Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Kaukab looks out to see if she can find someone on their way to the shop, to ask them to get a packet of pistachios for her. All ears, Adam’s apple, and brittle vanity, a teenager goes by but he is going in the opposite direction; he is smoking and she resists the urge to tell him like a good aunt that he should be fasting.

Kaukab shakes her head to drive away the smell of food from her head, the smell of Shamas’s lunch — it has mostly evaporated but the tip of its long tail is trapped under the lid of the enamel pan in which the leftovers lie. An Eid card has arrived from her father in Pakistan, full of pop-up doves in flight and minutely detailed palm fronds and jasmine garlands: it is impossible to open without risking a rip to the various tines and frills that stick to each other like eyelashes after sleep.

She goes to the window and looks out and sees a newspaper photographer taking a picture of the vicar outside the church; it is typical that the white people are treating their holy man as though he is ridiculous for having stood up against the moral vacuum of this obscene and degraded country. For once she would like to go from her house to, say, the post office without being confronted by the decay of Western culture.

Jesus Christ must be spinning in his grave.

Why is she stranded at a point in life where just about everything has stopped making sense? She begins to cry, wondering how what He does to humans can be called justice. Why has He chosen this life for her, written down such things under her name in the Book of Fates? May He forgive her for these thoughts. Yes, His justice cannot be defined by human terms. Let’s imagine a child and an adult in Paradise who both died in the True Faith. The adult, however, has a higher place in Paradise than the child. The Child shall ask Allah: “Why did you give that man a higher place?” “He has done many good works,” Allah shall reply. Then the child shall say, “Why did you let me die so soon that I was prevented from doing good?” Allah will answer: “I knew that you would grow up to be a sinner, therefore, it was better that you should die a child.” Thereupon a cry shall rise from those condemned to the depths of Hell, “Why, O Master, did You not let us die before we became sinners?”

It does seem unjust to us humans but we cannot fathom His ways, she tells herself. Stella, her ex-daughter-in-law, once told her that her middle name — Iris — comes from a beautiful girl of Greek and Roman myths who had iridescent wings, but lack of sufficiently varied pigments had meant that she is rarely depicted in paintings from ancient times. This is a little like how things are with Allah. We humans just don’t have enough shades and tints at our disposal to make a picture of Him. Here Kaukab is, away from her children, away from her customs and country, alone and lonely, and yet He tells her to have faith in His compassion. And that is what she should do uncomplainingly, reminding herself that she is not lost, that He is with her in this strange place. And yet she doesn’t know what to do about the fact that she feels utterly empty almost all the time, as though she has outlived herself, as if she has stayed on the train one stop past her destination.

Ki pata-tikana puchde ho—

Mere sheher da na Tanhaii ey

Zila: Sukhan-navaz

Tehseel: Hijar

Jeda daak-khanna Rusvaii ey.

Oda rasta Gehrian Sochan han, te mashoor makam Judaii ey.

Othay aaj-kal Abid mil sakda ey—

Betha dard di raunaq laii ey.

The words of the Punjabi song come to Chanda’s mother as she prepares to open the shop, the yellow leaves of early November scraping on the road outside because they are being blown about by the breeze. Fossilized dragonflies: there are faint marks on her cheeks and temples from the creases on the pillow where she had lain awake most of the night.

You ask for my address—

The name of my town is Loneliness

District: The Relating of Tales

Sub-district: Longing

And its post office is Condemnation and Disrepute.

The road leading to it is Devoted Thought, and its famous monument is

Separation.

That’s where Abid, the writer of these lines, can be found nowadays—

There he sits, attracting everyone to a lively spectacle of pain.

She stacks the shelves with items taken from brown cardboard boxes. It is forty minutes till opening time, when the shop will at once fill up with little children ready to buy sweets and chocolates by the handful, it being Eid today. In ten or so minutes she will be able to track her own little granddaughters above the shop as they thump the floor, running about to put on their frocks and veils stitched with sparkling gota and kiran. All dressed up, bespangled and a-clink with toy jewellery and glass bangles, they will come downstairs to get a blessing from their grandmother on the happy day.

A woman, smiling, knocks on the glass of the entrance door, and they exchange Eid greetings as she lets her in — the woman has run out of honey to marinate the chicken for tonight’s dinner.

As Chanda’s mother is pointing towards where the jars of honey are kept, another woman enters and gives them both her Eid greeting: “Though, of course,” she continues, “what is the point of Eid in this country — no relatives, no friends, no going up to the roof to see the Eid moon the night before, no special Eid programmes on the TV, no balloon sellers in the streets and no monkey-wallahs with their monkeys leaping about dressed up like Indira Gandhi in a sari and a black-and-white wig? In short, no tamasha, no raunaq. ”

Except dard di raunaq —thinks Chanda’s mother, remembering the Punjabi verses from earlier. A spectacle of pain.

The woman with the honey agrees with the newcomer. “We are stranded in a foreign country where no one likes us. I heard someone say only yesterday that our poor Shamas-brother-ji was beaten up by, who else but, white racist thugs.”

“By the whites? One of the rumours I have heard is that the people from the mosque had him beaten up, to stop him from testifying against the man who he is said to have seen abusing a child.”

The new customer has come to pick up the mince meat which she had ordered over the phone and which Chanda’s father had prepared last night and placed in the freezer. “This is cold. I feel for poor brother-ji’s frozen hands. Why don’t you hire a full-time assistant?”

“Sister-ji, don’t be inconsiderate,” the woman with the honey says. “Why should they hire an assistant? Next month there will be a trial and then, Allah willing, both the boys will be back here and take over the reins of the business from their aged mother and father.”

The other woman looks ashamed and says to Chanda’s mother, “Forgive me, sister-ji, I didn’t mean to imply that your sons would never return. They are going to be acquitted, of course they are. And from December onwards, brother-ji would never have to touch these hatefully chilly pieces of meat. Allah will deliver both your boys to you safely. Just you wait. But when I referred to a full-time assistant, I was thinking of that boy I saw here three days ago. I thought it was someone you had hired part-time, to relieve the load a little.”

Chanda’s mother takes an invisible blow to the stomach and holds her breath. “I don’t know who you are talking about,” she manages to say in a tiny voice.

The other customer joins in with a frown. “I saw a boy here last week too, sister-ji, at the back. No?”