Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

“My mind wandered during the prayer twice. There is nothing that torments Satan more than the sight of a faithful in prayer. He succeeded in distracting me today. I began wondering about what kind of gold leaf the Japanese have?”

Mah-Jabin smiles. “Are we having vermicelli for dessert?”

“I was just asking Ujala if he remembered calling them ‘princess’s hair.’ ”

Mah-Jabin, unwrapping the lilies, looks at Kaukab. “He left before the rest of us were up. When did he come?”

“He came around ten. Mah-Jabin, he looks so thin.”

Ujala is as healthy as a footballer, as a ballet dancer, but Mah-Jabin doesn’t wish to contradict Kaukab so early. She goes into the sitting room to get the vase. The pink tulips had turned violet as they had dried up in dying, a petal here and there leaning away from the cup of the others like a resting insect that hasn’t quite succeeded in shaking its wings into perfect order upon alighting.

After the lilies, Mah-Jabin goes upstairs to the bathroom (where all those years ago she had sat with a knitting needle, not knowing how to proceed). She takes off the silk scarf and hangs it from the hook. The fabric was bought from an Asian material shop, just two feet of it, where once she would have bought it by the yard to make shalwar-kameez s. She laughs whenever her fashion-student friends make a fuss because they have to undo a few inches of a seam that has been placed wrongly. Growing up she had seen her mother — and the other women in the neighbourhood— rip up seams, put them down again, and cut and recut sleeves, necklines, hems by the dozen. Kaukab, who has never bought any Western shirts and trousers and has never paid a seamstress to make her a shalwar-kameez, had once claimed that in her life she had stitched five-hundred kilometres of seams.

She stands motionlessly. The stress of the previous days, and the lag brought about by the fact that her usual routines have been broken here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, have combined to produce a kind of delirium: she fades and comes into focus with the rhythm of this mild fever, now suddenly conscious of her weight on the floor, now unconvinced of the reality of things. And now, remembering something, she opens the narrow angular cupboard in the corner that houses the immersion heater swaddled in insulating pillows of shiny silver nylon. “Hello, spaceman.” It was in here that she had tossed her husband’s letter — unread and crumpled-up— during the visit back in spring. The spaceman was to take it up in his rocket: toxic waste to be dumped into some distant black hole. But it is still back there, and just when she reaches in, out of curiosity, and has pulled it forward a little she hears Ujala’s voice. She quickly lets go of the balled-up paper and closes the hatch. Ujala enters the bathroom just as she turns around. He is smiling, and, his arms extended towards her, he comes closer and begins to feel for the clasp of the Venezuelan necklace she is wearing. A row of seeds threaded onto cord, he had bought it for her two days ago.

“I have to return it to the shop. The seeds are poisonous, it seems. There is a note in the shop window, asking the customers to bring it back for a refund, and they have also advertised in the papers.”

“Seriously?” Mah-Jabin cannot help laughing as she takes off the necklace hurriedly. It tangles in her hair and Ujala’s attempts to free it make it only worse. He looks anxious for a few moments as though they won’t ever be able to get rid of the lethal seeds from around her neck, from around his fingers. She calms him and they collapse against each other, smiling and tumbling like kittens, the moments a ball of yarn between them.

Shortly before she left England to get married and settle in Pakistan, Ujala had come home in the middle of the night, having slipped out soon after Shamas and Kaukab went to bed. He was twelve and had clearly been experimenting with alcohol out there on the hills or beside the lake. Mah-Jabin had taken him to his bed, quietly, not wishing to awaken the parents. The smell of beer from his mouth revolted her. He wept against her, begging her not to go to Pakistan and leave him alone here; he said that Charag was a shitty swot but she was his friend, his only friend, his only friend: “What will I do without you here? No, I am holding on to your leg until you promise to stay. I mean it: I’ll hold it as long as I have to. Just watch me.” She hissed at him to lower his voice, but he kept talking, the placement of words in each sentence in slight disarray — the way the drunks talk, the way their mother speaks English (once, when she had a headache, she had told the children, “Make noise silently!”).

A few days later, he had had his face slapped by her in fury. She had returned from the town centre with a new suitcase and found Kaukab in tears in the kitchen. Without needing a word of explanation, Mah-Jabin had rushed up to his bedroom. “I want you to stop accusing Mother and Father. They are not forcing me into an arranged marriage. I am going because I want to.” He said she was stupid not to see that they weren’t giving her the advice she needed, didn’t tell her openly what she was getting herself into.

Free of the Venezuelan seeds, Mah-Jabin goes downstairs, telling Ujala to come to the kitchen as soon as possible so that they can help their mother with the meal.

Several separate foods will come together to form a meal in three stages, and Kaukab’s plan is to, over the next few hours, bring them each to within twenty minutes of completion. The bitter-gourds are almost ready, secured in the violet thread that Kaukab had used to sew herself a frilled tablecloth not long ago, and she tells Mah-Jabin how difficult it had been to settle on that colour as the thread with which the sewing would be done. “Because the pattern on the fabric was yellow splashed with violet, a yellow seam would stand out when it passed across a violet patch, and the reverse would be true if the thread of the other colour was chosen.”

“What you needed was a transparent thread: something which the spiders should get together with the fishing-line manufacturers to develop: thin enough but sufficiently strong.”

Ignoring her frivolous comment, Kaukab looks around and says, “I’ve always wanted this kitchen to be bigger.” She is draining the water off the potatoes and putting the yellow wedges into the pan where the curry base is sizzling. “It is going to fill up this evening, and everyone will have to sit cramped around the table.”

“We can eat in the sitting room,” Mah-Jabin suggests. “We’ll move the table in there.” She slides open the door and looks in to confirm that there is enough room in there. When Ujala comes down — he is putting on a sweater and his face emerges out of the neck-hole like a diver coming up and breaking the water’s surface — the brother and sister move the dining table and chairs into the centre of the next room, pushing the coffee table with the vase of lilies to one side. The Koranic verses hang in their black frames against the pink walls that are lined up to waist-length with bookshelves. “I used to cut the bookmark ribbons off Father’s books to tie up the hair of my dolls,” Mah-Jabin says. Ujala takes the latest issue of the Muslim women’s magazine Kaukab subscribes to — the monthly Veil, published in Pakistan — and puts it in the pile where the previous issues are kept.

“It doesn’t do any harm,” Mah-Jabin whispers: she had seen the distaste on his face when he picked up the magazine full of orthodox rants and strictures, apocalyptic visions and prophecies.

“I think it does.”

She looks away. “It makes her happy.”

“I don’t think it does. I have never seen more misery and guilt on her face than when she has just finished reading something printed in there. It’s turned her into a selfish monster. She is the reason why Father won’t openly condemn the idiocies of Islam. He thought it would hurt her. She and her like don’t do any harm? She has harmed every one of us. She won’t allow reason to enter this house.” Mah-Jabin leaves the room and he stands looking at the verses on the wall. For millions of people, religion was often another torture in addition to the fact that their lives were not what they should be. Their world is pitiless from womb to tomb, everything in it out of their control, almost as though the life-lines on the palms of their hands were live knife-cuts, a source of pain since birth. This world gives them terrible wounds and then the holy men and women make them put those wounds into bags of salt.