Maps for Lost Lovers (44 page)

“How is your father, Kiran?” he says to indicate that she doesn’t have to continue with the earlier subject, in case she has begun to regret having confided in him during the minutes away from him. “Is he still finishing every sentence with a laugh as though ridiculing his illness?”

Kiran however does wish to return to the earlier topic, and says, “I didn’t meet him while he was visiting your house. Remember he left Dasht-e-Tanhaii to go to London, to spend his last two weeks in England looking up old friends in the capital. Well, one day I received a letter from him—from London—saying he was coming back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii just to see me. The look on my face had alarmed my father. ‘What was in that letter?’ he asked, having seen me reading it earlier. ‘Has someone died?’ I wanted to say, no, someone dead has come alive.”

“He wrote to you and came back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii? I didn’t know that. Did you know he had named his daughter after you?”

“No, I didn’t, but he told me when we met. You knew?”

“Yes, but I didn’t want to mention it in case it hurt you. I am sorry.”

“There he was, at the doorstep one day soon after the letter. All my life I have looked at other men with the hope of catching a fleeting glimpse of one of his gestures, a skin-colouration like his, a smile resembling his. Now, there was the accumulated sadness of compromises in his features that comes to everyone in old age.”

“I don’t think he knew you had gone to Karachi.”

“No. I told him last year.” She is sitting stiffly, spine held away from the back of the seat. “He brought for me what he called ‘the five arrows of Love, the mind-born god’: there was a red lotus, a deep-red
asoka
flower, a coral-green froth that was mango blossom, yellow jasmine, and a blue lily.”

“Yes. Spring is the time associated with romance and they were the five flowers of the Subcontinental spring.”

“He stayed in a hotel and I visited him at various places in town.” She looks at Shamas. “What must you think of me, Shamas? An old woman living in the past.”

“Most people live in the past because it’s easy to remember than to think. Most of us don’t know
how
to think—we’ve been taught
what
to think instead. And, no, I don’t think badly of you.”

She doesn’t say anything more and looks out of the window, craning her neck occasionally to keep this or that in view as the bus rushes along the road.

Two days ago, Shamas thought for a brief moment that he recognized Suraya’s paisley jacket in the window of a charity clothes shop—but on second glance they turned out to be someone else’s footprints, not hers.

The bus passes an electrical appliances shop that has a poster claiming that theirs is the Best deal ON/OFFer. The photographs of the immigrants are lost forever. A jeweller’s shop will open soon in the place where the photographer’s studio used to be: empty wristwatch boxes and little finger-ring cases are arranged in neat rows in the window, the lids open: a miniature cinema theatre of satin-and-plush seats. A chair can be glimpsed inside, for the customers to sit in, its tall ornately moulded back bringing to mind the frame of a mirror.

“When he left me in England all those years ago,” Kiran says, “he said he’d be back in twenty-five days. When we re-met, he said if he were a religious man, he’d believe that God had turned those twenty-five days to twenty-five years as a punishment for not saying ‘God willing’ after telling me about his return. I told him that as far as I was concerned, he didn’t go even after he’d gone.”

“I never understood why you hadn’t married anyone else.”

“There were other possibilities. I’d get frightened of the loneliness of old age, and the members of the Sikh community would try to match me up with people. Some good, some not. But.” She waves her hand in resignation. “There was even a white man I had gone to school with and had been terribly in love with as a girl. I was the only Asian in my school, and I used to wonder why no one had ever asked
me
out on a date. I approached that boy to see if he’d go out with me but he said no. And when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘Well, you are a darkie!’ The word ‘Paki’ wasn’t invented until the 1970s, otherwise he would have used that.

When he said that to me, I suddenly realized, ‘Of
course
I am a darkie.’ And because I loved him I didn’t want him to be called a darkie-lover, and decided to stay away from him. He said, ‘It’s a pity you are a darkie, because if you were white you’d be really pretty.’ And then some years after we left school we ran into each other . . . but nothing serious happened. The Sikh friends and acquaintances still try sometimes—they mean well, I suppose—but these days it’s mostly widowers and illegal immigrants.”

