Maps for Lost Lovers, page 10
Shamas uncovers the window and looks out at the dawn. His back teeth still warm from the tea of five minutes earlier, he steps out of the house as he does early morning each Saturday and Sunday, to go into the town centre and intercept the bunch of newspapers that the newsagent otherwise drops into his closed office. He brings the office keys in case the papers have already gone out, but that rarely happens because he leaves as early as possible, sometimes setting off before dawn, these leisurely strolls in the empty roads and streets being a pleasure much looked forward to during the week. He carries the newspapers back to the office on Monday, and the stories and articles—concerning race relations—that he has circled during the weekend are clipped and filed by the secretary.
The sky is beginning to pale, but a mournful darkness still clings to the world down here.
Locking into each other like the facets of a jewel, the tilting surfaces of the neighbourhood have channelled away the water that the snows released upon melting.
When the snows began to melt, receding to lie on the sides of the roads, the white mounds looked as though they were dead bodies covered in white sheets.
Where are they? They are nowhere and yet he feels as though he is handcuffed to their corpses. It has been many months since their disappearance but Kaukab cannot be swayed: “They will return, safe and sound. What are months and years in Allah’s plans? For all we know your own father’s sister will contact you one day, after half a century.”
The truth about his true identity had returned to Chakor slowly over the years, the truth that he hid from his family for as long as possible. He had known that truth in its entirety long before he introduced into The First Children on the Moon a regular section called “Encyclopaedia Pakistanica,” inviting the readers to write the histories of their towns, villages and neighbourhoods, and a boy from Gujranwala had sent in the details of the 1919 bombing. He had looked up the accounts of that April Tuesday in history books too.
The three First World War BE2c biplanes, under the command of Captain D. H. M. Carberry, arrived over Gujranwala at 3:10 p.m. that Tuesday. He dropped his first three bombs on a party of 150 people in the nearby village of Dhulla, who looked as though they were heading for the town. One bomb fell through the roof of a house and failed to explode. Two fell near the crowd, killing a woman and a boy, and slightly wounding two men. The rest of the crowd fled back to the village, encouraged by 50 rounds from the Lewis machinegun.
A few minutes later, Carberry dropped two bombs—one of them a dud—and fired 25 rounds at a crowd of about fifty near the village of Garjhak,without causing any casualties.
Returning to Gujranwala, he attacked a crowd of about 200 in a field near a high school on the outskirts of the town, dropping a bomb which landed in a courtyard, and followed up with 30 rounds of machinegun fire: a sweet-seller was wounded by a bullet, a student was hit by a bomb splinter,and a small boy was stunned.
In the town itself he dropped a further four bombs—two of which failed to explode—and fired between 100 and 150 rounds at crowds in the streets.
When asked later why he had machinegunned the crowds even after they had been dispersed, Carberry replied, “I was trying to do this in their own interests. If I killed a few people, they would not gather and come to Gujranwala to do damage.”
His idea was “to produce a sort of moral effect upon them.”
He claimed he could “see perfectly well” from the altitude of 200 feet and that he did not see anybody at all who was innocent . . .
Deepak confessed everything to Mahtaab eventually, the truth that Chakor had kept from his family. The first very-brief and confusing flash of recall had occurred as early as 1922, just three years after the bombing, when he saw a white woman and inexplicably found himself staring at her feet. But in the years to come—the years during which he married Mahtaab and had children—the details of his past life would return more fully, making themselves visible in the gentle and gradual manner of objects taking shape with the slow arrival of dawn. When the British began selling the contents of their homes in preparation for their official departure from the Subcontinent in 1947, Mahtaab had returned home one day with a crinoline to make into a quilt (along with six suede hats to take to the shoemaker to have slippers made out of them), but he had not needed that prompt to remember that his name was Deepak, that he was a Hindu, or that he and his sister had been on their way to see whether it was really true that white women hid tails under their crinolines.
Mahtaab gave no indication that she minded his not having shared it all with her much earlier. He said he hadn’t known what to do so he had ended up doing nothing.
