Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

She hears a car pull up outside and, from the bathroom window, she looks down to see that Charag and Stella have arrived. Charag opens the back door of the car to let the eight-year-old son out. The temperature has plummeted over the past two days and Kaukab is pleased to see that the grandson is wrapped up against the December cold. The end of the woollen cap doubles in a band across his little forehead, over the ears and back along the nape of the neck, for extra warmth. When they were still married Kaukab had once seen Stella and Charag arrive for a visit — and Charag had kissed her on the lips out in the street. Kaukab had backed away. Must they display such lewdness in public? (Chanda and Jugnu at least spared her such obscene behaviour outdoors.) And right there in front of the little boy too, who would no doubt begin to chase girls as soon as he is in his teens and be sexually active by the time he is fifteen, thinking display-of-wantonness and sex-before-marriage was the norm and not grave sins! The little boy would no doubt marry a white girl and his own children would too: all trace of modesty and propriety would be bred out of them. Is this how Charag’s grandchildren would think of Charag? — “My mother and father are white, and my mother’s people are all white. I look a little dark because of one of my grandparents. He was a Paki.”

The grandson flings his cap onto the linoleum the moment she lets the three of them in. She apologizes for the kitchen smelling of food and asks them all to take their coats into the next room. Before closing the outside door she runs her gaze in a sweep across the street to see if Mah-Jabin and Ujala are returning. She hugs the little boy and kisses his head, face and both hands.

“What’s that?” Charag points to the crumpled letter that Kaukab only now realizes she still has in her hand.

She quickly puts it into her cardigan pocket. “A letter from your grandfather in Pakistan. He says he is disappointed that your son — his great-grandson — didn’t begin Koranic lessons at the age of four years, four months and four days, as is prescribed for every Muslim child.”

Stella is looking into the room next door. “Have Mah-Jabin and Ujala not arrived yet?” The dining table in there is paved with plates. The tablecloth is obviously from an Asian fabric shop, the beautiful material— patterned with movements of flower-heavy creepers — that the Asian women make their clothing out of, the colours often bright, the shapes exquisite, and which, Charag once said, had made his adolescent self look at Matisse more carefully.

“They have gone for a walk,” Kaukab says as she strikes a match to relight the hobs. She tilts the matchstick downward so that the wood beyond the head tempts the fire into remaining alive. “Please, go into the next room and stay there. I don’t want the smell getting into your clothes.” She was hoping to take Mah-Jabin aside as soon she came back to the house — to let her know that she has found the letter, to ask her to explain the truth about her marriage in Pakistan — but it’s unlikely that she would have a chance to do that over the next few hours. And she has yet to explain to Ujala that it wasn’t her intention to harm him with the sacred salt. Those damned scientists, how they love to analyse everything! As she takes the lids off the pans one by one, she is reminded once again— having forgotten it when she read that letter upstairs — that she has to scale down the evening meal. Suddenly confused, she wishes Mah-Jabin were here to be consulted, and she calls out to Charag in the next room so that he can go out and look for his brother and sister. But he doesn’t hear her.

Switching on the television in the next room, Charag is startled by the loud burst of noise that comes out: the volume is turned too high. He decides not to ask Kaukab whether his father’s hearing is deteriorating: he had asked once but Kaukab had denied it and seemed to consider the inquiry impertinent. A son may not notice his father’s inadequacies. Tonight he will contrive to show Shamas how to access the subtitles on the remote control: white, green, yellow, red — each person speaking a differently coloured sentence.

A black-and-white Tarzan movie is found for the little boy and Stella sits with him in front of it with the assurance that he’ll like it. “What does he turn into?” he asks after a while and he loses interest immediately when he is told that the character doesn’t turn into anything, isn’t transformed into a monster or otherworldly creature, that he remains a human being. But then he looks up, points to Tarzan and says, “He speaks like Grandma Kaukab!”

The three of them go back into the kitchen just as Kaukab is opening the door to Mah-Jabin.

“Ujala is still at the lake,” she announces, and, holding Kaukab’s eye, makes the smallest possible movement of the head to convey reassurance, “He’ll be back in a moment, Mother. We walked all the way to the Safeena. ”

With her arms around her little nephew, Mah-Jabin buries her lips into the soft skin of his neck. How old would her child have been now had she not lost it?

Stella tells her she has the beginning of a cold: “There was a spectacular storm scene in the play I went to not long ago. Wind machine, real water for rain.”

Mah-Jabin smiles and lowers the boy onto the floor and turns brightly to Kaukab. “Let’s get the food ready. Fasten your tastebuds, Charag and Stella. No doubt, you two haven’t been asked to help with the preparations because Mother is too polite. .” Stella is assigned the task to locate the cellophane bag of crushed summer mint from the ice-compartment and add them to a bowl of yoghurt. The beaten pulp is frozen solid in the cellophane like a creaking chunk of tundra with prehistoric algae in it, and there is no adult way of breaking it apart: it has to be done clumsily the way a child would do it.

Leaning into Mah-Jabin at the first opportunity, Kaukab tries to tell her that she knows the truth about her marriage but all she can say is, “Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t know what was going on?”

Mah-Jabin knits her brows and puckers her lips into a silent Shhh, and whispers back, “It’s OK. We’ll talk later. I think he knows you thought it was just ordinary salt.”

“I am not talking about Ujala,” Kaukab says, and wonders if she would know how to broach the subject of her marriage with Mah-Jabin later. “But, for the record I didn’t know anything about that too.” Her eyes are red.

From her coat pocket, Mah-Jabin takes out a pack of tamarind pulp: “I thought we could add it to the chutney, Mother. I stopped by at a shop on my way back.”

Kaukab is immediately concerned. “You went into a shop?” She knows the women of the neighbourhood know the girl is divorced, and is sure they would have made comments about her to each other — comments about her character, about her Western dress and cut-off hair.

“Yes. Chanda’s parents’ shop is closed. I went to the one in the next street.” She unwraps the tamarind. “A woman came in while I was there, a wealthy-looking, well-dressed woman. She must’ve heard that somewhere around here two brothers had killed their sister, and, not knowing that I was the niece of the dead man, she began berating the two murderers. She said, ‘People like that are ruining the name of Pakistan abroad.’ She was visiting from Pakistan, staying with her relatives in the suburbs who had brought her to our neighbourhood for amusement — if their suppressed smiles were anything to go by whenever a woman entered the shop with bright village-like embroidery on her kameez —to show her how the poor Pakistanis lived here in England, the factory workers, the bus drivers, the waiters. She couldn’t hide her contempt for us. Apparently she had been called a ‘darkie bitch’ by a white man in the town centre during her first week here and was resentful. She said, ‘The man who called me that name was filthy and stinking. And he would not have called me that name if it had not been for the people in this area, who have so demeaned Pakistan’s image in foreign countries. Imagine! He thought he could insult me, I who live in a house in Islamabad the likes of which he’d never see in his life, I who speak better English than him, educated as I was at Cam-bridge, my sons studying at Harvard right now. And it’s all the fault of you lot, you sister-murdering, nose-blowing, mosque-going, cousin-marrying, veil-wearing inbred imbeciles.’ ”