Maps for Lost Lovers, page 11
After his father’s origins became known, he pushed aside the recommendations and gentle reassurances of Kaukab’s father, and wrote and talked to some friends and scholars he himself trusted, and the news they gave him nearly pushed him over the edge—the children of the union between Mahtaab and Chakor were all illegitimate. He smashed the furniture on the veranda and hurled the water pitcher against the wall when he heard that Chakor wanted to be cremated. He shouted that Chakor should not have produced children if he was not sure about his religious standing, that on Judgement Day he would be hauled in front of his children in chains to ask for mercy from them.
He was against their efforts to locate Aarti. He said the cancer of the pancreas was Allah’s punishment and stood over the dying man while he coughed up blood and asked him to beg forgiveness from his wife and children and from Allah, “Only then would Allah stop the pain.” The war with the Hindus over East Pakistan was the final blow, and the defeat, when it came, traumatized him (and most of the rest of the country). He became silent, jaws working in rage as he went about the house, eyes aflame, spitting into the plate and walking away if the food was not to his liking, beating his son almost unconscious for flying a kite which he considered unIslamic, or for blowing on his whistle or dribbling a ball in the courtyard—asking a child to apologize for being a child.
Shamas fell asleep beside Chakor’s bed one night and woke at the sound caused by the opium addict next door throwing stones at the moon. He was alone in the room and it would be several decades before he would know fully what had happened while he slept. While he was asleep Jugnu too had nodded off, waking up only at a sudden blast of chilled air. The door to the courtyard was open—the pale light indicated that dawn was near—and the harsinghar was shedding its petals. Jugnu looked at his father’s bed and found it empty. Shamas was asleep on the mat on the floor. Going out into the courtyard, Jugnu saw that the front door was open and there was a bloody rag in the street, just outside the threshold. He went and picked it up—the blood was wet. Soon he found himself walking towards the ruin of the Hindu temple, following the trail of blood drops. The building had fallen into disrepair since 1947, when the Hindus of Sohni Dharti had left for India.
He went from room to ruined room, shouting his father’s name. He thought he heard sounds but they were the birds waking up. The smell of the smoke had intensified and he ran towards it but it was too late: his father had doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire. Knowing himself to be near death, out of his mind with the excruciating pain, he had decided to cremate himself.
The charred face, the lack of gleaming moisture on the teeth, the marriage ring melting and fusing with the finger the way meat sticks to the grill during roasting: Jugnu would try over the years not to think about these things, try not to put them in their sequential place in the story of the next two hours in the temple.
And he—like Shamas—would try not to think of the fact that someone in the night went into the cemetery and dug up the corpse no matter how deep they buried it; it happened three times.
Jugnu beat the flames out with the loi he had wrapped around himself before leaving the house and then he covered the burnt man with it, he who was producing growl-like low sounds at the back of his throat, and was in too fragile a state to be lifted. A crow swooped down from a low branch above Jugnu and picked up a glistening red piece of meat from the dusty floor. Just after the bird took off—disappearing through a gash in the wall—Jugnu recognized what it was: Chakor had cut out his tongue before setting fire to himself lest the pain cause him to call out for help.
He is returning home through the empty town centre, having been to the newsagent and collected the bundle of newspaper.
He climbs down to the riverbank, to listen to the river. The leaves of the rowan trees resemble the tamarinds’. Even if found, Aarti would not have been able to attend her brother’s funeral—it would have been too soon after the war with the Hindus for her to be granted a visa.
Drowned grass-blades whip like tails of sperm in the shallow edges and it is on reaching a secluded curve where the bubbles are like a tumbling spillage of glass beads that he looks up to find the two lovers staring fixedly at him, and the unexpectedness of it is as though a syringe of adrenaline has been emptied into his body.
It is obvious that they saw him before he saw them: they’ve flown apart and are already somewhat composed but their faces retain traces of the look they must’ve borne only moments earlier— show me where and I’ll taste you there. The boy’s back arched, he has almost refastened the buttons of his fly, and the girl is shrugging her shoulder back into the kameez that had been undone at the back—or had it magically come undone at his touch?—and peeled to expose a breast.
