Maps for Lost Lovers, page 24
While the girl was being buried today, someone’s raised voice had brought to a halt the shovelfuls of earth that were being thrown on top of the white-shrouded form lying in the pit: the news had been brought that the dead girl’s fourteen-year-old sister had placed a letter within the folds of the shroud, a message of love for her departed elder sister to take into the next world. Since Islam forbade such a practice—nothing may be buried with the body—Shamas had watched with terror as the men climbed down into the grave and pushed aside the earth to uncover the body. They exposed the soiled shroud to the haze of the afternoon, while the air flowed a sad amber and the bees hovered noisily around the bouquets and wreaths of flowers that were lying around waiting to be placed on the filled grave. The funeral resumed only when the letter had been discovered. “Minions of Satan!” said some of the men through clenched teeth when everyone was walking away from the grave later: the letter wasn’t from the dead girl’s sister—it was from her secret infidel Hindu lover, who had persuaded one of the women who had bathed and prepared the corpse to secrete it into the shroud. “Women and infidels: minions of Satan both!” The letter was passed around, a whole page filled with neat handwriting: “Such filth—what would the angels have thought had they found this upon her person in the grave?”
You, who have gone gathering the flowers of death,
My heart’s not I, I cannot teach my heart:
It cries when I forget.
Shamas caught sight of these words before one of the grave robbers tore up the letter into several pieces and threw it into the lake like a handful of white blossoms—a garland stolen from the dead.
He must stop thinking about death. He needs to touch Suraya, her youth, the life in her, feel her living breath on his face. His eyes search for her now among the members of the audience, but he cannot locate her. Oh, cut off the beak of this bird that says . . . beloved . . . beloved . . . She is a believer and must feel that it’s wrong for her to meet him: occasionally during their meetings he has seen a war raging in her expression, a wild internal disorder, the dinful strife of faith and disbelief.
He changes his position several times within the enclosure but has definitely lost her.
Outside, as he walks out of the marquee, past the roses’ stare, the dark-blue night air is stroking the lake’s surface, the ripples washed with moon’s pale silver light. At dawn the reflections of the sunlit ripples would be projected on to the bellies of the birds that would fly above the lake. Where is she? He is walking away, along the moonlight and glinting water of the shore, Nusrat’s voice becoming dimmer with each step, singing of wounded lovers, dancing proudly in the face of death and ruin. No clear path is available to him in the darkness and the trees creak like ships’ masts around him. His knees touch past tall wild flowers and grasses as he walks on. Where did she go? Only occasionally does he find a curved path that lies like a dismembered limb almost concealed by the tender cirri and tendrils of growth. Like hurrying skateboarders all around him, gusts of wind arrive occasionally, swerving, landing, gambolling and taking off here and there, all weave and waver. He has arrived at the edge of the cemetery, the graves outlined by foot-high fences, scrolling delicately like musical stands. Isn’t it in one of these dreaming clusters of trees that the two ghosts roam, calling out to him without opening their mouths?
He stops because there is movement nearby, and he hears his name being spoken.
“Shamas-uncle-ji.”
The dead girl’s lover steps out of the shadows ahead of him. “Uncle-ji, I am lost. Could you please guide me to her . . . to her . . . grave . . . her resting place.” He’s holding a bunch of orchids in his hands. “I’d like to give her these.” He speaks softly in a voice that is wearing mourning clothes.
“I think I remember where it . . . she . . . is,” Shamas says, having recovered. “Come this way.”
“I watched the funeral from the trees so I thought I’d remember the location,” the boy says, looking down at the flowers as he walks. “There are almost a thousand graves here but I knew how to find her when I came in the evening, thinking the funeral was over and there would be no one here, but a lot of women were visiting her at that time. I went away and now I am lost in the darkness.”
