Maps for Lost Lovers, page 2
Shamas asks her to step in now. “Come in out of the rain, I mean, snow, while I put on my Wellingtons. Kaukab is still in bed.” This is a narrow house where all the doors disappear into the walls, except for the two that give on to the outside world at the front and back, and he slides open the space under the stairs to look for the shoes, stored somewhere here amid all the clutter at the end of last winter. There are fishing rods leaning like stick-insects in the corner. Soft cages for her feet, there is a pair of jellied sandals that had belonged to his daughter, lying one in front of the other as though he has surprised them in the act of taking a step, the straps spiralling like apple peel.
“I apologize again for having troubled you so early. I was hoping one of your sons would be visiting, and I would bring him with me.”
“All three children are far away, the boys and the girl,” he says as he rummages. There is a lobster buoy from Maine, USA, that is used as a doorstopper at the back of the house on hot mornings, to let in the sun and the trickling song of the stream which runs beside the narrow lane there; the stream that is more stones than water as the summer advances but a great catcher of pollen nevertheless, the stones white as chalk in the sun, black underwater. During autumn the speed of the water is so great that you fear your foot would be instantly sliced off at the ankle if you stepped into it.
Outside, as he walks behind Kiran in that below-zero monsoon, there are gentle skirmishes between the falling snowflakes now that the wind has risen a little.
Two sets of Kiran’s footprints lie before him as he follows her to her house. Each perfect cylinder punched into the deep snow has at its base a thin sheet of packed ice through which the dry leaves of the field maples can be seen as though sealed behind glass. They are as intricate as the gold jewellery from the Subcontinent—treasures buried under the snow till a rainy day.
Planted between two field maples on the slope, the telephone pole has had several of its wires broken during the night, and, encased in thick cylinders of ice, they lie snapped like candles in the snow. The chilled air is as keen as a needle on the skin and the incline is forcing him to take a hummingbird’s 300 breaths per minute. A frozen buried clump of grass breaks under his weight and the cracking sound is the sound that Kaukab produces when she halves and quarters cinnamon sticks in the kitchen.
“I lay next to him on the floor all night, distracting him with talk,” Kiran says over her shoulder. “But when he began to grow despondent I set out for you. He said, ‘I want to leave this life. My bags are packed, but the world won’t let me go: it fears the report I’ll present to Him on my arrival.’ ”
Shamas wants to say something in response but a snowflake enters his mouth and he almost chokes.
Kiran is now ahead of him by a few determined yards. His own progress is decisive but full of inaccurate moves.
Kiran never saw her lover again—until perhaps last year when, now a widower, he visited England; Kaukab was apprehensive that the one-time lovers shouldn’t encounter each other, and, as far as Shamas knows, she succeeded in keeping them apart, but—he is quite sure—Kiran must have caught glimpses of him.
The street rises. On one side is the hundred-year-old Parish Church of St. Eustace, nestling in a wedge cut into the hill, circled by lindens and yews. Missing for as long as he can remember, the tail of the weathervane had turned up two months ago when the lake was dragged unsuccessfully for the bodies of Jugnu and Chanda. And on the other side of the street is the mosque. The crescent faces the cross squarely across the narrow side-street.
Pakistan is a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land, its history a book full of sad stories, and life is a trial if not a punishment for most of the people born there: millions of its sons and daughters have managed to find footholds all around the globe in their search for livelihood and a semblance of dignity. Roaming the planet looking for solace, they’ve settled in small towns that make them feel smaller still, and in cities that have tall buildings and even taller loneliness. And so the cleric at this mosque could receive a telephone call from, say, Norway, from a person who was from the same village as him in Pakistan, asking him whether it was permitted for him to take an occasional small glass of whisky or vodka to keep his blood warm, given that Norway was an extremely cold country; the cleric told him to desist from his sinful practice, thundering down the line and telling him that Allah was perfectly aware of the climate of Norway when He forbade humans from drinking alcohol; why, the cleric had asked, couldn’t he simply carry a basket of burning maple leaves under his overcoat the way the good Muslims of freezing Kashmir do to keep themselves warm?
