Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Shamas knows that she’s referring to the belief that Satan shares the sexual intercourse of a husband if he has omitted to read appropriate Koranic verses before penetration. And the penalty is great if the husband has not read specific verses at the precise moment of ejaculation: Satan’s seed enters the woman’s womb along with the man’s and the resulting child is predisposed to Satanic deeds.

He listens as she talks in a monotone. There is a half-penny coin in amongst the pennies, a coin out of circulation now, not seen in a while. Coins in the rotted pockets of some buried bodies have helped the police to narrow the time period within which that person might have gone missing. What was in Chanda and Jugnu’s pockets when the bodies were dismembered?

“Charag didn’t get into medical school because he was unable to concentrate on his studies in this house: the woman next door had begun making jeans for a garment company and had that industrial sewing machine installed in her kitchen, so that for twelve hours a day there was a buzzing noise in every room of this house. It would not have happened in a better neighbourhood. And Ujala grew up among the dole-collecting sons of factory workers and ended up thinking like them, leaving school at fifteen. In a better neighbourhood he would have had better examples all around him. You nearly called me a snob last month when I said I didn’t want one of Ujala’s old school friends in my house, but that wasn’t because he is on the dole and his father works in a mill, it was because that boy is said to be an expert thief who could, if he wished, even steal the kohl from your eyes. I would have missed the women I know in this neighbourhood had we moved elsewhere, but I would have been prepared to make that sacrifice for my children. Tonight, you were more interested in the fate of other photographs than the one of your own family.”

“They are an important document.”

“So is the one of your own family.”

The top layer of coins has lost its heat to the air but those buried underneath are still warm, a coil of vapour rises from them as when a biscuit not long out of the oven is broken in two: he has taken the glass jar (the twin of which, he remembers, was used to fashion the cage for the Great Peacock moth) from which the money came and is filling it up again, scooping up the slithery discs. The steam is a tangible soft pressure on the face: at one point it is no less repugnant than as if it were rising from the opened gut of a slaughtered animal, but the moment passes. And now there is that swan wing that was flexed up at him, brushing his face one summer night this year: he had been returning from a late meeting at the town hall and the milky bird sitting in the middle of the street collecting the day’s warmth from the tarmac.

He follows her up the stairs. She climbs sideways, like someone very old, holding onto the handrail: the steroid injection in the kneecap last year has relieved the arthritis somewhat but that leg is still not what it once was: in time one learns the individual failures behind the standard attitude actors and children-at-play assume when imitating old age. He watches as she changes into dry clothes and gets into bed. Would she like some hot milk? The fire on?

Downstairs, he dries the kitchen floor and sits looking at the jar of coins (while the little girl next door coughs in her sleep). The sight of the coins revolts him, a threat, and after quietly climbing the stairs to check on Kaukab, he gets dressed and, picking up the jar, steps out of the house. He can’t bear to have them under the same roof as him. It wouldn’t take him long to drop the coins into the lake. But less than a minute into his journey the cold forces him back into the house. December sucks warmth out of his body in white plumes as he goes. He climbs the stairs once again and, having checked on Kaukab, goes to the wardrobe where he keeps the whisky. Out on the landing he drinks two gulps and he places the bottle in his coat pocket before setting out for the lake once again. He had once overheard Charag say to Stella that he was glad Islam forbade alcohol “because otherwise I am sure both my mother and my father would be alcoholics.” The maples along the sloping side-street between the mosque and the church had begun to bleed drop by drop at the beginning of autumn and now they are almost empty, skeletons of their former selves. The moon floats on the water’s surface in a roadside pool, and the stars are closer to him on this bitingly cold night than the sparkling veil on her head is to a bride (as Kaukab once said) as he walks on towards the lake.

Kaukab, unable to gain more than an hour’s sleep, sits up, the house empty of her children. There are searing convulsions in her belly like the “three-day pain” a woman suffers after giving birth, the womb going mad looking for the baby it had contained until recently.

She wishes she had the Book of Fates for a few minutes so she could flick through the golden text, looking for happiness, while moths hit the windowpanes of the house loudly, to get at the light emanating from Allah’s ink. If only the angels would accidentally let fall the Book and it would land in her garden encircled by a brief nimbus of pure gold brightness. As it dropped through the dark air it would attract the attention of moths from the warmer corners of the universe, and they would follow its journey as though they were being sucked into a vortex. They would be hovering above the Book as it lay in her garden, those otherworldly moths, in an excited dance like sparks above a fire, the wings thinly haired like the back of a man’s hands. She would go down and pick it up, waving the insects aside with her free hand, maddening them with the smell of spices that still clings to her from earlier today. The Book would be very cold from its journey through outer space, and she would quickly step back into the house with it, clutching the secrets of her destiny to her body. And when she opened the pages the luminous words inside would light up her face — she’d feel the pressure of the light resting on her skin, as she looks for happiness.

She’ll find the page where the family had gone to have that photograph taken (as Allah willed and the angels wrote down with quills plucked from their wings).

Turn a few pages, and here she is six years ago, looking out at the young man who had been Ujala’s school friend — her boy-doll of a son Ujala— going by the house. Ujala had once swapped a coat with him for a pair of shoes the way young people do sometimes. And she had noticed with a pang that the coat was too small for the boy who wore it now, and she was reminded of how much Ujala too must’ve grown in the years she hasn’t seen a new photograph of him. At that age boys get bigger and taller at such a rate that they outgrow their clothes during the time it takes to buy them at the shops and to unpack them at home.

Moving forward, she’ll look for the day last year that Chanda and Jugnu are supposed to have died — just to prove to herself that the courts had made a mistake, that Allah is compassionate and merciful. But what if it’s all true? What did Allah have in mind by having the two lovers killed? She remembers a couplet of the Mughul poet Ghalib: My destiny’s script — due to the carelessness of its writer — is covered all over with smudges of spilled ink: these dark spots are the black nights I spend away from my beloved.

No, no, she mustn’t complain even for a half moment about the amount of unhappiness He has written in the Book for her: she must remember that Hazrat Rabia — may Allah hold that esteemed daughter of the dawn of Islam in His light till Eternity — had once confided to a friend that the amount of happiness in her life was beginning to trouble her: “I wonder if Allah is angry with me for some reason. Why hasn’t He sent any tribulations my way for a while so that I may please him by triumphing over them or bearing their burden without losing faith in Him.”