Maps for Lost Lovers (6 page)

Kaukab remains at the window after the boy has disappeared from sight, and then she blots her eyes with her veil. It has been seven years and a month since she and Shamas heard from their youngest child, her beloved son Ujala. She lifts a small framed photograph from the shelf and looks at him, his hair falling on his shoulders, the body beginning to stretch in adolescence, his mouth grinning, and she recalls that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said that Allah had revealed Himself to him in the beautiful guise of a long-haired fourteen-year-old boy. She presses the picture to her breast. He was always recalcitrant—everything she did seemed to disgust him—and he left home as soon as he could. The daughter Mah-Jabin calls every month or so and visits once or twice a year. Charag, the eldest child, the painter, came during summer last year, and hasn’t telephoned or visited since. He is divorced from the white girl—which means that Kaukab hasn’t seen the grandson for two years and seven months.

Her children were all she had, but she herself was only a part of their lives, a very small part, it has become increasingly clear to her over the past few years.

Alone in the house, she looks out in a daze. Snow has begun again.

Kaukab knows her dissatisfaction with England is a slight to Allah because He is the creator and ruler of the entire earth—as the stone carving on Islamabad airport reminds and reassures the heartbroken people who are having to leave Pakistan—but she cannot contain her homesickness and constantly asks for courage to face this lonely ordeal that He has chosen for her in His wisdom.

She often reminds herself that Allah had given Adam his name after the Arabic word
adim,
which means “the surface of the earth”; he—and therefore the whole of mankind, his descendants—was created from earth taken from different parts of the world. His head was made from the soil of the East, his breast from the soil of the Mecca, his feet from the West.

She lowers herself into a chair, the veil pressed to her eyes, remembering how the fridge door feels lighter these days because it is not as weighted with bottles of milk on the inside as it once was, when the children were here and Jugnu was still taking his meals with the family, as he would continue to do even after he went to live next door. How grateful she was at the beginning for Jugnu’s being here in England! When he was in America, he used to send coin-like postcards and, like a jukebox, she would sing a lengthy song in return, page upon page detailing the family’s life, asking him to come back, telling him that circumstances had improved a little since his first short visit to England. He did return and Kaukab found it hard to contain her pride when the neighbourhood women wanted to know who that flesh-and-blood Taj Mahal was they saw sitting in her garden yesterday. She recruited them in her search for a bride for him but he said he needed to find his feet in England first. She was grateful to him for being here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii because the move to England had deprived her of the glowing warmth that people who are born of each other give out, the heat and light of an extended family. She prepared for him all the food he had been missing during his years away. Bamboo tubes pickled to tartness in linseed oil, slimy edoes that glued the fingers together as you ate them,
naan
bread shaped like ballet slippers, poppy seeds that were coarser than sand grains but still managed to shift like a dune when the jar was tilted, dry pomegranate seeds to be patted onto potato cakes like stones in a brooch, edible petals of courgette flowers packed inside the buds like amber scarves in green rucksacks, chilli seeds that were volts of electricity, the peppers whose stalks were hooked like umbrella handles, butter to be diced into cubes reluctant to separate, peas attached to the inside of an undone pod in a row like puppies drinking from their mother’s belly: she moved through the aisles of Chanda Food & Convenience Store and chose his favourite foods. Coriander was abundant in the neighbour’s garden and it was just a matter of leaning over the fence with a pair of sewing scissors. If the ingredients were heavy as hailstone in the carrier bags, the final dishes were light as snowflakes, so delicate and fleeting was the balance of spices and the interplay of flavours. She feared her successes were accidental but with the help of Allah she repeated the error-free performances, and the diners proclaimed her to be the eighth, ninth,
and
tenth wonder of the world.

He was her husband’s brother, her children’s uncle, her own brother-in-law. Daily and deeply, she loved these words and what they meant. It was as though, when the doors of Pakistan closed on her, her hands had forgotten the art of knocking; she had made friends with some women in the area but she barely knew what lay beyond the neighbourhood and didn’t know how to deal with strangers: full of apprehension concerning the white race and uncomfortable with people of another Subcontinental religion or grouping.