He wonders how long Kaukab’s brother had stayed with her last year and asks her.

She is silent and then says, “He was still here around the time Chanda and Jugnu died—late summer.”

“Do you still write to each other?”

She gives no answer.

He sees a tear slide down out of her eye and, appalled at his insensitivity at asking her so many intimate questions, he says, “I am terribly sorry.” And this after she has shown him the great kindness of coming to the trial.

“I have been crying for a while: the tears’ve caught up with me only now.”

She doesn’t say anything further and Shamas looks away, out where the rain and the ice-clusters have stopped falling, and a day-moon is shining in the winter sky.

Kiran, composed now, sighs and paraphrases what she said earlier, “I met him on five occasions around Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and a sixth time in my house. That was the last time. I kept his presence in England from my father, and—during that sixth meeting, when he came to the house—I also tried to hide the fact that he was in there. He came very late at night and I took him upstairs . . .”

“You don’t have to tell me any of this, Kiran. I know it must be painful.”

“You are too kind. But please let me talk. I was upstairs with him. We poured all our longing into those moments. When we made love, it was as though we were trying to kill each other. And then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs but it was too late . . .”

“Your father managed to climb the stairs?”

Kiran places a hand on her breast. “I know I have let you think I came to hear the verdict today as an act of friendship towards you.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I was there because of Chanda’s younger brother—Chotta. I thought you knew about me and him. We tried to keep our relationship a secret, but
some
people in the neighbourhood found out. I’ve always wondered if you were one of them.”

“And he walked in on you while you and . . .”

“I had given Chotta a set of house keys. He saw us and went away shouting abuse, pulling off and shattering all those mirrors I have hanging in the staircase. A thousand broken mirrors: there was an eternity’s worth of bad luck in his wake. It all awoke my father. I had to tell him everything. I resisted at first, saying, ‘I cannot tell you what I have done.’ But he retorted, ‘A good person cannot do what others may not know.’ I am sorry, Shamas.”

“You don’t have to apologise, Kiran. Who am I to deny you the comforts of a companion?”

She buries her head in his shoulder.

He places a hand on her head. “Did you love Chotta?”

“I’ve cried for him, which is the same thing, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“And I do
have
to apologize to you, perhaps even ask for forgiveness. You see, that night was the night Chanda and Jugnu are thought to have been murdered. I ran after him when I had put on my clothes but couldn’t find him anywhere. He must have been in a rage. I don’t doubt for a moment that I contributed to the anger he unleashed on Chanda and Jugnu. I am terribly sorry.” She looks at Shamas and then withdraws her gaze from him. “Please say something.”

A bird sits on a bare tree outside, as though waiting for it to grow leaves and flowers.

Kiran is saying, “He refused to see me all during the coming weeks. I’d stop in the streets on seeing him but he would turn back or slip into a lane. I caught up once, tried to put him in good humour with a dozen cajoleries, but he said women were nectar-coated poison, puffs of coloured dust, dancing butterflies, and pushed me away.”

“When did you begin seeing him?”

“I think it must’ve been around the time Chanda and Jugnu began seeing each other.”

“And it also
ended
the night their story ended.”

“The fact that they were happy while
he
had just been betrayed must’ve made him resent them, perhaps.”

Daylight has faded altogether now; the road outside has become a river of car headlights heading home. The bus passes the Ali Baba carpet warehouse. Plastic fish are strung by their mouths on a sagging string above the fishing equipment shop, looking like the washing line of small mermaids.

Chanda and Jugnu are out there somewhere.

And Suraya.

Perhaps she returned to Pakistan? But: an unmarried woman with a child in her womb—she’ll be arrested for the sin of fornication. No, no, she’s still here in England.

Perhaps she aborted the child to be able to go back: her husband was about to marry another woman, and so she did all she could to be in Pakistan to disrupt and prevent the wedding—?

