Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

The food she is making is more than enough for six people, but, who knows, perhaps Allah has written in the Book of Fates that Jugnu and Chanda — safe and sound — are to walk in on the family just as it is sitting down to eat; in that case there won’t be any leftovers for tomorrow or the day after.

She opens the front door to throw the date stones into the rose beds. They might germinate there next year. Tall sky-touching palms, the sons and daughters of trees growing over there in sacred Arabian soil. But she has to close the door immediately because the Sikh woman Kiran is coming down the slope with the maples, between the church and the mosque.

She crosses the kitchen and throws the date stones into the flowerbeds in the back garden. The sycamores and the hawthorns on the slope behind the house are bare. She recalls how, back in spring, the hawthorns’ clotted five-petalled profusion had weighed heavy on the branches like snow. The dangling arm-long sprays had overlapped like feathers on a bird’s body. And thinking about the white hawthorn blossoms, she remarks that their scent is not too dissimilar to a Pakistani beauty soap that, according to the advertisements, was the choice of nine out of ten film starlets. The air now smells of freshly cut wood and the sun is a white hole in the sky.

There is a knock on the front door just then — and she is paralysed, absolutely sure that it is Kiran. What does she want? The knock sounds again and she opens the door to find

Ujala.

“Oh my life!”

A chunk had been bitten out of her life when he walked away from her, away from this house, and with the Ganges flowing from one eye and the Indus from the other, she wraps her arms around him, opening her hands wide to touch as much of his back as possible. When she releases him he doesn’t say anything, just gives a little flick to get his long hair out of his beautiful antelope eyes in that arrogant-seeming gesture of his. She brings him in and wants to take his face in her hands, to kiss him again and again. Get drunk, my heart. Go mad, my eye. But then she remembers what a woman had once told her at the shop concerning the latest Western theories about the bond between a mother and her son: “They say all mothers secretly want to go to bed with their sons. A bunch of people in suits and ties was talking about it on television last night.” Kaukab had felt repulsed, her mind spinning with revulsion at the idea: these kind of things were said by vulgar hawkers and fishwives in the bazaars of Pakistan, but here in England educated people said them on television. To speak in this manner about a mother’s love! This immoral and decadent civilisation was intent on soiling everything that was pure and transcendental about human existence! Mothers did check that their baby boys’ penises were stiff first thing in the morning but that was nothing more than a parent’s concern for the child, to see that everything about him was in order, developing satisfactorily; and women also quietly began to look for signs of nocturnal emissions in the bed linen and the pyjamas when the sons turned thirteen or thereabouts, and, once again, that too was no different from the eye a mother kept on her female children’s development.

She backs away from Ujala, who has yet to say anything.

Eight years!

“You look—” she begins but stops to wipe her tears with her veil.

“How do I look?”

Like a dream walking is what she wants to say. “I knew you were coming, but I didn’t know when. I said to myself he should hurry up and get here.” She wants to use the English expression “the sooner, the better” but wonders whether it isn’t actually “the better, the sooner”; she decides not to risk looking foolish in his eyes. With such tiny things is a semblance of dignity maintained, is a liveable life assembled. She moves forward and takes the boy in her arms again but he makes an attempt at release after only a couple of seconds, his head averted a little in discomfort. She lets go, the noise in her head louder than a tin roof in monsoon — thoughts, fears and words appearing and popping like bubbles.

The heavy stone of silence is back on the boy’s lips as he takes a chair.

“Would you have breakfast? No? Tea? I am making vermicelli for you. When you were little you used to call it ‘princess’s hair.’ ” She is afraid he will snap at her, tell her to stop digging up the grave of the time that has passed, the days that have died. But he smiles at her politely, his eyes haunted, his look colourless. One night while she was pregnant with him she had dreamt there was a rainbow in her womb. What has stolen his colours?

“How did you get here?” she asks.

He is silent as though his tongue has become fused to the roof of his mouth.

“A woman in the street told me yesterday she thought she saw you in the town centre,” she says. “Was that you?”

He takes a deep breath and shrugs.

“I told her she must’ve mistaken someone else for you, some nondescript boy who reminded her of me. I said to her, ‘Was he a handsome boy? Don’t go by my looks, sister-ji. My sons are very very beautiful.’ ” She hopes he will let her look at him to her heart’s content. How long has she waited for him to return, those long years, her eyes painted with the kohl of longing, a glittering sequin of hope stitched onto her drab veil. His face, once round and healthy, looks thin and drawn: the full moon has become the crescent.

“Where are you going?” she says in panic when Ujala makes to get up. “You’ve only just arrived. You can’t leave. By Allah, I won’t let you. .”

“I am not leaving. I would like to go upstairs and sleep for a while. I have been up since before dawn.”

A shiver runs through her on hearing his voice, the ghost of a reflex from the times she called his answering machine, fearful that he might pick up the phone.

“I’ll come with you and get you an extra blanket. We don’t have central heating so the rooms are cold, especially upstairs. The kitchen stays warm.”

She climbs the stairs ahead of him — red pain shooting up between the legs because of the speed of the ascent. Upstairs, she gets one of her new blankets out of its nylon zipped-up bag from the cupboard. “Warm as July.” She smiles as she hands him the blanket.

“You didn’t go to the trial,” he says abruptly. “They burned parts of the bodies. Now we know for sure.”

“I didn’t go,” Kaukab says. “No.” The scent of naphthalene balls escapes from the cupboard — a protection against Jugnu’s moths. Pointing to the jar full of one-pence coins in the corner, Kaukab says to the boy, as though distracting a child: “That’s yours. Do you remember?”

“I remember. Do you recognize the jar?” he approaches it and strokes it with his hands. And without waiting for her to answer, goes on to explain: “It’s one of a pair. Jugnu knitted copper wire around the other one and then broke the glass with a hammer to make a cage to hold the Great Peacock moth female. She had hatched ahead of the males, and hung in that cage, sending out chemical signals.” Kaukab watches him as he speaks almost as though he is in a trance. “The males hatched and followed the scent to her, flying up through the attic and then down into his bedroom where the cage was hanging.”

“It was his first night next door.”

“He woke in the morning to find them clustered around her, the cage completely covered with vibrating velvet. The Night of the Great Peacock Moths,” he whispers, and then in his normal voice says, “You once told me that back in Sohni Dharti a man had committed suicide by boiling a few handful of coins in water for a long time and then drinking that water.”