They must have taken great care to select a secluded enough place for this rendezvous, and no doubt the condom he would have unrolled onto himself sometime soon had they remained undisturbed is patterned with battle-fatigue camouflage.
“Hello, Shamas-uncle-ji,” the boy—twenty-odd, a Hindu—says with a smile. “It is Shamas-uncle-ji, yes?”
Shamas knows him vaguely from the neighbourhood. Knowing no English on the first day of nursery school, having spoken nothing but his parents’ Hindi up until then, he had demanded to know whether his mother was being called a liar by the teacher who insisted that this fruit was an “apple” and not a saib as he had been taught to call it till then.
A smiler, he stands there now, the shirt straining at the wide shoulders. The force of puberty had struck from within the plates of his face with differing intensity in different places: the nose has become disproportionately longer; the cheekbones are flat, remaining where they were in childhood; the chin and jaw are more angular.
“Let me get my lid”: he nods backwards where his baseball cap lies on a boulder. It is a pretext: he wishes in reality to check on his lover—she, the nipples the size of vaccination scars embossed on the fabric of the shirt, had vanished when the boy came towards Shamas, tenderly giving her the time to correct her appearance somewhere discreetly out of sight, even though the jut and swell of his own erection was still there and he had had to thrust his fists into the trouser pockets to make it less obvious.
She is now married to a Muslim, but this love is much older than the marriage.
Shamas is suddenly tired from the jolt the encounter has given him. On the luminous edge of his fevered senses, he waits, feeling slightly stoned, dreamily stilled. The sky is almost all light now, the water sparkling. There is the beginning of cataract in his eyes, but the faint milkiness has to be endured for now because nothing can be done about it until it has grown more opaque, setting like glue, shutting out vision, the doctor informing him that surgery would be performed in about a decade, surprising him by how long he expected him to live.
He brings her to Shamas now. Poised and graceful, marked by distinction at every pore, as she comes she pats her hair and consults her shadow on a boulder as she would a mirror.
“You know Shamas-uncle-ji, of course? He and his brother are the coolest adults I know. He lives near St. Eustace’s Church. When we were children we used to call the vicar Bo Peep: the whites have moved out, so he’s lost his flock.”
She is a girl from the edge of the neighbourhood, and her face concentrates with the effort to place Shamas—the intruder on stolen rapture. She has freshly applied scent to herself and it drifts to Shamas in surges as though gardenia flowers are opening in rapid succession somewhere nearby.
“A heart was found here yesterday, uncle-ji,” the girl tells him—she has obviously decided to believe her lover and trust Shamas, understanding that he is not the kind of adult who would report this sighting to others and make trouble for the pair. “About half a mile in that direction, beyond the pine trees. There were detectives everywhere. We came just out of curiosity . . .”
“A human heart,” says the boy. “Some children went home talking of something they called a ‘beat box.’ The parents called the police.”
Shamas looks at them without understanding what he is being told. A heart? The lovers stand facing him, still as if painted in a picture, though the fronds of the bracken they had walked through are still moving from that disturbance as though ghosts are passing through. His words, when he speaks, come out ragged from the throat that has remained unused for a while: “Whose heart was it?” Chanda’s? Jugnu’s? He hears himself give out a small cry. A wren on a tree that overhangs the boulders has been watching Shamas and now flies away with a shrill whistle. He turns and begins to walk away.
The soft distortion of tiredness polluting his blood, Shamas moves under the high nave formed by the pine trees, the trees occasionally shaking drops of yesterday’s rain onto him, the clusters of needles dripping like saturated paintbrushes, producing a mud thick as mayonnaise. No, it can’t be Jugnu’s heart or Chanda’s, he tells himself as he hurries, his breathing settling somewhat.