A telephone call could also come in the middle of the night from Australia, a despondent father asking the cleric to fly immediately to Sydney all-expenses-paid and exorcise the djinns that had taken possession of his teenaged daughter soon after an end was put to her love for a white schoolmate and she was married to a cousin brought hurriedly over from Pakistan.
Having reached the summit of the street, Kiran is looking down the slope waiting for him to catch up. He arrives and they stand side by side, motionless for a short moment, looking down at his house.
The town lies at the base of a valley like a few spoonfuls of sugar in a bowl. At the very top are the remains of an Iron Age fort to which a tower was added to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
“All night I have tried to lift him to put him back into bed,” Kiran says, “but I wasn’t able to.” Her hair has silvered with age but her skin is still the colour of rusting apple slices. The beads hanging from her earlobes are tiny and clear, as though she has managed to crack open a glass paper-weight like a walnut and somehow managed to pick out whole the air bubbles suspended within it. “All night I tried.”
“You should have come for me immediately.” Encrusted with snow, the hawthorns behind his house seem to be in flower this morning.
“Your elder boy is married now? To the white girl with the green Volkswagen Beetle?”
“They referred to it as ‘the Aphid.’ They were married, but are now divorced.” They’ve set off again, along the road through the cherry trees towards Kiran’s house. “I can’t really remember the last time I saw the grandchild.”
Seven years old, the little boy is “half Pakistani and half . . . er . . . er . . . er . . . human”—or so a child on his English mother’s side is reported to have described him in baffled groping innocence.
As he walks, his foot shatters an iced-over puddle (he’s neither a child nor Jesus); the thin sheet breaks, releasing the loud sound that was lying trapped underneath, the water coming out to mix with the snow in a sapphire slush.
Kiran’s house is one-half of a stone box set at the edge of the road, interrupting the cherry trees. It is his understanding that the woman next door is a prostitute. Kiran was a girl of thirteen back in the 1950s when Shamas had arrived from Pakistan. Her father had lost all other members of his family during the massacres that accompanied the partition of India in 1947, and so he had brought her with him when he migrated to England from India. She was a mysterious withdrawn creature: to look at her eyes was to wonder immediately what myth it was that contained a being of identical spell-binding powers, the blood stopping dead for a beat or two.
A child in a house full of lonely migrant workers, she was the focus of everyone’s tenderness. It was a time in England when the white attitude towards the dark-skinned foreigners was just beginning to go from I don’t want to see them or work next to them to I don’t mind working next to them if I’m forced to, as long as I don’t have to speak to them, an attitude that would change again within the next ten years to I don’t mind speaking to them when I have to in the workplace, as long as I don’t have to talk to them outside the working hours, and then in another ten years to I don’t mind them socializing in the same place as me if they must, as long as I don’t have to live next to them. By then it was the 1970s and because the immigrant families had to live somewhere and were moving in next door to the whites, there were calls for a ban on immigration and the repatriation of the immigrants who were already here.
There were violent physical attacks. At night the scented geraniums were dragged to the centres of the downstairs rooms in the hope that the breeze dense with rosehips and ripening limes would get to the sleepers upstairs ahead of the white intruders who had generated it by brushing past the foliage in the dark after breaking in. Something died in the children during those years—and then, one night, Jugnu had come, his passport swollen with the New England wildflowers he had picked at the last minute before boarding the plane, the pages damp with sap and dew—he soon filled the days and nights of his niece and two nephews with unexpected wonder.
They have arrived at Kiran’s house and he goes in after her.
A vase of roses has dropped a few crimson notes onto the piano keys.
