Nadeem Aslam - Maps for Lost Lovers

Everyone except Jugnu was terrified by what the old man was saying: The “bearded figure” in his dream, referred hitherto as just a saint, had been none other than the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. The cleric had kept this fact from the Muslims due to humility: “I did not want to appear to be a braggart. I am not one of those over-zealous men to whom Gabriel would appear to be a poor catch: they would want to track God.”

Jugnu left the mosque after the misunderstanding about him being a doctor had been cleared up.

To contemplate that the Prophet Muhammad can be wrong — on anything — was to risk a deep spiritual trauma; and so, after the cleric died, soon after Jugnu departed, the men who had been present at the deathbed decided that what the dying man had revealed to them should never be made public. These men would not come forward to testify officially that they had seen Jugnu that dawn. They would have, of course, talked to some of their most-intimate friends or to their wives about meeting Jugnu in the mosque if they had decided to keep quiet for some other reason — say, that they did not want to get involved in a murder inquiry. But this was a matter of religion.

All except one of them would remain utterly silent. And the one who would speak would say to his wife, “When I saw Jugnu I knew he was as good as dead. I knew Chanda’s brothers were waiting for them to come back from Pakistan to kill them. Had my sister set up home with someone that shamelessly, I would have dissolved them both in acid much sooner.”

It was only when he had got up to say his predawn prayers that the cleric remembered that he hadn’t opened yesterday’s post: he found the letter from the American president, politely declining to convert to Islam. The world’s most-powerful country was not to be headed by a Muslim anytime soon! Everyone in the neighbourhood knew the details of the dream, and some of the faithful had made plans in anticipation of the President’s assenting reply. When the prophet Suleiman (or King Solomon, as the Christians called him) had sent a letter to Bilquis (the Queen of Sheba), inviting her and her people to submit to worshipping only Allah, she had decided to pay him a personal visit; and while she was journeying towards him, Suleiman had had his djinns transport her throne to him so that she would know that he had Allah on his side. The people in the neighbourhood had wondered whether the President would turn up in Dasht-e-Tanhaii upon receiving the letter, and they had wondered if Allah would command a few of His djinns to transport some famous American landmark or other to this town. How would the Statue of Liberty look up there on the highest hill, next to the Iron Age fort? Was the earth in the town centre strong enough to take the weight of the Empire State Building? Was the Golden Gate Bridge long enough to span the lake, a girdle around the embedded giant’s waist?

Having left the mosque on his way to The Vision, Jugnu had to walk past Chanda’s family’s shop. Chanda and Jugnu had returned to England earlier than planned, but their killers knew that they were back because the taxi driver who had driven them home from the train station last night had casually mentioned the fact over his vehicle’s communications radio. Chanda’s brothers happened to be at the taxi firm in the town centre and were told the news. The police would never find out who it was that had driven the couple home from the station. The taxi place was staffed mainly by illegal immigrants who were either too afraid to come forward with leads — because the police would surely detain and deport them — or they had moved on to another job or another town by the time the police came to make enquiries.

Chanda’s elder brother, Barra, he who was born holding in his hand a piece of clotted blood, was already awake because when the cleric had collapsed at the mosque earlier, someone had run to the shop and rapped on the door to get a packet each of star anise and cinnamon to make a fortifying brew for the patient. Through the glass of the window, Barra saw Jugnu go by in the half dark.

During the police questioning soon after the couple’s disappearance, the two brothers would declare that they knew absolutely nothing of Chanda and Jugnu’s arrival back in England. But during their talks — part boasts, part confessions — to family members and close friends back in Pakistan, they would admit that Barra had seen Jugnu go past the shop during that early hour.

Jugnu, being watched by Barra from the window, stopped when he noticed the time on the clock-tower that stood in one corner of the Mount Pleasant primary-school playground. It was a quarter to five— fifty-five minutes to sunrise. His wristwatch showed Pakistani time and he took a few seconds to wind the hands back. Barra went into the room of his younger brother — Chotta — in order to wake him. “You preferred being murderers to being the brothers of a sister who was living in sin?” one of the people they would tell the truth to, over there in Pakistan, would ask them. “Yes,” they would say, “because it was we who made the choice to be murderers. We are men but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by not paying attention to our wishes.”

When both her marriages in Pakistan failed and she came back to England, Chanda had been asked by her brothers and father to consider wearing the all-enveloping burqa. The men said they felt awkward and ashamed when they were with their friends on a street corner and she went by. “We see the looks in their eyes — some pity us, some blame us for not having found you a better life,” they said. If she wore a burqa no one would know it was her as she went by. The shop was named after her— Chanda Food & Convenience Store — but the sign above the entrance was painted over after she came back trailing the stink of failed marriages. The old name, it was felt, would needlessly remind people of the girl, their next thought probably being, “Chanda — the twice-divorced girl.” I feel I am being erased, Chanda wrote in her diary angrily.

Chotta was not in his room when the elder brother Barra entered it. Barra knew where he could be — in Kiran’s stealthy arms, in the room next to where her bed-ridden father lies — and he left the house to go fetch him. He went in the opposite direction from Jugnu, and he didn’t yet know that he had seen Jugnu alive for the last time. On his way to Kiran’s house, he had to go past the mosque and he met and exchanged greetings with several men who were gathered outside in the half dark, mentioning examples of the just-deceased cleric’s holiness to each other.

Some of the men who were gathered outside the mosque had remonstrated with Chanda’s brothers in the previous months for allowing their sister to cohabit with a man she wasn’t married to. Many people who saw Barra in the gathering beside the mosque would vouch for his whereabouts to the police later, not knowing if their sighting was of any value. Shahid Ali, who worked the night shift—6 p.m. to 6 a.m. — in a factory (and drew unemployment benefit too), would say that on seeing Chanda’s brother that August Friday, he had remarked to himself that no wonder what the cleric had been promised in his dream hadn’t come true, that the vision of the saintly figure had proved to be false: how could it not when the world was full of such shameless people? “ ‘We are a people so undeserving of miracles,’ I had said to myself with regret.”

Haidar Kashmiri, who had gone to the shop earlier for the spices, saw Barra and thought that he had found a packet of star anise on a shelf somewhere and had brought it over, not having been able to locate it earlier.

People had already begun to doubt that a holy man had appeared in the cleric’s dream.