He is embarrassed by the manner of his departure from the two lovers, and looks back to see if he can locate them. In love with a Hindu, she was married off against her will to a cousin brought over from Pakistan, but the couple divorced because she remained distant from him—the cousin moved out as soon as he got his British nationality, no longer having to put up with her. Though she was still young, no one was willing to marry a girl who was not a virgin—“Why not marry a blue-eyed English blonde if virginity is not an issue?”—and the parents could only find an older man for her, who, it has now turned out, has three other wives: one is under the British and also the Islamic law, the other three are under Islamic law only. He wants a son but they keep producing girls, so he has married again and again. The fertility clinics run by Pakistani doctors often place advertisements in the Urdu newspapers, saying, We tell you the sex of the foetus while you wait; this is innocent-seeming, yes, but Shamas knows what message is being conveyed—so that if it’s female you may have it aborted quickly. He wonders if the husband of this particular girl has used these services.
Shamas gives a final glance in search of the lovers but they are nowhere to be seen. When her mother discovered that she had refused to consummate the marriage with her cousin after sharing a bed for almost a week, she took the bridegroom aside and told him in a whisper,
“Rape her tonight.”
He goes past Kiran’s house. The sight of the young girl’s flesh—the soft brown body, bright in the sunlight, glimpsed in sections—is hard to shake off. There have been times over the past few years when he has found himself visiting Kiran and her invalid father, but each time he has known— the guilt lying heavy as lead on his thoughts—that he had set out in that direction with the initial intention of encountering and, perhaps, beginning a conversation with, the prostitute who lives next door.
SPRING
THE MADONNAS
Mah-Jabin’s train, bringing her to Dasht-e-Tanhaii, passes through tunnel after tunnel like a needle picking up beads to thread a rosary. Their number increases as the valley draws near and the ground corrugates to resemble a tempest on land, heaving, convulsing, the troughs deeper with each turn of the rails, the peaks higher in each new view.
And as the air caught between the stiffened waves pours into the compartment—filling it to the brim with England’s warm April—a moth the size and shape of the cursor arrow on a computer screen also enters, to loop and spiral against the window.
She’ll be twenty-seven this year and lives and works in London, divorced from the first cousin she had gone to Pakistan to marry at sixteen, living with him in the pale-green house in Sohni Dharti. Her decision to divorce him had devastated—and enraged—her mother. The two-year marriage is strange to her as though someone is telling her a story.
Kaukab submerges the apples one at a time in the basin of water, rubbing each with her hands to polish away a breach in the slight greasiness on the peel, and then works her way around the fruit until she meets the whistling clean beginning.
The orb of the bunched-up tissue paper in which Mah-Jabin has brought Madonna lilies is continuing to rustle as it expands and opens complicatedly inside the bin out of which dead tulips lean like necks of drunk swans, limp. The Madonnas have replaced them in the glass vase; the shrivelling and the separation of petals that had come to the tulips in drying out has made each cup resemble a live honeysuckle blossom, in size and shape.
“Did you get the flowers I sent you on your birthday, Mother?”
The apples have already begun to yield their fragrance to the warmth in the room, soft and lazy—smoky autumn days. “Yes. They lasted two whole weeks.”
She brings a knife to Mah-Jabin, seeing that she is holding an apple. “Is that how white girls are wearing their hair these days?” Outside, the sun suddenly slips out of a gash in the clouds and lights up the room like magnesium detonated.
Mah-Jabin squints and returns the apple to its hexagonal space among the others, accepts the knife, and gestures with it at the peppers—red as birth—lying on the draining board. “I just felt like a change.” The cutting off is quite recent, and she still finds yard-long strands clinging to the clothes she hasn’t worn for a while.
“It was nearly eighteen-years’ worth of growth.” Kaukab’s lips assume a smile, fixed, as a smiling statue would continue to smile regardless of the violence which might be done to the rest of its face or body. “Eighteen years.”
All the more reason, Mah-Jabin thinks but doesn’t say. Calmly, the blade cuts through the pepper with a hollow sound, creating red hoops that would acquire a wax-like transparency on cooking.
