Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

And just now on the bus, she was no doubt unable to face him with her guilt and had lied about it.

Nothing is an accident: it’s always someone’s fault; perhaps — but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a question can mean people are not able to face one another the next day.

And he is not sure whether he will ever be able to confront or compel her to admit the truth.

They are trapped here with each other — locked up together in solitary confinement — and there is no release.

I begin this action with the name of Allah, Kaukab whispers in Arabic. It’s midmorning and she’s begun preparing the evening meal: this house — so full of disappearances for so long — will have people in it tonight. She wonders if she had been smiling a little in her sleep last night — the daylight hours still numb from yesterday’s verdict.

Magpies, chuckling and cackling woodenly, dart in and out of the hedge outside, their markings panda-like, their tails turned up like a spoon in a glass.

From a carrier bag she takes out the karela s: the six-inch-long bitter-gourds, pointed at either end, the skin covered in tough green sine-waves like backs of crocodiles cresting the surface of a swamp. She counts the gourds and they are ten. A sufficient number: one each for the six adults, and one for the little grandson in case he wishes to experiment. And that still leaves three to prevent embarrassment and regret in case someone wants a second helping. She begins to prepare each gourd in turn. Feeling drops of moisture exploding in her face like fistfuls of rain hurled by the wind, she scrapes off the tough ridges onto the flattened carrier bag, and then carefully introduces a long cut into the skin of the gourd by running the tip of the knife from top to bottom. Inside, the seeds are large, square, and scarlet, embedded in white flannelette pulp. Her thumb gouging the vegetable delicately, she removes the seeds so that the gourd is empty. Each lime-coloured purse is to be filled later with half-cooked mince meat, wound about tightly with a yard of thread to prevent any spillage, and then cooked until the skins have softened and the mince inside fully ready. She drops the skins into a bowl and sprinkles salt over them to draw out the bitterness.

A little dance of rhythmically raised and lowered arms always accompanies this dish: one end of the thread has to be located and pulled out, the vegetable spinning on the plate like a kite-flyer’s spindle. Kaukab has never stitched the openings shut with a needle as some women do: she knows some metals can be poisonous and doesn’t want the risk.

The perfect hostess, she makes a mental note to put out a saucer on the dining table just before the meal begins, to receive the oily threads.

In a large pan the size of an elephant’s footprint (as Jugnu used to refer to it), Kaukab soaks some basmati rice. Bas —scent; mati —earth. She inhales the scent of Pakistan’s earth deep into her lungs. She washes the starch out of the grains by gently rubbing them until the water is no longer milky and the rice looks like little stones at the bottom of a clear rain-fed stream.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice, singing Allah’s praises, fills the air from the cassette player on the refrigerator. Nusrat is gone, leaving his songs behind, the way when a snail dies its shell remains.

The three cassettes, Pakistani imports, had cost £5 from Chanda’s parents’ shop two years ago; these twenty or so songs would have cost about £45 from white people’s music shops in the town centre, Nusrat being famous among them these days too. Kaukab had shuddered at the price when she was told about it: tonight’s lavish meal — stuffed bitter-gourds, grilled chicken, mutton-and-potato curry, pilau rice (in case someone doesn’t feel like eating chappatis), chappatis (in case someone doesn’t feel like eating pilau rice), shami kebabs, cauliflower-and-pea curry, fruit salad, sweet vermicelli decorated with edible gold leaf, all spiced and flavoured with the finest and freshest spices — will cost just over £39. It would feed six people and a child tonight and the leftovers would be consumed by Kaukab and Shamas over the next day or two.

Islam is said to forbid music, Kaukab remembers as she marinades the chicken breasts with natural yoghurt mixed with Australian wildflower honey and the juice of two lemons, puréed onion, grated ginger and garlic, but she has always reminded herself that when the holy Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had migrated to Medina, the girls there had welcomed him by playing the duff drums and singing Tala’al-Badru ‘alayna, which is Arabic for The white moon has risen above us.

From the cupboard under the sink, with its dark light of a forest floor (Jugnu again), she takes out the packet of desiccated Arabian dates that she had hidden there: hidden there from herself, dates being a weakness of hers. She steadies herself against the counter as she straightens — the bending has resulted in a spike of pain in her lower abdomen.

She opens each date to check that it doesn’t have insect eggs inside, takes out the stone, and then washes the flesh before dropping it in a bowl of hot water. As she discards any insect-riddled fruit, she remembers being a young girl and joking with her friends that they shouldn’t throw away fruit from the sacred land of Arabia just because of a minor impurity, that they should remember the story of the Pakistani man who went to Saudi Arabia to perform the pilgrimage and, in feverish delight at being in the holy land, began to kiss the words written on the walls along the road: Arabic to him was what the Koran was written in — he didn’t know that it was an everyday language too — and what he took to be verses from the Koran was actually an advertisement for hair-depilatory cream. Kaukab sighs as she remembers her girlhood, and only then is she disturbed by the realization that she has just thought of something irreverent if not offensive to Allah.

She shakes her head.

Muslims must be alert against such thoughts: Satan, the Father of Woes, is always around, ready to urinate in your mind through your ears the moment he feels you have let your guard down!

To drive away the Accursed One, she revolves sacred facts about the Koran in her head: the text is composed of 114 chapters, 70 of which were dictated at Mecca and 44 at Medina. It is divided into 621 divisions, called decades, and into 6,236 verses. It contains 79,439 words, and 323,670 letters, to each of which attach 10 special virtues. The names of 25 prophets are mentioned: Adam, Noah, Ismaeel, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Elisha, Jonah, Lot, Salih, Hud, Shuaib, David, Soloman, Dhul-Kafl, Idris, Elias, Yahya, Zacharias, Job, Moses, Aaron, Jesus, and Muhammad. Upon all these be prayer and peace, especially on Muhammad. There are no butterflies in the Koran but nine other birds or winged creatures are mentioned: the gnat, the bee, the fly, the hoopoe, the crow, the grasshopper, the bird of Jesus, namely the bat, the ant, and the bulbul. .

The dates, cleaned and stoned, will be cooked in creamed milk into which vermicelli — shining like a fairytale princess’s golden hair — will be added. With the potato peeler she shaves a heap of thin waxy crescents from a dried coconut, to be added to the syrupy vermicelli along with rose essence, pink-husked pistachio nuts (and the dates brought back to plump fullness by the boiling water). A square of gold leaf is safe from damage between two rectangles of rough paper: it is to be stuck onto the surface of the prepared dessert. The gold leaf flutters, aware of the slightest air current, when Kaukab lifts the top paper rectangle at one corner for a little peek. It is almost as though there is something not-quite dead between the pages of a book, a brilliant trapped moth.