Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“Your father managed to climb the stairs?”

Kiran places a hand on her breast. “I know I have let you think I came to hear the verdict today as an act of friendship towards you.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I was there because of Chanda’s younger brother — Chotta. I thought you knew about me and him. We tried to keep our relationship a secret, but some people in the neighbourhood found out. I’ve always wondered if you were one of them.”

“And he walked in on you while you and. .”

“I had given Chotta a set of house keys. He saw us and went away shouting abuse, pulling off and shattering all those mirrors I have hanging in the staircase. A thousand broken mirrors: there was an eternity’s worth of bad luck in his wake. It all awoke my father. I had to tell him everything. I resisted at first, saying, ‘I cannot tell you what I have done.’ But he retorted, ‘A good person cannot do what others may not know.’ I am sorry, Shamas.”

“You don’t have to apologise, Kiran. Who am I to deny you the comforts of a companion?”

She buries her head in his shoulder.

He places a hand on her head. “Did you love Chotta?”

“I’ve cried for him, which is the same thing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“And I do have to apologize to you, perhaps even ask for forgiveness. You see, that night was the night Chanda and Jugnu are thought to have been murdered. I ran after him when I had put on my clothes but couldn’t find him anywhere. He must have been in a rage. I don’t doubt for a moment that I contributed to the anger he unleashed on Chanda and Jugnu. I am terribly sorry.” She looks at Shamas and then withdraws her gaze from him. “Please say something.”

A bird sits on a bare tree outside, as though waiting for it to grow leaves and flowers.

Kiran is saying, “He refused to see me all during the coming weeks. I’d stop in the streets on seeing him but he would turn back or slip into a lane. I caught up once, tried to put him in good humour with a dozen cajoleries, but he said women were nectar-coated poison, puffs of coloured dust, dancing butterflies, and pushed me away.”

“When did you begin seeing him?”

“I think it must’ve been around the time Chanda and Jugnu began seeing each other.”

“And it also ended the night their story ended.”

“The fact that they were happy while he had just been betrayed must’ve made him resent them, perhaps.”

Daylight has faded altogether now; the road outside has become a river of car headlights heading home. The bus passes the Ali Baba carpet warehouse. Plastic fish are strung by their mouths on a sagging string above the fishing equipment shop, looking like the washing line of small mermaids.

Chanda and Jugnu are out there somewhere.

And Suraya.

Perhaps she returned to Pakistan? But: an unmarried woman with a child in her womb — she’ll be arrested for the sin of fornication. No, no, she’s still here in England.

Perhaps she aborted the child to be able to go back: her husband was about to marry another woman, and so she did all she could to be in Pakistan to disrupt and prevent the wedding—?

He has tried to get information from Kaukab about “Perveen,” but apparently she has not been in touch since that first time. “Other women of the neighbourhood got to her, no doubt,” she said with regret. “Telling her lies about me, turning her against me. And, between my own illness and your injuries, I haven’t had time to go to her street.”

Kiran asks, “Do you want to know how it began?”—and goes on without waiting for his answer: “I heard a knock — very gentle — on my door one night. It was about ten o’clock. I opened the door and he asked me if he could come in. I recognized him from the shop, and although I was taken aback by him asking to be let in, I brought him into the kitchen. He said he wanted to talk, but he kept his eyes on me quite blatantly as I moved about making tea, and it was only after a while that I realized he was drunk. And it must’ve been soon after that that he stood up, eyes still trained on me. We both knew what he wanted to do but neither made a move for many minutes. Things refused to come to a boil. My father asked from his bed who was at the door, and I said no one. That was his prompt. The fear that I would shout if he came near me was what had kept him from making a move but now he knew I wouldn’t. So he lunged.” Without looking at Shamas she says, “I didn’t resist.”

“I think I understand why you didn’t go to the police to offer information or come to talk to me.”

“It was because people would have called me names.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“After Chanda and Jugnu disappeared there were rumours about Chanda’s family’s involvement. Chotta had refused to talk to me or see me after that terrible night but it was several weeks later that he came around one day and confessed to the murders. I never saw him again. I am so sorry.”

“Are you saying you could have helped put the whole matter to rest sooner?”

“No, no. He told me everything after the policemen from England had got their testimonies from the people in Sohni Dharti. I am sorry.”

“I don’t know what to say. You did what you had to do to save your name, Kiran. Even he tried to preserve your good name: what happened with you that night isn’t mentioned in any of the testimonies — that that was part of the rage unleashed on Chanda and Jugnu. He didn’t tell it to anyone.”

The bus is pulling up at their stop. They both go down the stairs and the winter’s chill hits them in the face when they get out. Each day after the trial, Shamas has gone home and told Kaukab the details of what happened at the court. Based on what he learns at the court, they put together the sequence of events that led to Chanda and Jugnu’s murders, adding new details each time he returns from the hearing, moving the narrative of the couple’s last few hours forward each day. But he’ll have to keep secret what Kiran has just told him.

He and Kiran stand together for a few moments before going their separate ways.

“Do you know what he was doing, drunk, knocking on my door at ten o’clock that night?”

Shamas looks up at the sky where the moon is the colour of garlic peel, with a morning-sky blue girdle around it.

“He had mistaken my house for the prostitute’s next door, and when I answered he had decided to try his luck with me.”

“This December is harsher than last year’s.”

“Well, we are older and weaker by another year, remember.” She smiles. Shamas smiles in return and tells her to tread carefully on the rain-slippery roads as she walks away.

After a sentence has just been written down, a sense of unfinished business compels the tip of the pen to return to that place back there where an “i” is still to be dotted, a “t” left uncrossed; and during a distraction, the mind is vaguely aware that somewhere in the room there is an apple not yet eaten down to the core, a cup of tea with two sips still remaining in it; and so now, now that the conversation with Kiran is over, he is aware of a similar dissatisfaction within him. He locates it: he had wanted to ask her whether Chanda’s brother had ever discussed with her the matter of Chanda and Jugnu setting up home together. He and Kiran were lovers: the matter would have come up. How did he view his own illicit and, yes, sinful encounters with Kiran while condemning Chanda and Jugnu for the same thing?

As he watches her recede in the distance, he wonders whether she had told him the truth: he wonders whether she knew about the details of the murders many weeks or even months before the British police got their lead in Sohni Dharti. She just didn’t come forward because she was afraid of what people would think of her.