The heat in the room leaps at the sensitive parts of Shamas’s face: the brow, the eyes, and the upper cheeks—the area onto the reverse of which dreams are projected during sleep. Kiran’s father, lying where he had fallen next to the bed, acknowledges their entrance by a faint movement of the body, a movement allowed him by the elasticity of the skin; otherwise, he is pinned to the floor by his great bulk and by the weight of his illness that is greater still. Being a Sikh, he has never cut his hair and the locks are collected in a bun at the top of the head. “Shamas? I am sorry to disappoint you but I am still alive. I know you cannot wait for my death to get your hands on my jazz records.” The wood these walls are made of has soaked up more music than the birdsong it had absorbed as trees in the forest.
Shamas approaches and drops by his side. “I pray for it every day but you are stubborn.” Blood vessels creep close to the surface on the man’s cheeks as on the bodies of shrimps. Together in the harness of their arms, he and Kiran lift the old man as heavy as a stone Buddha onto the bed.
“Thank you, sohnia.” His eyes droop close as Shamas arranges the quilt around him. Sohnia: the Beautiful One. “I want to leave and go up there. The temptation on my part is strong to arrive and watch with these eyes all the greats playing music together.”
“God’s very own backing band!” Shamas smiles. Through his socks he can feel a zone of greater warmth on the carpet where the body had lain next to the bed all night.
“God’s very own backing band. Yes.” Loose strands of his dishevelled beard are softly bristling away from his skin, some short, some long, the colour of mist on a spring morning, floating above his face as though he is below water. The room expands and contracts with the unfocused dazzle thrown off the white crumbs falling past the window. Tenderly, the old man places a hand on Shamas’s sleeve and whispers, “Thank you for coming, my friend.” And then, mischievous once again, he shouts: “Watch him on his way out, Kiran. Don’t let him steal. I’ll count the records this afternoon just to be sure.” He shuts his eyes, the lips keeping the shape of the last word.
Shamas closes the door quietly behind him as he leaves the room.
“They are three weeks old.” Kiran, who had been in the kitchen, comes out into the hallway where he stands looking at the roses on the piano. “Duke Ellington taught me to put an aspirin in the water to make them last.” She presses a key without sounding it, exposing the dull yellow wood of the adjoining key beneath the gleaming lacquer. “He mentions it somewhere in the ‘self-interview.’ ”
“Sidney Bechet uses the word ‘musicianer’ in his book. It’s lovely. I don’t think I have come across it anywhere else, but ‘a practitioner of music’ should be called a ‘musicianer.’ ”
“Come through. I am making tea.” The kettle is whistling back there like a toy train. Around her wrist there is a gold bracelet composed as though of a series of semicolons—
He declines her offer. She doesn’t know this but her lover eventually named his baby daughter after her—Kiran, it being a name acceptable to both Sikhs and Muslims. A ray of light.
She plucks open the front door for him. “I’ll tell him you failed to steal anything.”
It was this father and daughter who had introduced Shamas and the other migrant workers to jazz in the house they shared all those years ago. She would stop suddenly on hearing the pulse of sound coming out of the Woods music store. “Unless I am mistaken that’s Ben Webster.”
At home she would take out the new record that would look painfully vulnerable out in the air, and examine it carefully for imperfections, blowing on it quietly as though it were on fire, and then place it onto the turntable with the caution of a mother setting a baby in a cradle, while, an open book of faces, the others would be sitting in a semicircle around the gramophone, waiting for it to begin—Louis Armstrong “calling his children home” with his trumpet, or the genius of Count Basie so unmistakable that the stylus would seem to be travelling around the very whorls of his fingerprint.
The record would begin and soon the listeners would be engrossed by those musicians who seemed to know how to blend together all that life contains, the real truth, the undeniable last word, the innermost core of all that is unbearably painful within a heart and all that is joyful, all that is loved and all that is worthy of love but remains unloved, lied to and lied about, the unimaginable depths of the soul where no other can withstand the longing and which few have the conviction to plumb, the sorrows and the indisputable rage—so engrossed would the listeners become that, by the end of the piece, the space between them would have contracted, heads leaning together as though they were sharing a mirror. All great artists know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.