Not for a single moment, Mahtaab wrote in answer to the letter in which Kaukab had asked whether she felt betrayed by her husband. Imagine how much he must’ve suffered with that secret gnawing at his innards.
Shamas is standing on the bridge, looking down into the water. And a woman’s voice calls to him, softly, from behind:
“Brother-ji.”
He is startled, and, turning in a near swoon, sees Chanda’s mother standing there, hesitating about approaching him.
“I wanted to tell you something, brother-ji.”
Shamas doesn’t know how to react, his head a perfect vacuum.
“It is something important. I thought of going to the Urdu bookshop by the lake yesterday afternoon, but I couldn’t make time. Instead, because I know you always go to collect the newspapers from the town centre very very early, I left the house this morning to talk to you . . . I was walking behind you but couldn’t catch up. Then you stopped here to look at the river . . . Brother-ji, a woman from near our house returned from a visit to Lahore yesterday. She says she thinks she saw Jugnu in the crowd at the Data Darbar mausoleum last Thursday.”
He looks at her without making eye contact. In her earlobe there is an emerald that would fill the cupped paws of a mouse—a berry of solid green light. He clears his throat, confused by what he is being told, but then the power of reason and the ability to conceive coherent thought fly back into his skull. “Both their passports were found in the house,” he says quietly. “Have you forgotten that, sister-ji? No one saw them upon their return from Pakistan but they did return.”
“She thinks she saw him, brother-ji.” Roses suddenly bloom on her cheeks.
He feels himself soaked in profoundest grief: when she speaks it is as though all the sorrow in the world has been given voice. The words float out of a deep loneliness he recognizes. “The passports are here in England, sister-ji.” He must state the facts but feels himself cruel for doing so, vindictive, as though he is swinging at her hopes with a club.
The sun lights up the course of tears on the fraught melancholy mask of her face. “Everyone in that country wants to come to the West, brother-ji, so the two of them probably sold the passports to another couple and decided to live in Pakistan themselves . . . Everyone made their life difficult here . . . No one at the airports checks to see if the passport photographs match exactly . . .” She is searching his face to see if some little thing can be salvaged from the wreck of her ideas.
He shakes his head. “That other couple entered Britain, came to this town, let themselves into Jugnu and Chanda’s home, and deposited the passports and luggage before disappearing. Forgive me, sister-ji, but is that what you are suggesting?” She resembles her daughter; it is as though the father had made no genetic contribution towards the absent perished girl.
“Yes . . . No . . . Yes . . . I know it sounds foolish but . . .”
“Forgive me, but that is as absurd as that talk about them turning into a pair of peacocks. Don’t you agree?”
Standing immovably, she tries again. “Brother-ji, people are lost and found in so many ways . . . Your own father-ji was separated from his family members in a strange manner . . .”
Coloured motes fill the sunlit distance between him and her.
Shamas wonders what expression he’s wearing on his face—is he frowning, does he look angry, distressed?
She is silent for a few moments and then, defeated, says, “Yes, it is foolish. I am terribly sorry to have troubled you, brother-ji.” On her head is a veil transparent as water and her upper body is wrapped in a yellow shawl printed with white penny-sized stars; her arms are crossed under the shawl. He is not sure if he has ever conversed with her before but he knows she has the long slender fingers of a piano player, has seen her using them to manipulate with sensitivity and graceful importance the cash register at the shop.
“Would you like me to walk back with you?” He is not sure whether he should have made this offer: what would people think if they saw her walking beside a man not her husband at this early hour? If someone has seen them talking there is already a possibility of gossip. The breeze is coming from her direction and he realizes now that the sorrow he had sensed within him earlier was partly due to the woman’s smell— the mother smells like the daughter. All he has to do to be reminded of Chanda is to draw a breath. Once, during the brief few months that the couple lived together—in radiant ignorance of the fate that awaited them—Jugnu had tacked one of Chanda’s veils to the window to keep out insects, and Shamas had walked into a space saturated with a scent he had understood to be the scent of Chanda’s body and hair.