She had had no schooling beyond the age of eleven, but when she arrived in England all those years ago, bright with optimism, she had told Shamas she planned to enrol in an English-learning course as soon as their material circumstances improved, and, in anticipation, she filled a whole notebook with the things she overheard, words whose meaning she didn’t know, proverbs jumbled up, sayings mistakenly glued to other sayings:

The grass is always green with envy on the other side.
Love is in the air but is blind as a bat.
Blood is thicker than water through thick and thin.
It will be a cold day in Hell when Hell freezes over.
A friend indeed is a friend, indeed.
Heaven is other people.

This last she had heard and remembered correctly,
Hell is other people,
but she had later begun to doubt herself: surely no one—no people, no civilization—would think other people were Hell. What else was there but other people?

She never did take that language course. But when they bought a television in the 1970s—it was a Phillips because her father had owned a radio made by that company back in Pakistan so she found it a reassurance and also knew it could be trusted—she began to watch children’s programmes with her children, but each one of the three moved on eventually, leaving her and her rudimentary grasp of English behind.

Now she stands up and moves towards the telephone. Dialling carefully, she waits for the call to connect but then hangs up after the first ring, her courage failing. A minute later she dials again and, bravely, keeps herself from walking away. She lets it ring. The answering machine at the other end has a message in Ujala’s voice. He has refused to speak to her personally for years now, but she rings his number every few days to hear his voice, always afraid lest the boy himself pick up the phone and proceed to say something unpleasant to her, something abusive, telling her she is heartless, is partly or wholly responsible for the deaths of Jugnu and Chanda, having been outraged when they set up home together.

Overcome by fear, she hangs up for the second time.

Yes, she had objected to Chanda moving in with Jugnu, but she is not heartless and hadn’t disapproved of their love. When she heard the rumour about the pair, she remembers being secretly relieved that Jugnu had chosen a Muslim this time, all his previous women having been white. Jugnu was in his late forties, and Kaukab knew he must marry this girl and settle down. But then they began to live together in sin and Jugnu refused to listen to her no matter how reasonably or passionately she tried to make him see the error of his ways.

She was already anxious to see Jugnu settle down and raise a family long before Chanda appeared. Shamas—unwilling to think about such things unprompted—agreed with her whenever she insisted on raising the subject. They would then talk to Jugnu together. The last time the two of them broached the subject with him, seven years or so ago, he startled them both by replying: “Good. I have been meaning for you to meet her.” He was referring to the white woman Kaukab had seen with him in the town centre on two occasions during the last month.

It was high summer, and on the day of the dinner Kaukab worked in the kitchen all morning. She went to sit out in the sun for a few minutes as the afternoon wore on, all the summer foliage giving a sea-tinge to the light in Dasht-e-Tanhaii as though a green scarf had been draped over the sun. That was when Charag came home on an unexpected visit: Charag—the son whom she had sent away to university in London to get an education—had come to inform her that he had a
girlfriend
who was not only
white
but also
pregnant.
The news stunned and repulsed Kaukab, and she held Jugnu responsible for her misfortune. Once, on seeing a diagram of a moth’s innards in one of Jugnu’s magazines, Kaukab had wondered how there could be room in so small a creature to house so many mechanisms, and that summer seven years ago, her own despair was immense although she was tiny: she accused Jugnu of leading her children astray. After Jugnu, her mind, flooded with bitterness and sorrow, had turned on Shamas because Shamas himself had confused the children with his Godless ideas, undermining her authority and devaluing her behaviour as though it was just neurotic and foolish—Jugnu only finished the job Shamas started years ago.

And then she held her own father responsible for having chosen an irreligious husband for her, the father whose impeccable judgement—she had said at other times—could be counted on to remain unclouded during all circumstances, uncowed even by the most monumental of world events so that he had sent a nine-page telegram to Ayatollah Khomeini following the Iranian Revolution to ask him to reconsider his zeal, quoting from the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, against his excesses.

