Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

He knows he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.

He looks at Kaukab when she is otherwise occupied, to see what kind of a day she has had. The last few days — if not the last few months — have been devastating for her, he knows. Each day after the trial he came home and told her the details of what happened at the court, and she had been inconsolable. Last night he wondered whether he should add to that story of Chanda and Jugnu’s last few hours on earth what Kiran had told him on the bus, weave that dark thread into the already-dark tale. But he feared how Kaukab would react — she would see Kiran’s secret affair with Chanda’s brother as proof that she was a woman of loose morals, that her family had been right in the 1950s when they refused to let her marry her brother; perhaps she would accuse Kiran of lying about her brother’s secret visit to Dasht-e-Tanhaii—? But, he must admit, he had also envisaged the opposite reaction: that she would insist Shamas not reveal to anyone the details of Kiran’s love affair with Chanda’s brother or the night she spent with her own brother: “People would gossip and point fingers at the poor woman. You have no idea how easy it is to ruin a woman’s life.” Now, as he steals glances at her, he wonders which of the two Kaukabs is the real one.

She seems contented, her children around her.

The pots sing on the fire. Dipped in beaten egg, the shami kebabs drip like a cow’s mouth from a drinking pail and they are noisy when lowered into the oil which crackles like cellophane. Everyone except Kaukab and Mah-Jabin sits down and eats from the yellow plates arranged on the table in the next room. In the kitchen, Mah-Jabin asks Kaukab to join the others too — seeing as she has been on her feet all day and also has the pain in her abdomen to consider — but Kaukab bats down the suggestion, and then Mah-Jabin tells her that she will come to Dasht-e-Tanhaii to be with her when she has to go to the hospital for the operation in January, that she has arranged leave at her work. Kaukab tells her to lower her voice— “There are men within earshot, and this is women’s business.”

The mother and daughter, with a Lakshmi-like abundance of arms and hands, have filled all the plates and, while the kebabs are taken steaming to the table in batches by Mah-Jabin, every other minute a new chappati is ready from Kaukab’s hands. Growing as it does from two whorls at the crown of her head instead of the usual one, Stella’s hair is often unruly, and with a touch of his finger Charag removes the irritation of an escaped strand from across her cheek, an action he — at one time — would perform with his tongue, kissing her face afterwards.

Kaukab asks Mah-Jabin to go join the others when the initial servings are over and the meal enters a more relaxed phase, the food unfolding warmth in the eaters’ bodies.

Shamas unspools the thread from around the grandson’s “starfish leg.”

The spicy cauliflower goes into Stella’s mouth and comes out through her eyes as water.

Tiny beetroot stars — that Kaukab had punched out of the beetroot slices with a cutter — are lined up in a growing necklace where they are being discarded towards the edge of Ujala’s salad.

There are white specks associated with calcium-deficiency on Stella’s fingernails, and Kaukab is privately taken aback when she notices them for the first time as she takes a chappati to the table: she is ashamed whenever these marks appear on her own nails, yet another proof for the white people that the Pakistanis are unhealthy people, disease-riddled, filthy bearers of epidemics like the smallpox they brought with them to England in the 1960s. Ever since Charag and Stella arrived she has been worried that she has forgotten to brush her teeth in time for their arrival, to get rid of any bad odour before the white girl came.

Stella tells them all about the fair she had taken the child to not long ago. Eating from cellophane bags stuffed like pillows with candyfloss, they went into the tent where a Sleeping Beauty lay on a satin-draped bier. The body was a wax statue and, as proof that the princess was dead to the world, the impresario pierced it through the gown with a long pearl-headed hat pin. To approach the sleeping body was to become a child that had awakened from a nightmare and gone into the parents’ room for comfort, or, Stella thought, a thief that had broken into a house with its occupant asleep unawares.

Kaukab says the princess should have had a few scented geraniums scattered about the palace corridors so that the intruders brushing against them would wake her up.

Surrounded by hair as long as a wild horse’s mane, the face on the bier belonged to the woman who was hiding underneath the wax body— and they saw her drunk when the fair closed, staggering about the cobbled square, weeping with her wig in her hand and shouting abuse at passersby.

Halfway through the meal, Charag reminds Stella that there is a gift for Kaukab and Shamas in their car, and when Stella gets up to go to the car, Kaukab asks her to remain seated: “It’s too cold outside — cold as outer space. Charag should go.” Stella is wearing a skirt, her legs visible below the knees, and Kaukab doesn’t want anyone in the neighbourhood to see the exposed skin and comment on it: when they were still married, she had asked Charag to tell Stella to not dress in that immodest garment — at least during her visits to this neighbourhood— but nothing happened. She hadn’t expected Stella to begin wearing the shalwar-kameez and the head veil (though nothing would have pleased her more; many white women do abandon their old way of dressing upon marrying Muslim men) but she didn’t wish to see female flesh on display.

Charag gets up and goes out to the car, returning with a small brown-paper-wrapped square fastened with a cord. “It’s a surprise, Mother. Open it.”

Kaukab unknots the thread, remembering the first time she had made a knot in something in Stella’s presence: she had suddenly gone numb, wondering if there was a Western way of tying a knot — more sophisticated, better. Perhaps the way she tied knots was an ignorant way of tying a knot?

“I bought all the photographs and negatives from a photographer in town the last time I was here. They are from the ’50s, ’60s and the early ’70s, of Pakistani and Indian immigrants,” Charag says. “I met this woman at the lake who planted the idea in my head that perhaps I should try to incorporate into my art the lives of the people I grew up amongst— examine and explore them.”

“And going through a box, he found this,” Stella smiles. “Extraordinary.”

It is a photograph of the family — Charag and Mah-Jabin, as children, sitting cross-legged on the ornate rug on the studio floor; Shamas standing and looking impossibly young; Kaukab, seated on a reproduction chair, pregnant with Ujala, the stomach swelled out like a bulb, like the middle of a vase. Kaukab smiles as she holds up the framed picture for everyone to see.

“I remember making this shirt for you, Charag.” Kaukab smiles. “You complained the collar was too stiff. The fabric was crisp as a new bank-note.”

“It was completely by chance that I went in, to rummage around but then the photographer said he would be going out of business later in the year. Look at Mah-Jabin’s two plaits! How pregnant were you then, Mother?”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Kaukab frowns. “Later Mah-Jabin would demand I make only one plait, saying, ‘On the way to school the two brothers walk either side of me and each flicks one of them whenever he feels like it.’ With one plait she managed to cut the difficulty in half.”