She shakes her head to decline his offer to see her home. “No, thank you, brother-ji. I’m not going far.” And before walking away, she says, “But you yourself should be careful: I don’t like the thought of you going out of the house at an hour when there is no one around. As I was waiting for you earlier I felt like the only one out in a town under curfew. You must try to break this habit. Anything could happen: you should remember that this isn’t our country.”
There is silence all around and the whole town lies wrapped in dreaming. He must continue with his own journey. He straightens as though shifting a yoke. The exchange of words could not have taken more than two minutes but it had felt longer: shocking or stressful events and incidents are said to concentrate consciousness to a single point and that slows down the time. Dying, over within seconds, supposedly takes forever.
He’s been left shaken by the encounter, and as always in times of stress he thinks of his younger days in Lahore and Sohni Dharti, when he was writing poetry, beginning to develop political awareness. An unmarried young man’s sexual life, in those days and in a segregated country like Pakistan, began late, and so they were also the years of his sexual initiation, exploration, and gratification—in the “Diamond Market” district of prostitutes in Lahore. (During the past few years here in England, at the other end of his life, he has occasionally thought again about paying for sexual contentment, to alleviate his physical loneliness, but he hasn’t gone beyond looking at telephone numbers and addresses in the classified pages of The Afternoon.) He was twenty-six and awaiting the publication of his first book of poems. The rumour in the publishing world in Lahore was that of any two rivals competing for the love and attentions of the same woman, the one who owned a copy of his book would have the upper hand. But then, in 1958, he had had to leave Pakistan for England, fleeing the military coup. The new government began hunting for Communists and he came to England a month after police raided the offices of his publisher and noted down all the names they found there before torching the place. He stayed in England until he was thirty-one, working in the mills and factories around Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
After five years in England, he returned to Sohni Dharti in 1963 and married Kaukab, doing all he could to catch a glimpse of her after the negotiations had begun, and succeeding finally when he knocked on her window one monsoon afternoon to ask for the literary pages of the newspaper. When he learned that he was to be a father, he decided to go back to England, having failed to gain meaningful employment since his return to Pakistan. He was back in England at the beginning of 1965, and Kaukab joined him at the end of that year, wearing a long chocolate-brown coat he had sent her from here, and carrying the baby Charag in her arms.
Shamas was working in a factory and that was when the word of his father’s past reached him. It was 1970. Shamas did not return for a visit until the following year when news came that Chakor was dying of pancreatic cancer.
And as death drew near he became delirious, asking Mahtaab to promise she would cremate him on logs of the flame-of-the-forest tree, like a Hindu, instead of burying him in the ground like a Muslim.
Difficulties had arisen soon after the identity became known but the letters to Shamas had hidden the news of this harassment. He would learn later that a shopkeeper whose hand had accidentally brushed against Chakor’s had immediately washed it, saying, “I wouldn’t touch a Hindu even with a meat hook.” Women began to send back the rose essence Mahtaab sold—in bottles the size and shape of a bicycle’s light-generator—claiming it was contaminated with onion. Things were made difficult for him at The First Children on the Moon until he had no alternative but to resign; the “Encyclopaedia Pakistanica” series was seen by some to be nothing more than his excuse for publishing detailed maps of Pakistani towns and cities which the Indians could use during war—a war with India being always a possibility, the most recent only five years ago, when, to distract the attention of the public who had become disaffected following that election back in 1964, the government had sent the army into Kashmir, and India had retaliated by crossing the border into Lahore.
An Indian Hindu scholar claimed that Anarkali, Pomegranate Blossom—the servant girl with whom the Muslim prince Saleem had fallen in love, and whom Saleem’s father the Emperor Akbar had had buried alive as a result in 1599—was not a girl at all, but, in fact, a boy, a fact the Muslim historians of the Mughul era had suppressed till now: the claim was published in Pakistani newspapers and Chakor was manhandled in the street that week and told that the Hindu gods were “pretty boys,” what with their rouged cheeks and lipsticked mouths.