“Thank you,” Kiran says, standing in the door. “I approached the mosque earlier—knowing there would be people there, hoping I would bring one of them back with me but they were busy with their own troubles.”
“Troubles?”
“Someone left a”—Kiran hesitates—“a pig’s head outside the door during the night. A lot of noise and shouts outside the building as people discovered it.”
A quill of vapour emerges from Shamas’s mouth. He has just been to the mosque to assess the situation, the building that was an ordinary home until a decade ago when it was bought to be converted into a mosque. The widow who had lived here had slowly lost her reason after her husband’s death. She was alone: her husband had brought two of his nephews into England in the 1960s, declaring to the immigration authorities that they were his sons, and when she miscarried complicatedly five times in the 1970s, the doctors did not see why they should not suggest a hysterectomy since the couple already had two children. The husband had consented and persuaded her to consent: knowing very little English and nothing about how the law operated in this country, he feared their refusal to have the operation would somehow result in the doctors’ alerting the immigration authorities and landing all four of them in prison.
The nephews did end up in jail once they grew up. They were briefly brought to the funeral of their uncle in handcuffs: one was serving a sentence for breaking-and-entering, the other for possession-with-intent-to-supply. She flew at them with her nails at the ready and then went into convulsions and the women had to prise open her clenched teeth with a spoon to get at her tongue.
Losing weight rapidly over the coming months—there were reports that there were spiders’ webs on the hobs of her cooker—she went about in rags, her veil as wrinkled as a poppy, having locked all her other clothes and jewellery in a trunk and thrown the key into the lake. Within the year she became convinced that someone had been tampering with the sun: “I can’t find it anywhere, and if ever I do it’s in the wrong place.” That was when her brothers came and took her back to Pakistan, putting the house up for sale.
Shamas pauses outside the mosque, having gone in there looking for the cleric. He had to offer help, talk to the cleric—even though he didn’t want to initially. After the previous cleric died last year, the father of Jugnu’s girlfriend Chanda had taken up the reins at the mosque. Chanda’s family had disapproved of her “living in sin” with Jugnu, and so Shamas would rather not face the missing girl’s father.
But then he remembered being told by Kaukab last week that the missing girl’s father is no longer headman at the mosque: he had stepped down recently, unable to do anything about the talk in the mosque about his “immoral,” “deviant,” and “despicable” daughter, who was nothing less than a wanton whore in most people’s eyes—as she was in Allah’s—for setting up home with a man she wasn’t married to.
And so Shamas had gone in and found the worshippers weeping. They were in tears at the realization that Allah does not consider them worthy enough to have placed them in a position where they could have prevented this insult to His home.
The director of the Community Relations Council, Shamas is the person the neighbourhood turns to when unable to negotiate the white world on its own, visiting his office in the town centre or bringing the problem to his front door that opens directly into the blue-walled kitchen with the yellow chairs.
Had the CRC existed back then, the fears that led to the woman agreeing to the hysterectomy would have been allayed.
Breathing quills of vapour he stands outside the building where plastic bags containing the animal’s head and the blood-soaked crystals of snow are lying against the stump of the apple tree that had been cut down because, according to the cleric, it was the seat of the 360 djinn whose evil influence was responsible for the widow’s lonely bewilderment.
He must go and see if anything has happened at the Hindu temple— responsibility to his neighbourhood driving him on.
Snow creaks underfoot as he goes back towards Kiran’s house once again. Torn pages in a wastepaper basket, the new snowflakes have partly filled the oblong cylinders his feet had made in the snow earlier. It is January in England, and it is January in Pakistan too. When they arrived in England, some of the migrants had become confused by the concept of time zones, and had wondered if the months too were the same at any given time in various continents. Yes, it’s January in Pakistan too. January—the month of Janus, the two-headed god, one looking towards the future while the other looks back.
