Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Jugnu took his keys and came out of his back garden. The barber’s son — having driven his taxi all night — was just pulling up outside his parents’ home when Jugnu emerged into the street. The old man sat in the car next to the son, who, as testified by the black-and-white photograph that hung in the barbershop, looked exactly like his father when he was young.

Jugnu stopped because his way was blocked by the car door opened on the pavement side. And with a greeting and a smile, he reached in and relieved the old barber of the box he had been holding on his lap. There was a scraping of claws inside when the box tilted in his hand. A strong smell of bird-droppings and feathers came from the box which told Jugnu that on his way home from his night’s work the son had collected the father from an all-night quail fight. Some members of the older generation indulged in this passion which was illegal in England but wasn’t prohibited back in the Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi towns and villages they came from. Most young men, born here in England, were uninterested in the activity, but there were younger men at these fights here in England: they were the sons-in-law (mostly nephews) the older generation had imported from the villages back home for their British-born daughters. And increasingly the other young men present were the asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

The birds were starved for a fortnight and fed on seed soaked in alcohol just before the fight, the men handling the Islamically unclean bottle of alcohol with rags, and then spurs were attached to the back of the birds’ legs.

“The box contained dying blood-soaked birds,” the barber’s son would say later, in the months to come, “and I was afraid Jugnu would grow suspicious and land us in trouble. He was an educated man. Not like us: the sons had failed their O-levels just as, in another time, another country, the fathers had failed their Matriculations.”

The barber’s son let Jugnu help his father — in spite of the fact that the old man was overcome by disgust when he saw Jugnu, whom he considered a loathsome and immoral sinner.

After helping the old man out of the car, Jugnu carried the box of quails to the front door. The son was about to drive off but then the car stopped: the window was rolled down and the son told the father what he had just heard over his communication radio — that the cleric at the mosque had collapsed of a suspected heart attack. The barber, fishing in his pocket for the key to the front door, was shaken by the news. During Jugnu and Chanda’s stay in Pakistan the cleric had had a most-holy dream, a dream that had had an electrifying effect on the Muslims of the neighbourhood; and it had also been mentioned in letters and telephone calls to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where too it had proved sensational. A saintly figure, holding a thousand-bead jade rosary, had appeared and told the cleric to write a letter to the American president, inviting him to convert to Islam. The holy man was standing in a mosque carved out of a single pearl that was — it was the cleric’s understanding in the dream— washed twice daily in rose water. The saint told the cleric that he had pleased the saint by his unwavering piety, and that — as a sign of his pleasure towards him — it would be at the cleric’s prompting that the American president would convert to Islam.

The barber bid a perfunctory, distracted farewell to Jugnu, after saying, in a voice full of awe, “Only the pious die on a Friday.” And he’d claim later that when his fingers touched Jugnu’s — as he took from him the box containing the wounded birds — Jugnu’s hand had felt cold and stony, like a dead man’s.

After seeing the old barber to the front door, Jugnu continued on his way towards the maple-lined side-street that rose between the church and the mosque.

He stopped before he began the ascent because at the corner he noticed the ladder rising towards the sky. The previous month — while he was in Pakistan — the workmen who came to replace the telephone pole had discovered that a letterbox was fastened to it, as red as a fire engine and hot under the summer sun despite the shade of the nearby maple trees. They did not have the official keys needed to release the clips and decided to ease the box over the top of the pole and slip it down the replacement like a wristwatch. The new column turned out to be thicker nearer the base and the box rested twelve feet above the ground. It would remain in that position for several months and a ladder was put up for the posting and collecting of letters. Some people in the neighbourhood would see it as a blatant and obvious attempt by the whites to stop the Asian people from keeping in touch with their families back home. Bindweed raced up the ladder and pole, the tendrils candystriping the rungs, the beautiful white flowers lolling in the air on delicate branches that were full of sculpted heart-shaped leaves.

Just under two weeks from that day, Kaukab would drag this ladder trailing a straggle of dusty green hearts into the front garden of Jugnu’s house and set it against the top window, sending a boy up to have a look through the window — wishing Ujala was home so she could send him up instead of having to ask someone else’s son.

Standing there, he was smiling to himself when Naheed the seamstress hurried out of her house and asked him to please go up there and quickly post this letter, brother-ji. In the months to come she would debate with herself whether or not to let anyone know that she had been one of the people who had seen Jugnu during that predawn hour. The letter was to her sister, who lived in Bangladesh, and she wanted it kept a secret from her husband: during a visit to Pabna over a decade ago, the man had been accused of assault by Naheed’s younger sister, and, shouting down the girl’s claims, he had forbidden Naheed to communicate with her family. Naheed wrote to her parents and sister whenever she had the opportunity and posted the letters while he was asleep, on occasions going out into the street in the middle of the night.

If I tell the police about having met Jugnu, she would write in a letter to her sister several weeks after that dawn, he would want to know what I was doing out at that hour, talking to other men. And the police visits to the house and questionings would abrade his vindictive nature.

As for the barber and his taxi-driver son — who were the other two people to have seen Jugnu by that time that day — they would not wish to get involved because they feared the quail fighting would land them in trouble with the law.

After posting the letter for Naheed the seamstress — a letter that had been sealed with dabs of chappati dough because the tube of glue was somewhere upstairs and Naheed hadn’t wanted to go looking for it lest she wake her husband — Jugnu continued up the maple-lined street, towards the corner where the mosque was situated.

The street lights were still on and they cast an apricot glow on the pavement.

As Jugnu walked past the mosque door, Shaukat Ahmed, who had a knitwear stall in the covered market, came out and, on seeing Jugnu, asked him grimly to step in and look at the cleric. (“I always thought he was a doctor!” he would say of Jugnu later.) The cleric was talking slowly with his last breaths, and wanted to be laid out on his prayer mat. He used a cured deerskin as prayer mat and Jugnu brought it to him from where it lay folded and spread it.

As the news of the cleric’s death spread in a short while, there would be a large gathering of people in the mosque, but when Jugnu went in there was only a handful of people, listening to the cleric, the American president’s letter crumpled in his right hand.