Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Shamas stands outside the courts, waiting for the bus that will take him home. The sun has vanished completely and, here and there, there is a rain of cold thin droplets that gusts of wind push closer together so that briefly they look like pale-blue veils and banners floating away in the air, swaying. The trees toss as though rubbed with itching powder.

He stands holding the black flower of his umbrella, beside the shop called The Enchanted Forest that sells sawdust-filled hummingbirds in glass jars like sweets by the dozen, flamingos so life-like they can be mistaken for artificial, trout with carnation gills, and hornbills posing on sea-kneaded driftwood, and where the tawny lioness in the window becomes a striped tigress when the sun is in the right place and the bars of the shutters throw their shadows onto it.

Only this week has he been able to get out of bed following the assault. And the first thing he did was to go to Suraya’s house — the house she had grown up in, her mother’s house, the house where Shamas and she had made love on two occasions back in the summer. But it turns out that she has sold the house. He doesn’t know where she is. He rang the infirmary because he remembered wondering in his weeks’-long delirium whether she had killed herself, whether she had had a miscarriage. He even went to the cemetery to see if he could find her mother’s grave — in the hope that she would visit — but to no avail.

It’s December and this morning there was a layer of ice on the puddles as thin as the glass light-bulbs are made of. Kaukab has been unable to attend the trial because her condition is worsening. She needs surgery for her womb but the doctors have been unable to find a place for her at the hospital; the operation will be in January. She is in severe pain, he knows, and having to nurse him back to health has not been easy.

He raises a hand in greeting on seeing Kiran walking towards him, the misty rain accumulating on her umbrella, too insubstantial to collect into beads and slip down the outer slope like children sliding down a hill.

His heart kicking, he listened as the jury convicted Chanda’s brothers today. Feeling weightless and heavy at the same time, he heard the judge say that the killers had found a cure to their problem through an immoral, indefensible act; a cure, a remedy — and their religion and background took care of the bitter aftertaste. Their religion and background assured them that, yes, they were murderers but that they had murdered only sinners. The judge said that Chanda and Jugnu had done nothing illegal in deciding to live together but, Shamas knows, that the two brothers feel that the fact that an act is legal does not mean it’s right.

Kiran was at the courts too today. Charag, his former wife Stella, Mah-Jabin and Ujala have been attending the trial too; they are staying with some friends while in Dasht-e-Tanhaii. He was surprised to see Kiran there this afternoon but appreciated her gesture in coming.

“This cold weather,” she says quietly upon arriving to stand beside him, shaking that head full of greying hair, the hair that she used to weave into a plait strong as a leather belt when younger, coiling the locks and fastening them with a series of diamond-like rhinestone pins.

“This morning I discovered a single icicle, thin as a thermometer, outside my window.”

“Do you remember the year when winter unexpectedly arrived in September and everywhere the rain being held in the bowls of garden flowers froze into ice? About twenty years ago.”

“Was it really that long ago?” From this existence of two moments, we have to steal a life.

“Shamas, I haven’t heard whether the police have found out anything about who assaulted you.”

“No. I didn’t see who it was, so there are no leads. None of my children had been told about it, but they found out when we met at the courts this week. I am mostly healed but they were still shocked by my condition. They gave me a headache as they asked me a hundred concerned questions. Had the police done this, Had the police done that?” They had offered to drive him home, but he didn’t want their company — afraid that a shrapnel of the truth might be extracted from him by them.

The bus is almost full and they have to sit upstairs. Their bodies become warm soon after the journey begins while, outside, the rain intensifies, big drops that each hit the windows diagonally and break into a row of six to eight smaller drops, sticking there to the dry glass that is vibrating like a harp string.

“Your sons reminded me of you — the way the elder stands, the younger’s way of talking. I can see them in you.”

“The children will come home tomorrow for a few hours, much to their mother’s satisfaction. They are terribly missed by her.” His distorted reflection in the steel tubing of the seat in front reminds him of the time he saw Jugnu leaning over a scarab beetle: his face was being reflected in the insect’s polished silver back.

“I wanted to come to the courts yesterday too,” Kiran says.

Someone rustles a broadsheet newspaper at the back and it sounds like a peacock dancing with its tail fanned out, the feathers aquiver.

In the seat in front of Kiran and Shamas a small boy of about eight or nine (the same age as Suraya’s son, surely) is talking to an adult man, an uncle or father; he’s eating an apple, journeying bit by bit along its equator, and his talk is obviously a complaint about school, “Everyone these days is doing the sideways thumb-flick thing when they want to point to someone standing next to them, copying the new boy in class. .” He stops to take a bite.

A new boy in class? Shamas’s heart begins to beat faster as it occurs to him that the new boy could be Suraya’s son: could it be that she has managed to bring her son to England? Which school does this apple-eating boy attend?

“. . who’s called James Hamby. Everyone thinks he’s so cool. .”

The new boy is obviously not Suraya’s son. Just for a moment back then Shamas had had an image of himself standing outside this boy’s school to meet Suraya as she comes to pick up her son. His heart is hammering inside his breast — from now on he’ll see everywhere a possible map that’ll lead him to her. He fears he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.

Kiran says, “I know how painful the past few days have been for you. When they set up home together, there were rumours that Chanda’s family would soon poison them both. Of course, it didn’t happen — our neighbourhood runs on gossip.”

“Kaukab, I know, sometimes blames Jugnu and Chanda for what happened. They tried to turn their back on the world, on the world’s trouble, and found themselves stabbed in the back.”

“Meaning: No one on the planet has yet earned the right to be that innocent?”

Shamas nods, but his attention is drawn towards the people waiting to get on the bus, out there, now that they are approaching a stop: no, Suraya is not among them. He turns to Kiran. “Do you know this Punjabi couplet?

Kuj Sheher de loke vi zalim san Kuj mainon maran da shauk vi si

It’s by Munir Niazi.”

Kiran translates the words into English, “ On the one hand, the city surrounding me was easily provoked. On the other, I was curious about ways of dying. Though, of course, it’s their curiosity about ways of living that led to Chanda and Jugnu’s death.”

“The second verse should be, ‘On the other, I was curious about ways of living.’ Kuj mainon jeen da shauk vi si. They did not have a death wish. They had a life wish.”

“Jugnu, with a blindfold of butterflies on his eyes,” Kiran says after a while.

“Why weren’t they careful? Even animals know to retreat from obvious danger. For all his love of the natural world, Jugnu should have remembered that all animals retreat from fire.”