Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

When Charag enters the room, carrying the dish of vermicelli, the look on his face tells Kaukab that Mah-Jabin has told him everything. And as if to confirm, Mah-Jabin — following Charag with the spoons and bowls— avoids her eyes guiltily. The girl has applied the gold leaf to the surface of the vermicelli very clumsily, tearing the delicate sheet here and there so that it looks like a blistered mirror.

“I know you all think me the worst woman in the world,” Kaukab hears herself speak, “but I. .” And speaking evenly she tells everyone, turning now to Charag, now to Shamas, breaking into English occasionally to include Stella, that she hadn’t known the salt given to her by the cleric-ji was a bromide — whatever a bromide is — and, she sees herself reaching into her cardigan pocket many seconds before her hand actually makes that movement: she takes out the letter and says: “And, Mah-Jabin, I know you think I’ve kept at you unreasonably to return to your husband, but that’s because I didn’t know any of these details. I know I can’t seem to move without bruising anyone, but I don’t mean to cause pain.”

Mah-Jabin has recognized the letter and moves forward to take it from Kaukab’s hands.

Kaukab leaves the room and hurries upstairs, wishing to be alone. She closes the door to her bedroom and locks it, getting into bed with the intention of staying there for only a while but opening the door more than an hour and a half later. She must get downstairs quickly, she tells herself as she steps onto the landing, because otherwise Mah-Jabin would start doing the washing up: there are too many dishes and pots today for her to ask the girl to wash them.

She comes downstairs to find Shamas bringing the chairs back into the kitchen. The dining table is already in its usual place. “Have Stella and Charag gone?” she asks. He gives a nod, and when she asks him where Mah-Jabin and Ujala are he tells her that they have gone too: “They all drove away together. Mah-Jabin knocked on your door before leaving but you didn’t answer.”

“Where have they gone? When are they coming back?” Kaukab finds herself asking in panic. “I have things to say to Mah-Jabin — tell her that the next husband I find for her would be decent — and I have things to say to Ujala. I hadn’t expected a happy farewell but at least a tender and affectionate one.” She rushes to the front door and opens it, looking around desperately. A sandalwood-coloured cat that has been standing in the garden flashes out of sight at the appearance of the human, very fast, as though it had been at the end of a length of elastic stretched to the limit. “How long ago did they leave?” It was all over so quickly: this morning she had thought she would have many hours with her children, whole days with Ujala: she feels the crushing disappointment she felt as a child whenever she accidentally swallowed whole the sweet she had hoped to enjoy sucking the flavour out of slowly.

The bitterly cold air spills into the house like a sea. Shamas asks her to calm herself and makes her sit on the chair for a few minutes. Stony-faced, she does what he says but then gets up to begin the washing up, waving away his offers to do it all for her. She rubs the pans mechanically until she can see her face in them and then stops as though that was what she’d been looking for. There are fifty-five items to be washed altogether and the leftovers are to be put into dishes of manageable sizes and fitted into the fridge. She says her night prayers at ten, and although she is silent, her faith is not mute: he can hear her screaming as she sits on the prayer mat. Without a word exchanged they both work until eleven at night when the kitchen and the sitting room are back to their normal shapes, the drawers shut, the cupboards stacked with pots and pans, the floors clean, and the Madonna lilies glowing on the central coffee table.

As Shamas drifts towards sleep he hears Kaukab’s movements in the next bedroom.

And in the middle of the night he opens his eyes because he has suddenly become aware of sounds from downstairs. The winter nights are deceptive, he reminds himself: although it is dark it must be nearly dawn — Kaukab has no doubt gone downstairs to say the first prayer of the coming day. But then he notices that it’s 3 a.m. Too early for the dawn prayer. Even though it is not uncommon for one of them to get up in the middle of the night to go downstairs and rattle the aspirin bottle, he decides to go downstairs to take a look nevertheless. At the bottom of the black staircase there is an envelope-thin slit of light from the door to the kitchen, and on the very last step there is a miscalculation by him — he thinks there are no more steps left — and his foot falls through the ten or so inches of air to land with a thump on the floor, a feeling not too dissimilar to mistaking an empty stapler for a full one and punching it with force. It seems she hasn’t heard the noise and doesn’t react when he enters. She remains motionless but says quietly of the pan on the cooker: “I am waiting for it to cool. It’s still too hot to drink.”

“Milk?” And when he moves towards it she comes at him from behind and pushes him sideways, his right hipbone hits the wood of the dresser and he jack-knifes with pain. His hand had been about to close on the handle of the pan and the pan tilts off the hob: a transparent sheet of stretched water emerges, and within this long waterfall a thousand one-pence coins clattering to the linoleum.

A circle of steam expands towards the four walls from the spilled water. She scrambles for the pennies on all fours. “Get away from me.” She tries to shake his hand off her shoulder now that he has staggered forward. “I am going to drink this water.” She turns around and a lioness’s paw scratches his face because he tries to drag her away. “You brought me here. To this accursed country. You made me lose my children.”

He is terrified. Someone in Sohni Dharti had committed suicide by drinking the water in which a handful of coins had been boiled, the relatives mistaking his broken footsteps for alcohol and putting him to bed so he could sleep it off.

She looks wildly at him: “I hold you responsible for the fact that my children hate me.” She catapults forward but his arms are ready to grip her from behind, keeping her a yard or so away from the coins overlapping like fish scales. There is no longer any danger because all the water has been spilled, but a revulsion in him must prevent her from touching the coins, a fear of death-contamination — and she seems to want a contact with them for corresponding reasons.

“Yes, I hold you responsible. Have you read what that beast nephew of yours did to my daughter, my better-than-flowers daughter?” She loosens his grip from around her waist and gets up, the tail of her kameez and the top of the shalwar soaked in the poisonous water. “I want you to know that Mah-Jabin’s chances in life were ruined by you, her father. You didn’t want to move to a better neighbourhood, and no decent family was ever going to come to ask for the hand of a girl living in this third-class neighbourhood of people who are mill labourers or work at The Jewel in the Crown and The Star of Punjab. You have to think of these things when you have daughters. I asked you to put aside your principles when there was talk of an O.B.E., just for the girl’s sake, just so there would be at least something attractive about her to other people, your photograph in the Urdu newspaper for all to see, but you said no, said you neither seek honour among men nor kingship over them. I swear on the Koran I didn’t want any of these things for myself but for the children. I wanted Charag to become a doctor so people would say Mah-Jabin is a doctor’s sister, but that dream of mine failed too. And how am I going to find another man for her now, now that her brother’s picture is in the newspapers but for disgusting immoral wicked reasons. I can only hope no one sees that magazine. How will I face the decent God-fearing people of this neighbourhood if the news of that debased picture ever gets out? How I hate you for allowing Satan to plant his seeds in my stomach.”