Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

And suddenly now she is afraid: how could she have entertained those thoughts about the Book of Fates? No human is ever to set eyes on it. Such flagrant disobedience! No, no, if the Book ever fell to earth, she would bring it in and then wait for the angels to come looking for it. She’d know they have arrived because the noise of the moths outside the window would lessen — their light would attract some of the moths away from her house. Would they look a little like the ones she has always imagined? During the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, some of the bombs that the Indian jets had dropped on Pakistan had not exploded upon landing, and several clerics had said that they had personally seen angels appear and intercept the bombs in midair and carry them in their arms to gently place them on the Allah-beloved soil of Pakistan. Would they match the angels’ descriptions Kaukab had read in the newspapers at the time? An iridescent cloud, up there in the sky, would retain a precise cut-out where one of the angels had flown through it. They’ll settle on the mosque roof, no doubt, as they wait for her to bring them the Book, the air bright around them, the hems of colourful silk-and-brocade robes resting on the black tiles, for the Muslim angels aren’t dressed in white like the Christian ones, nor are their wings plain white: the feathers are green, blue, red, orange, yellow. Birds of Paradise! They have diamond sprays in their chiffon turbans and their cheeks are as though dyed vermilion. Some would be reclining on the roof, others looking in the direction of this house— she is sure they could see through the walls, possessing eyes powerful enough to spot a candle flame on the moon — and a few would have taken off their wings and would be rubbing their shoulders as though for relief, as though the wings are too heavy, the flight to earth too long. She is not sure she would be able to see them because some clerics maintain that angels or the spirits of holy figures cannot be seen by women, who are inferior to men, but then she remembers that the Koran plainly states that Moses’s mother had received a divine message from Allah, a revelation, just as all the prophets had, who were all male.

Kaukab gets out of bed, performs her ablutions, and opens her Koran.

No, she doesn’t need a peek into the pages of the Book of Fates.

She has this book.

Yes, it’s not our place to say “Why?” or “How?” to Him; we can only say “Help!”

On the last day of his life, Jugnu was awakened an hour and a half before dawn by the sounds the peacocks made as they entered his back garden.

A man was hurrying towards the mosque because the cleric had collapsed with his left hand on his heart, and the peacocks — who were roaming the dark streets — were made to scatter in every direction by him. The peacocks were a nuisance — liable to scratch the paintwork of cars, and last week they had entered the mosque and several had snatched up rosaries, the beads dangling from their beaks as they were chased out and down the street.

A few of the birds now entered Jugnu’s back garden for safety amid the branches of the apple trees. The birds had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight ago — no one could tell where they had escaped from. They spent most of the daylight hours in the lakeside woods and in the secluded hilly meadows around the neighbourhood, away from humans, but they came out to the streets at dawn. Their presence in the neighbourhood was disturbing to some. The faithful have always been ambivalent towards peacocks because it was this kind-hearted creature that had inadvertently let Satan into the garden of Eden. Disguised as an aged man, Satan had asked to be admitted but the door-keepers had recognized him and refused, but then the peacock — who had watched the entire incident from its perch on the boundary wall — had gone down and lifted the bedraggled old man with its feet and flown back in with him.

Leaving Chanda asleep, Jugnu got out of bed. He approached the window and its dimly lit view of the peacocks. A pale summer moon was decomposing in the dark blue sky, which, at dawn, in an hour and a half, would be painted with a light as red as a Kandahar pomegranate. Jugnu was wearing an improvised dhoti: it was his habit, upon getting up in summer, to tie around his waist the light sheet of linen he had slept under.

Jugnu and Chanda had arrived home from the airport after ten last night, and, exhausted from the long eight-hour flight, they were asleep in each other’s arms just over an hour later; Jugnu had often remarked that an aeroplane journey was surely worse for the body than a ride on a primitive bullock cart along rutted backwoods-village roads. As her dark-green eyes closed last night, Chanda had no inkling that she would never see Jugnu again.

They hadn’t unpacked. And upon getting up and going downstairs on this the day of his death, Jugnu began to open the suitcases and he soon became engrossed in the notebooks in which he had recorded the information about Pakistani lepidoptera during his visit. He had witnessed a Paradise Flycatcher tear up and feed a Common Mormon to its fledglings in the Kaghan valley. After the monsoon shower in the Salt Range of the Punjab, he tracked the south-easterly drift of Blue Tigers, and he managed to observe the annual migration of the Pale Lemon White through the Khyber Pass.

In the kitchen patterned with rows of cedars — more gift-wrapping than wallpaper — he opened one of the many small cardboard boxes that contained the butterflies he had brought from Pakistan.

One box — which held several Common Guava Blues that had been caught in the guava orchards of Malir and Landhai, just outside Karachi — would be found on the kitchen shelf when the police forced their way into the house thirteen days later — because the couple had returned earlier than they had planned, no one would miss them till then.

As there was no food in the house, Jugnu boiled some water and drank a cup of black coffee while he waited for the first sign of life in the house next door so he could go and borrow bread, milk and eggs from Kaukab. He went outside and hesitantly approached the denim jacket that had been hanging on the line since spring because a wren had built a nest in one of its pockets. He noted that the bird family seemed to have thrived in his absence.

Going past the lily tangle of the garden next door, he dug up an onion from Kaukab’s small herb patch for an omelette, his hands glowing in the gloom-rich corner. He didn’t know that he was being watched.

All but two of the peacocks had dispersed by now, and they were sitting near Jugnu, also watching him. But they too had vanished by the time he came out of the house for the second time (the suitcases lay in the kitchen like gutted carcasses) to knock quietly on Kaukab’s door because a light was now on in there.

There was no answer.

On the small patch of grass in front of the back door there was dew, and Jugnu, using his hands as a brush, wiped the words The Vision onto it. The words were a clear green amongst the silver-grey-green beads. It was a message for Chanda: Jugnu had decided to walk to the farm of that name where fresh bread was sold at this hour. He’d buy other provisions for breakfast from there too.

The farm was a mile away, beyond the lake and its xylophone jetty. The family that owned it also bred orchids in a glasshouse presided over by a lightning-shattered elm. Since long before Jugnu knew them, they had been trying to breed a flower resembling the one to be found at the centre of a gold-and-ruby Fabergé egg. The dazzling heirloom had travelled through the decades and each new generation of those tenacious yellow-haired giants seemed obsessed with creating a living copy of the jewelled sculpture. “But that flower is the work of the imagination,” Jugnu had once said to them with a smile. “It’s like trying to live a life described in a beautiful poem or a perfect novel.” They came to the neighbourhood of Asian immigrants every year to invite children to take part in the annual “worm-charming” competition held on the farm. There could be up to fifty-million earthworms beneath an acre of land; and each team of children was allocated one of the tablecloth-sized squares in a field. The ground was beaten with sticks, pounded with fists, stamped on, until the vibration brought the worms to the surface. There were prizes for the most earthworms collected (the record had been standing at 763 per-square for several years), for the longest earthworm, and the heaviest. But the mothers in the immigrant neighbourhood were always apprehensive about letting their children take part because the field where the competition was held was next to the cemetery and they did not want their children to handle anything that could have fed on corpses.