Kaukab nods to postpone the subject, for now. “I saw the peppers by chance yesterday. From Spain, I think. At this time of the year they are the size of tulips so I had to get these big ones when I saw them. A little expensive, but,”—and here she examines the girl’s face for signs of forgetting— “you know your father likes them.”
With the back of her fingers she touches the silk Mah-Jabin has brought her—the green of the dome on Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) mausoleum in sacred Medina—for her to sew a kameez for herself, and which she has rejected because she would not be able to say her prayers in it: it is patterned with butterflies and Islam forbids pictures of living things.
“It is a pity about this,” she says. “Perhaps I could make you a kameez of this, but you probably don’t wear Pakistani clothes these days.” The words are spoken with the back turned; the listener is being tested, to see if she can guess what expression of the face accompanies the words, as a lover would suddenly close both eyes and demand to know what colour they are: the right answer would be a proof of love.
Mah-Jabin was allowed to wear “Western” clothes to school but only if they mirrored shalwar-kameez in cut and style: the shirts had to be long-tailed and had to remain untucked whenever she wore trousers. Aswirl with pleats like the ghagras of Pakistani desert women, and because it was floor-length, a skirt had been allowed her once, though skirts on the whole were forbidden because they were an easy-access garment. When someone they met at a wedding ceremony was considered “skimpily dressed” by Kaukab, Mah-Jabin had said, “She was wearing a sari! Six and a half yards of fabric.” “The number of yards in itself is immaterial when it comes to modesty,” had been Kaukab’s response. And so she intercepted the secret codes and signals before they could be transmitted and understood. She saw it all as cats’ eyes see in the dark. Despite the fact that Mah-Jabin said she had lost the receipt, she was made to return to the shops a blue sweater that had a broad paler stripe running from armpit to armpit, calling attention to the chest.
Mah-Jabin—chalk-green suede trainers at one end and an uncovered head at the other, black trousers gently fluted at the ankles, and a dazzling purple-collared shirt made out of a marigold sari fabric—brings the plateful of pepper rings flecked with ivory seeds to Kaukab. “I once cooked myself a meal of what my friends at university were about to throw away—the stalks of the peppers, the seeded heart. They were astonished, but you’ve taught me well.” She is afraid of sounding casual about her new familiarities, anxious not to hurt Kaukab by presenting herself to her in any capacity other than a daughter, her daughter. There is so much outside the house that may not be brought into the house, and the mother is quick to construe any voicing of opinion or expression of independent thought by the girl as a direct challenge to her authority.
After almost twenty years of doing without, Kaukab had found a friend when Mah-Jabin reached puberty. “My Allah,” she would say, biting the corner of her veil to stopper her laughter, “I didn’t tell even my mother or mother-in-law half the things you’ve coaxed out of me, you wretch. How can you ask me what was the first thing your father said to me on our wedding night? Have some shame.” They could discuss and dissect anything with ease once Kaukab’s feeble protests against her impropriety had died down.
Mah-Jabin would ask questions about Grandfather Chakor: she wondered why it was not considered strange by the other Muslims at the shrine that the little boy in their midst was uncircumcised, as he must have been because he was born a Hindu. Kaukab explained that during those early days of the century, when disease and infection were rampant, it wasn’t uncommon to find a Muslim boy of that age with his foreskin intact because he was deemed too weak from the smallpox he had caught last year and the typhoid of the year before, and then the cholera the following year would cause yet another postponement: “They circumcised him at that shrine he found himself in, and that was that. In Sohni Dharti there was a twelve-year-old in my time whose mother had eight other children and therefore had never had the time: afterwards he walked around with a hole in the front of his shorts like an elephant in a balaclava, and what am I doing talking to you—and that too of such matters!—when I should be doing something about the bottom of the washing basket where the less-urgent bits and pieces have been lying undisturbed for weeks like an invitation to centipedes and silverfish.”
