Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“All, except moths.”

The sky is getting darker. Evening is on its way, planting flags of sadness as it comes.

Kiran says, “You mustn’t feel too sad. In this life we are duty bound to dig up a little happiness. Remember Kaukab’s brother visited England last year?”

Shamas looks at her.

“I met him,” she says quietly.

Shamas nods: “I thought you would be curious.” He smiles at her: “I hope Kaukab didn’t see you two together.”

Shamas glances at the newspaper in front of him. He cannot remember the last time he looked at the news. A seventeen-year-old Palestinian girl was beaten to death in the Gaza Strip by her father for having lost her virginity. . The Bahamian authorities found 56 Haitian migrants and the body of another on a desolate shore six days after their sailing boat foundered, the US coastguard said yesterday. The survivors said about 130 people were on board when the 30 ft boat left Haiti for Miami ten days ago. . In Saudi Arabia, a fifteen-year-old boy has been publicly beheaded for changing his religion from Islam to Christianity. .

Shamas waits to see if she would resume telling him about the lost lover. There was a shameful expression on her face when she mentioned him, mentioned her search for happiness. Perhaps she thinks people would judge her? The world doesn’t rub salt into our wounds exactly: it has coated us with salt so that whenever we happen to get injured it is doubly painful.

“How is your father, Kiran?” he says to indicate that she doesn’t have to continue with the earlier subject, in case she has begun to regret having confided in him during the minutes away from him. “Is he still finishing every sentence with a laugh as though ridiculing his illness?”

Kiran however does wish to return to the earlier topic, and says, “I didn’t meet him while he was visiting your house. Remember he left Dasht-e-Tanhaii to go to London, to spend his last two weeks in England looking up old friends in the capital. Well, one day I received a letter from him — from London — saying he was coming back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii just to see me. The look on my face had alarmed my father. ‘What was in that letter?’ he asked, having seen me reading it earlier. ‘Has someone died?’ I wanted to say, no, someone dead has come alive.”

“He wrote to you and came back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii? I didn’t know that. Did you know he had named his daughter after you?”

“No, I didn’t, but he told me when we met. You knew?”

“Yes, but I didn’t want to mention it in case it hurt you. I am sorry.”

“There he was, at the doorstep one day soon after the letter. All my life I have looked at other men with the hope of catching a fleeting glimpse of one of his gestures, a skin-colouration like his, a smile resembling his. Now, there was the accumulated sadness of compromises in his features that comes to everyone in old age.”

“I don’t think he knew you had gone to Karachi.”

“No. I told him last year.” She is sitting stiffly, spine held away from the back of the seat. “He brought for me what he called ‘the five arrows of Love, the mind-born god’: there was a red lotus, a deep-red asoka flower, a coral-green froth that was mango blossom, yellow jasmine, and a blue lily.”

“Yes. Spring is the time associated with romance and they were the five flowers of the Subcontinental spring.”

“He stayed in a hotel and I visited him at various places in town.” She looks at Shamas. “What must you think of me, Shamas? An old woman living in the past.”

“Most people live in the past because it’s easy to remember than to think. Most of us don’t know how to think — we’ve been taught what to think instead. And, no, I don’t think badly of you.”

She doesn’t say anything more and looks out of the window, craning her neck occasionally to keep this or that in view as the bus rushes along the road.

Two days ago, Shamas thought for a brief moment that he recognized Suraya’s paisley jacket in the window of a charity clothes shop — but on second glance they turned out to be someone else’s footprints, not hers.

The bus passes an electrical appliances shop that has a poster claiming that theirs is the Best deal ON/OFFer. The photographs of the immigrants are lost forever. A jeweller’s shop will open soon in the place where the photographer’s studio used to be: empty wristwatch boxes and little finger-ring cases are arranged in neat rows in the window, the lids open: a miniature cinema theatre of satin-and-plush seats. A chair can be glimpsed inside, for the customers to sit in, its tall ornately moulded back bringing to mind the frame of a mirror.

“When he left me in England all those years ago,” Kiran says, “he said he’d be back in twenty-five days. When we re-met, he said if he were a religious man, he’d believe that God had turned those twenty-five days to twenty-five years as a punishment for not saying ‘God willing’ after telling me about his return. I told him that as far as I was concerned, he didn’t go even after he’d gone.”

“I never understood why you hadn’t married anyone else.”

“There were other possibilities. I’d get frightened of the loneliness of old age, and the members of the Sikh community would try to match me up with people. Some good, some not. But.” She waves her hand in resignation. “There was even a white man I had gone to school with and had been terribly in love with as a girl. I was the only Asian in my school, and I used to wonder why no one had ever asked me out on a date. I approached that boy to see if he’d go out with me but he said no. And when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘Well, you are a darkie!’ The word ‘Paki’ wasn’t invented until the 1970s, otherwise he would have used that.

When he said that to me, I suddenly realized, ‘Of course I am a darkie.’ And because I loved him I didn’t want him to be called a darkie-lover, and decided to stay away from him. He said, ‘It’s a pity you are a darkie, because if you were white you’d be really pretty.’ And then some years after we left school we ran into each other. . but nothing serious happened. The Sikh friends and acquaintances still try sometimes — they mean well, I suppose — but these days it’s mostly widowers and illegal immigrants.”

He wonders how long Kaukab’s brother had stayed with her last year and asks her.

She is silent and then says, “He was still here around the time Chanda and Jugnu died — late summer.”

“Do you still write to each other?”

She gives no answer.

He sees a tear slide down out of her eye and, appalled at his insensitivity at asking her so many intimate questions, he says, “I am terribly sorry.” And this after she has shown him the great kindness of coming to the trial.

“I have been crying for a while: the tears’ve caught up with me only now.”

She doesn’t say anything further and Shamas looks away, out where the rain and the ice-clusters have stopped falling, and a day-moon is shining in the winter sky.

Kiran, composed now, sighs and paraphrases what she said earlier, “I met him on five occasions around Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and a sixth time in my house. That was the last time. I kept his presence in England from my father, and — during that sixth meeting, when he came to the house — I also tried to hide the fact that he was in there. He came very late at night and I took him upstairs. .”

“You don’t have to tell me any of this, Kiran. I know it must be painful.”

“You are too kind. But please let me talk. I was upstairs with him. We poured all our longing into those moments. When we made love, it was as though we were trying to kill each other. And then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs but it was too late. .”