Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She nods. “The boiling metal turned the water poisonous, yes.”

He unbuckles his belt and undoes the top two buttons of his jeans to enter the bed.

Kaukab turns to leave the room. “What an awful story to remember.” She wants to examine his face, to understand why he had made that comment about the suicide, but she hears him taking his pants off, the slide of fabric against skin, and therefore cannot look in his direction. “Are you sure you will be comfortable in this room? The kitchen is directly below and I am going to be cooking all day: the smell of spices will rise right through the floorboards and the carpet.”

“Close the door as you leave.”

Downstairs, she lets out an inward sound — echo, and then echo of echo — a cry in the forest of old age, loneliness. He is out of reach, no doubt holding her responsible for Chanda and Jugnu’s disappearance. She senses loathing in him, a wall-like hate in whose foundations lie the bloody cut-up bodies of the two lovers. She thought he would be happier than he is. She’d thought he’d ask her, Did you miss me? And that she would answer: No more than I’d miss my eyes. They haven’t seen each other for eight years and have, therefore, a total of sixteen-years’ worth of life to catch up on, but he has barely said a word. Mah-Jabin and Charag have sent her photographs of him during his absence, but they stopped when he found out and threatened to cut himself off from them too.

It had taken her decades to rebuild the happiness she had lost when she moved to England: she had built it around her children, and, yes, around Jugnu, but she had never realized how loosely woven a thing it was, how easily torn.

She breathes in against a wave of tears and sits there for a few minutes before getting up carefully. There is a lot to do. She had peeled the potatoes last night and covered them in water to stop the rusting, and the base for the pilau rice was readied last night too: just a matter of reheating it half-an-hour before it’s time to sit down at the dinner table and dropping the rice in it. An illiterate woman came by yesterday to ask her if she would read a letter from her brother in Pakistan, and she and Kaukab had spent the afternoon chopping up all the onions that would be needed today.

And the dozens of cloves of garlic got peeled as though all by themselves when the matchmaker stopped by in the evening and the two of them talked as they worked, the topics under discussion varying from recipes to djinns, from the new fabrics to become available in the clothes shops to all the successful marriages the matchmaker had arranged this year, the most recent one of a woman named Suraya about whose beauty she never tired of speaking.

After the dawn prayers today, Kaukab sat down with a basket and extracted the peas from each peapod with the skill of a pickpocket.

The mince for the shami kebabs was boiled with split chickpeas, cinnamon sticks and other spices, two days ago, beaten in a large black-stone mortar with a heavy wooden pestle until it had the texture of wet sand and came out from between the fingers in sculpted waves when squeezed in a fist. It was patted into small discs: they are in the fridge now, and all that remains is to dip them in egg and shallow-fry them in sunflower oil minutes before eating — the egg coating would seal the mince in the thinnest omelette imaginable. For the fruit salad, she would enlist one of the other guests when they arrive: the fruit — apples, pomegranates (the very last batch of the year), pears, grapes, and peaches that look as though they are apples made out of the finest pink suede — must remain fresh and crunchy. There is coriander and mint chutney to pound in the small marble mortar the size of a green-pigeon’s nest — oh, Jugnu! Oh, my Jugnu! — that she had been given as a present by a woman returning from Pakistan five years ago.

She takes the coat Ujala has left on the kitchen table and carries it into the pink sitting room. The smell of cooking mustn’t get into the clothes. The whites call the Asians “smelly” but they do have a point: the coats are hung in the kitchens and the pungent smells of the spices get into them. The Asians who have moved out to the suburbs also call the Asians in this poor neighbourhood “smelly” and “stinky.” Some of the women in this neighbourhood are from villages where it is common practice to put butter in the hair: the smell is often rancid. Kaukab makes sure Shamas’s coat and hers are never in the kitchen.

The extractor fan has been on for over an hour now and will continue to work into the evening.

She wonders if she should ring Shamas at the office and let him know that Ujala has arrived. But she is still a little apprehensive about the telephone because two days ago, when she had dialled a wrong number, she was told to, “Get off the phone and go back to your country, you Paki bitch.” She is glad Shamas doesn’t drive: accidents happen, and you never know what kind of person you would have grazed the vehicle of or offended with your way of driving, what kind of name he or she would choose to call you in public.

From the floor she takes up the glove that had fallen out of Ujala’s coat pocket and places it on top of the coat next door. The wool is bright green, vivid red, a deep yellow reminiscent of linseed oil. Children’s primary colours. In winter the tiny mittens and gloves are all across the town centre, lone and lost, along with dropped mufflers and misplaced pompom hats. It is almost as though there is a conspiracy among the toddlers to replace the colours now that the hanging baskets containing the annual flowers have been taken down for the year, the wrought-iron brackets affixed to lamp-posts remaining empty until next summer.

She had turned off the cassette player when Ujala arrived, but now she switches it back on: so as not to disturb him, the volume is turned low, like the faint whiff from a long-empty scent bottle. She cuts the cauliflower into florets, and as she washes them in a basin her hand becomes a starfish, the florets among which it moves appearing like a coral reef. Getting the mutton-and-potato and the pea-and-cauliflower curries started and kneading the dough for the chappatis takes her to one o’clock. Turmeric has dyed the tips of her fingers golden as though with the yellow dust of lotus blossoms. She wipes the table until it is as wet and clean as an eye. It is time for the noon prayer, but before that she tiptoes upstairs and, asking herself to be courageous, goes into the room where Ujala is asleep and carries away the jar of coins. She hides it under the sink, his comment about the suicide flying inside her head the way the silver ball zigzags inside a pinball machine. She had heard somewhere that one Japanese emperor had taken his life by inhaling gold leaf, and she wonders whether the edible gold leaf could be used by someone for similar purposes. Having performed her ablutions, she says her prayers on the velvet prayer-mat, bending and straightening with immense pain, and afterwards she opens the front door to see if there is anyone outside the church — in order to ask them to go in and see if a Song of Solomon cake can be bought: it has all the spices mentioned in that Christian poem and it has been a favourite of Ujala ever since he tried it at a school fair. She doesn’t have time to look in the direction of the church because she finds Mah-Jabin sitting on the doorstep, a bunch of Madonna lilies — coned-up in red paper — held against her breast like an infant.

“I rang the bell,” Mah-Jabin says as she gets up.

“I was saying my prayers. I didn’t hear anything at all.”

“I hope I didn’t disturb you. I knocked too,” the girl says apologetically, placing the lilies on the table.