Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Kaukab shakes her head in disappointment. “We are driven out of our countries because of people like her, the rich and the powerful. We leave because we never have any food or dignity because of their selfish behaviour. And now they resent our being here too. Where are we supposed to go? The poor and the unprivileged, in their desire to keep living, are being disrespectful towards the rich and the privileged: is that it?”

“She was very elegant, not at all like people who have made their fortunes quite recently and are intent on showing it off.”

Kaukab bangs the wooden ladle on the rim of the pan — to free it of the sauce clinging to it, but with a little more force than necessary so that it emphasizes her disapproval: “What’s all this talk about old money and new money? If it’s new money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who are being used and abused in the present, and if it’s old money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who were used and abused in the past. The legs of the rich people’s thrones have always rested on the heads of poor people.” She turns back to her work: “I haven’t lived with your father for four decades and not learned a few truths.”

She wishes she could’ve said all this in English so that Stella would know she was intelligent, a thinking person. Yes, she had grown to like Stella eventually. She remembers when Charag had come home from university years ago to tell her that he was in love with a white girl who was expecting their child. After the initial shock of the revelation had worn off, Kaukab had walked to the train station to get on the train that would take her to Charag and his white girlfriend and their unborn child. How her selfishness had blinded her to the immense love her son must feel for the girl! Kaukab had grown up being told that what the two of them had done before marriage was wrong, wanton and depraved, but she had made sure her own children grew up with the same message: and if what had occurred was hard for her to accept, how hard it must have been for her son, how great the love that made him act against her teachings. Even in Pakistan everyone loved someone before marriage, but from a distance: a surreptitious glance answered by an eloquent smile. The West just gave a person the permission and opportunity to act on those feelings — it wasn’t her son’s fault. On the way to the train station, she longed to nestle her future daughter-in-law in her arms, call her by her name, Stella, but at the ticket-office window she lost heart on being told that she would have to change trains, fearing she would be lost without her lack of English as she searched for the correct platform, too humiliated by her pronounced accent and broken words to ask someone to guide her to the connecting trains. And where and how do you get a taxi in a strange city? She was a beggar who did not want to stretch out her hand because that hand was dirty. And so with eyes veined with carmine, she waited for Shamas to come home: as soon as he returned she asked him to take her to her son.

“This curry is done. Now I must see if there’s enough dough for the chappatis. Who wants chappatis instead of rice?”

Charag has been peeling and cutting fruit into a salad bowl that is now filled up with the sweet chunks — the colourful heap of peels beside it looks as though the flags of a dozen nations have been shredded — and he now asks from where he is standing at the dresser, “Where are the lemons? And why is there such a feast being laid out for tonight?”

“It is not a feast,” Mah-Jabin says quickly. “As Mother explained to me earlier, and as I explained to Ujala not long ago when he asked me the same question beside the lake, Mother just decided to cook the next few days’ food in one go. She happened to be in the mood.”

Kaukab looks at Mah-Jabin with gratitude. “I’ll freeze them in silver-foil containers.”

Stella nods. “It’s a good idea.” She points to the eight-year-old: “He asked me recently, ‘Why is Grandma Kaukab always cooking?’ ”

Kaukab is moved that the boy had noticed her, had paid enough attention to her to have identified a trait of sorts. She wants to kiss and nuzzle him but stops herself in case the whites have come up with a theory about grand mothers and grand sons too.

“It would be a feast if I were making something special: these foods are everyday.” She has found another reason to bolster the lie Mah-Jabin has told to save her. She wants to make a humorous comment at this point: “But, yes, being a housewife is difficult. I sometimes say to myself that if I had studied medicine I would have had to take the exam just once and be respectfully called a doctor for the rest of my life, but in domestic life you have to take and pass exams every day, and even then appreciation isn’t guaranteed.” She is in the process of mentally translating all this into English to be able to tell it to Stella, when Ujala returns.

Head drooping like an elongated sunflower, he seems as gaunt and withdrawn to Kaukab as before when she dares to take a quick peek at him, but he joins in with the tasks and even carries and lifts up the eight-year-old to the cooker to let him look into the pot in which the bitter gourds are sizzling. “What are they?” he asks the child.

“Starfishes!” the boy exclaims on seeing the plump pointed gourds that have browned on cooking and now do look like dismembered starfishes.

“That’s right. We are having starfish curry,” Ujala says.

Over the next hour — while December’s darkness falls outside — the kitchen is animated as voices rise and hang in the air for short periods — a mouthful of food taken directly from the pot resulting in a bout of praise for Kaukab; the grandson spitting out a mouthful of half-chewed M&Ms like coloured gravel; Charag smiling and telling Mah-Jabin to finish the apple she has left to brown on the table (“Apples don’t grow on weeds, you know — as Mother always told us”); the threat of a tantrum from the child, followed by a counter threat of punishment from one of his parents, a fawning taking of the sides by the grandmother, the young uncle, the aunt — but these are short lived and the air becomes tense and subdued quickly: yesterday — with its verdict — is like a colossal block of ice that’s still too near, breathing chilly air on everyone’s skin. The house, as it floated through time, has arrived at an iceberg, and no one is sure whether it will ever move away from it, leaving it behind. Now and then, to relieve the silences, Kaukab says, “Allah is great!”

When she goes upstairs to the bathroom immediately after Charag has been there to wash his face, she notices that the linoleum is warm where he had been standing just now, and she has to steady her heart with joyful fingers — her cold cold house is full of her children again. There’s warmth in unexpected places.

Shamas comes home just as Kaukab is telling Stella about a woman in the neighbourhood both of whose identical-twin daughters became pregnant at the same time: one of them has had the baby in the seventh month, and now the news has to be kept from the other in case she too fails to carry the pregnancy to full term; luckily the still-pregnant girl lives in America so it’s easier to hide the truth. Every time Kaukab has spoken to Stella, she has surreptitiously breathed into the hollow of a hand and sniffed it to see that her breath isn’t stale, and she has missed the sarsaparilla root that is thrown into the brass or earthenware containers which hold a household’s drinking water in Sohni Dharti, to sweeten the water so that its scent will freshen the mouth when the water is drunk.

Shamas realizes that the grandson is about the same age as Suraya’s son. He tries to drive the thought away.