She accused her father of not checking what kind of people he was handing over his daughter to: surely, the clues were everywhere if he had cared to look. Just after the engagement, Shamas’s mother had wondered whether Kaukab would like to rub bird shit into her face, claiming it would enhance her complexion, and she sent her a cage of Japanese nightingales which Kaukab kept just for their song!

Charag, after giving her the devastating news, stayed for less than an hour, leaving her alone with her grief and tears.

She wept as she prepared the food in honour of Jugnu’s white woman—a feast celebrating the fact that they were sinners! The two guests would come after eight, around the same time as Shamas, who had a Communist Party meeting that night; and since Ujala was staying with a friend, Kaukab was alone in the house, alone in the house just as she was alone in the world, alone to let out a noisy sob whenever she felt the need, and as though in harmony with her own state the sky darkened around six and it began to rain noisily. It was just after seven that she happened to see herself in the mirror: the whites of her eyes were veined with blood, her face was red, her eyelids were swollen, and her hair was in disarray (she had beaten her head with her hands several times in a fit of grief ten minutes ago).

She did not have the energy to clean herself up—let Shamas come home and see what he and his family and his children had done to her— but she washed her face nevertheless and oiled and combed her hair because the white woman was coming.

She sprayed perfume into her armpits, and rubbed moisturiser into her flaky grey elbows. She had never met a white person at such an intimate level as she would tonight, and for several days now she had been wondering which of her
shalwar-kameez
s she should wear, settling on the blue one that had a print of white apple blossoms. She clicked open the lid of the face-powder container for the first time in ten years and the smell the cracked pieces of powder gave off took her back to her younger days. Delicately, she patted the fawn-coloured powder over the eyelids, to hide the dark circles and the wrinkles, to bring out the eyes that had sunk into her skull over the years. Allah, the pores on either side of her nose were deep enough to lose coins in. She plucked hairs out of her eyebrows. (Must remember to take out exactly the same number from the other brow.) She wondered which earrings she should wear as she painted her mouth with the pale reddish-brown lipstick. Too much? She wiped it off and started again, and wondered whether she should try eyeliner and just the smallest hint of mascara, wishing her daughter was still living at home to provide guidance on such matters. She struggled hard not to cry at that but failed; in the end, however, she had to restrain herself because she had also to practise her English in the mirror. And it too was hopeless: what was a person to do when even
things
in England spoke a different language than the one they did back in Pakistan? In England the heart said “boom boom” instead of
dhak dhak;
a gun said “bang!” instead of
thah!;
things fell with a “thud,” not a
dharam;
small bells said “jingle” instead of
chaanchaan;
the trains said “choo choo” instead of
chuk chuk . . .
The eyebrows were still a little unruly, she decided towards the end, and rummaged in the cupboard where Ujala kept his things: she managed to locate the jar of hair gel and smoothed a little of it on each brow to tame the hairs. Shouldn’t she take some of the powder off her face: the layers looked so thick she could’ve scratched a message on her forehead with a nail. After she was ready, at last, there was just enough time to attend to the few last details of the meal: she went into the back garden with her sewing scissors to clip leaves of coriander to sprinkle over the
mung dahl.
And that was when a ten-year-old girl from the neighbourhood saw her from the other side of the lane, crossed over, looked at her contemplatively for a few seconds, and then said quietly in the flat tones of one making an innocent observation:

“But surely, auntie-ji, you look like a eunuch.”

Shooing the child away, who must have seen eunuchs dancing at a wedding during a visit to Pakistan or India, Kaukab rushed indoors burning with shame and humiliation, wondering whether she hadn’t in fact got carried away with the cosmetics, and she pleaded with Allah for help because now there was no time for her to correct her appearance: the doorbell rang to announce the arrival of Jugnu and the white woman, she who no doubt had a perfectly made-up face framed by perfectly arranged hair. She stood frozen in the middle of the room and heard the key slide into the lock of the front door: Shamas must be with Jugnu and his guest.