He has tried to get information from Kaukab about “Perveen,” but apparently she has not been in touch since that first time. “Other women of the neighbourhood got to her, no doubt,” she said with regret. “Telling her lies about me, turning her against me. And, between my own illness and your injuries, I haven’t had time to go to her street.”

Kiran asks, “Do you want to know how it began?”—and goes on without waiting for his answer: “I heard a knock—very gentle—on my door one night. It was about ten o’clock. I opened the door and he asked me if he could come in. I recognized him from the shop, and although I was taken aback by him asking to be let in, I brought him into the kitchen. He said he wanted to talk, but he kept his eyes on me quite blatantly as I moved about making tea, and it was only after a while that I realized he was drunk. And it must’ve been soon after that that he stood up, eyes still trained on me. We both knew what he wanted to do but neither made a move for many minutes. Things refused to come to a boil. My father asked from his bed who was at the door, and I said no one. That was his prompt. The fear that I would shout if he came near me was what had kept him from making a move but now he knew I wouldn’t. So he lunged.” Without looking at Shamas she says, “I didn’t resist.”

“I think I understand why you didn’t go to the police to offer information or come to talk to me.”

“It was because people would have called me names.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“After Chanda and Jugnu disappeared there were rumours about Chanda’s family’s involvement. Chotta had refused to talk to me or see me after that terrible night but it was several weeks later that he came around one day and confessed to the murders. I never saw him again. I am so sorry.”

“Are you saying you could have helped put the whole matter to rest sooner?”

“No, no. He told me everything
after
the policemen from England had got their testimonies from the people in Sohni Dharti. I am sorry.”

“I don’t know what to say. You did what you had to do to save your name, Kiran. Even
he
tried to preserve your good name: what happened with you that night isn’t mentioned in any of the testimonies—that that was part of the rage unleashed on Chanda and Jugnu. He didn’t tell it to anyone.”

The bus is pulling up at their stop. They both go down the stairs and the winter’s chill hits them in the face when they get out. Each day after the trial, Shamas has gone home and told Kaukab the details of what happened at the court. Based on what he learns at the court, they put together the sequence of events that led to Chanda and Jugnu’s murders, adding new details each time he returns from the hearing, moving the narrative of the couple’s last few hours forward each day. But he’ll have to keep secret what Kiran has just told him.

He and Kiran stand together for a few moments before going their separate ways.

“Do you know what he was doing, drunk, knocking on my door at ten o’clock that night?”

Shamas looks up at the sky where the moon is the colour of garlic peel, with a morning-sky blue girdle around it.

“He had mistaken my house for the prostitute’s next door, and when I answered he had decided to try his luck with me.”

“This December is harsher than last year’s.”

“Well,
we
are older and weaker by another year, remember.” She smiles. Shamas smiles in return and tells her to tread carefully on the rain-slippery roads as she walks away.

After a sentence has just been written down, a sense of unfinished business compels the tip of the pen to return to that place back there where an “i” is still to be dotted, a “t” left uncrossed; and during a distraction, the mind is vaguely aware that somewhere in the room there is an apple not yet eaten down to the core, a cup of tea with two sips still remaining in it; and so now, now that the conversation with Kiran is over, he is aware of a similar dissatisfaction within him. He locates it: he had wanted to ask her whether Chanda’s brother had ever discussed with her the matter of Chanda and Jugnu setting up home together. He and Kiran were lovers: the matter would have come up. How did he view his own illicit and, yes,
sinful
encounters with Kiran while condemning Chanda and Jugnu for the same thing?

As he watches her recede in the distance, he wonders whether she had told him the truth: he wonders whether she knew about the details of the murders many weeks or even months before the British police got their lead in Sohni Dharti. She just didn’t come forward because she was afraid of what people would think of her.

And just now on the bus, she was no doubt unable to face him with her guilt and had lied about it.

Nothing is an accident: it’s always
someone’s
fault; perhaps—but no one teaches us how to live with our mistakes. Everyone is isolated, alone with his or her anguish and guilt, and too penetrating a question can mean people are not able to face one another the next day.