think me a conniver, think I am smelling the fragrance of these roses just to get closer to food during my fast.”

The woman is sitting at the table and, having taken off the oven gloves, is helping Kaukab remove some of the leaves from the rose stems and arranging the flowers in the vase of water. “Allah is compassionate, Kaukab, and in any case He knows everything in our heart.”

“He dictated it all to the angels who jotted it down in the Book of Fates.”

“I was just thinking of that Book earlier in the morning, Kaukab. I thought if only I could get a look in its pages I’d know how long I’ll have to wait for any news of my son, or I could flip back a few pages to go into the past to see what happened to him, where he is.” She breaks off and twirls a rose in her hand, blinking fast to prevent tears.

Gently, Kaukab rubs the woman’s shoulder. “You mustn’t despair. Allah will come to your aid.”

“I told him that if he wanted to go on holiday he should go to Pakistan and stay with his uncles. But he said he wanted to go to a different place, telling me that the point of travel was to ‘discover new things’—whatever that means. In the end I was happy that he was going to Turkey, a Muslim country.” The woman stares at the pink roses. “He disappeared almost on arrival in Istanbul a week ago. The police found a body in the Bosphorous yesterday and tests are being carried out to discover the identity. It is possible he was killed for his passport.”

Kaukab nods. She has heard that a British passport can fetch £5000 in poorer countries.

“I know I must have faith in Him, Kaukab, but my heart sinks at the thought of what might have happened. Abdul Haq, from Gulmohar Street, was lucky but will my son be? Haq recovered last year from his fractured skull which he got after visiting Istanbul’s historic mosques. They had drugged him and then bludgeoned him, taking his passport. Accepting the hospitality of a kind local who offered him tea was the last thing he remembered.” The woman lowers her voice to an almost inaudible whisper. “Who knows what has happened? Only yesterday The Afternoon said that a rotting corpse has been discovered under the debris of a tower that was blown up back in the summer.”

“We mustn’t allow ourselves to despair of His mercy, sister-ji. Tower, what tower?”

“It was in the paper, but no one knows much about it yet. It was a dark-skinned boy, they say, a Pakistani or Indian or Bengali. It’s possible that he was an illegal immigrant but who can tell?”

“May Allah treat the poor boy’s soul gently,” Kaukab whispers. “He must be known to a few other illegal immigrants in the town, but they can’t come forward to say they knew him because they fear they’ll be detained and sent back.”

The woman sighs and places a hand on Kaukab’s. “You are so good, Kaukab. You have had tragedy in your own family and yet here you are, thinking of others, consoling me. You haven’t forgotten His goodness. And of course the same is true of Chanda’s mother — she’s been so forthcoming with reassuring words too.” She places a rose into the vase. “Incidentally, Kaukab, last night I couldn’t sleep and so, at about three, I decided to get up to read a few pages of the Koran and pray for the safety of my boy. I was in the bathroom, doing my ablutions, and through the window I saw Chanda’s mother standing outside Jugnu’s house.”

“Next door?”

“Yes. The poor woman obviously wanted to see the last home her daughter had had, to stand in front of it and grieve. She couldn’t do it in the daylight hours because people would have found it strange, thinking she was being disloyal to her sons. The things we poor mothers have to do, Kaukab!”

“I don’t think it’s wise for her to be out at three.”

“She wasn’t alone. She had with her that young man who they have employed as help at the shop. She was pointing out various things to him — no doubt telling him little things like which was the room filled with butterflies.”