The cancer of the pancreas was in the last stage when it was diagnosed, and as death drew near, Chakor’s raving became constant, wanting cremation instead of burial. Fearful that Mahtaab might act upon the words of a dying man out of his mind with pain, Kaukab had sent Shamas to Pakistan:
“I want you to go there and see that what needs to be done is done.” She pointed to the one-year-old daughter, Mah-Jabin: “No one will marry her if your mother-ji does what he is asking. She herself never had any daughters so she doesn’t realize how important it is to remain on the good side of society. But you do have a daughter now, and must place her before everybody else. A scandal like that would do irreparable damage to her chances.”
It was November 1971, and the West Pakistani army had been in East Pakistan since March, spreading death and destruction: the general election last December had been won by an East Pakistani leader and the West Pakistani powers had refused to allow him to form the government, sending in the soldiers to suppress the unrest that followed. These soldiers had been told that the East Pakistanis were an inferior race—short, dark, weak, and still infected with Hinduism—and junior and senior officers alike had spoken of seeking in the course of the military campaign to improve the genes of the East Pakistanis: women and girls were raped in their hundreds of thousands. On the day in December that Chakor vomited dark-brown half-digested blood, grainy like sand—the aorta had ruptured and spilled its contents into the stomach so that now his body was consuming itself—the Indian army moved into East Pakistan, and Pakistan surrendered after a two-week long war: East Pakistan was now Bangladesh—India had not only defeated Pakistan, it had helped cut it in two.
At night Shamas would sit beside Chakor, the basket of bloody rags set by his chair leg. Sometimes the twenty-four-year-old Jugnu would be there with them, back from the Soviet Union.
The harsinghar tree in the courtyard, which dropped its funereal white flowers at dawn, had more flowers than usual under it during those mornings, as though the branches had been disturbed during the night. Shamas was no believer, but imagination insists that all aspects of life be at its disposal, the language of thought richer for its appropriation of concepts such as the afterlife. And so as he looked at the carpet of blossoms he couldn’t help entertaining the thought that during the night Izraeel, the Muslim angel of death, had wrestled in the branches above with the Hindu god of death for our father’s soul. Shamas looked up and imagined the branches twisting around the two supernatural beings, the flowers detaching from twigs and forming a thick layer on the ground.
The excessively heavy drop of blossoms was caused in fact by Mahtaab, who had lately taken to chewing the harsinghar foliage: the betel leaves, which were her lifelong addiction, and without which it was impossible for her digestive system to function, grew mainly in East Pakistan, and when their price went up at the beginning of the civil war she had reduced her intake to just a two-inch section at dawn; but now that East Pakistan was another country, the supply of betel had stopped altogether, and while a few people had given up the habit as a patriotic gesture, all over Sohni Dharti men and women were experimenting with any leaf they came across in case it resembled the betel in bitterness and flavour.
“I am sure the government is happy at last,” Mahtaab had said, “now that it has turned us all into donkeys.”
Both Shamas and Jugnu had smiled but their elder brother had taken exception to the comment. He had become increasingly religious in his forties and the news that his father was a Hindu had devastated him. He had accused the man of betraying them all by concealing the secret from them, prolonging the sin he was committing by living with a Muslim woman.
As a young man he occasionally attended the mosque run by Kaukab’s father, his attendance increasing when he fell in love with Kaukab’s young aunt who lived with the cleric’s family beside the mosque. He hoped to catch a glimpse of her each time he went to pray: she was often at a high window overlooking the prayer hall—waiting to catch sight of him, surely? And through his piety he hoped to be seen in favourable light by Kaukab’s father, hoping that one day he would think him an appropriate match for his sister. When he heard that the young woman was soon to be married off to the man to whom she had been betrothed at birth, he was heart-broken and stopped going to that mosque, attending instead another one, one operated along a more strict interpretation of Islam. It was here that he would meet the people who would eventually lead him towards the austere and volatile form of the faith that was alien to his parents and brothers.