Shamas nods. Women aren’t allowed to be present at the burial, and must come to the cemetery later. The dead girl’s sister had wanted to watch her being buried but she had been told that it was an impossibility. In her grief she would have rebelled—it was her first direct experience of death so she wasn’t familiar with the rules that must be observed, and she would have thought that her great loss entitled her to break Allah’s law— but it turned out that she was having her period: so they informed her that she couldn’t go anyway because of that reason, because she was in an unclean state. Forbidden to touch the Koran, enter a mosque, pray, even prepare food according to certain sects—that she was impure and polluted during menstruation was something she had known for some time, something she had come to accept by now, her arguments against it fully exhausted. And so she had acquiesced, agreeing to visit the grave later.
“It’s there,” Shamas points to the mound where the wreaths and garlands are dying, furred with shadows. The boy takes a step towards it but stops. In the moonlit darkness his skin looks blue as Shamas’s own must appear to him: the colour of Krishna, the god who multiplied himself a thousand times so he could be with the thousand maidens simultaneously in the night forest—and so all lovers are one. The boy shakes his head: “I don’t really know which rules to observe at a Muslim grave-site. Earlier I thought Muslims burned candles on their graves because I saw a light flickering on her resting place but then it disappeared—it must be one of those fireflies that have been discovered hereabouts.”
Muslims do burn lamps on graves and the moths they attract are said by some to be angels, the spirits of the departed by others, or lovers in disguise come to say prayers for their beloveds’ souls. “Fireflies, here in England?”
The boy takes another tentative few steps, fearful of protocol. “Yes, there have always been rumours of their sighting in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, but last week they were confirmed.”
Shamas waits until the boy has reached her and kneeled down, and then he withdraws. In Shamas’s thoughts, the girl—during her last few days on earth—appears as the moon threatened by the dragons of the eclipse—surrounded by her criminally stupid parents and that monstrous holy man. He goes back the way he had come, and when he arrives back at where he’d met the boy he sees that there is a heart lying in his path, there, in a patch of moonlight falling from the foliage above, a heart sliced neatly into two halves: the two pieces are lying next to each other— the inner chambers are exposed in cross-section, curved and muscular. Shamas backs away when the two halves are suddenly and weakly illuminated as though from within. The red light colours the ground and only then does he see that they are two orchids fallen from the cluster the boy had been carrying. The firefly that had alighted on them has just given a pulse of light—it arcs into the air and vanishes, leaving behind a blinding smear on Shamas’s retina, a long trail slow to fade. He picks up the two blossoms, looking around for other fireflies, remembering how he captured those luminous insects in his childhood and kept them in glass bottles topped with perforated caps to make lanterns that quivered like liquid. A mass of them moving in the distance after a monsoon shower: the points of light opened and slowly closed like mouths of fishes. The air would be alive with responsiveness, and he could see them even with his eyes closed: in the darkness they conferred a facial vision that the blind are said to possess—a trembling warm sense of something there, nearby.
Could the presence of fireflies be the origin of the stories about the two ghosts wandering in the lakeside woods? He sets out again carrying the blood-coloured orchids. And now he remembers how a few days after his father’s death, all those years ago, he had one night found himself walking towards the Hindu temple where his father had set himself on fire. He remembers seeing a cluster of fireflies in the distance, there near the temple: the edges of leaves, or various sections of the insects’ own wing beats, could be seen by the light, faintly. But then something made him frown— the creatures were standing still, unmoving, as though a spell had been cast over them. When he drew close and saw the cause of that stillness, the fright had sent him—a grown man—running through the darkness. He remembers the sight to this day: each of the hundred or so insects had been pierced onto the thorns of the tree that was home to the birds known as the “butcher birds” because they impaled their victims on to spikes to kill them or to eat later. The speared fireflies had been alive, in the process of dying.
No, no, he must resist these thoughts of death! He speeds up madly to make a way out of the cemetery, going along the paved paths between the graves, getting lost, needing a map of this labyrinth, a flaw in the net to burst through, this net made up of almost a thousand knots. He needs Suraya. His teeth are bared and ache with dryness as does his epiglottis. The faster he runs the louder the noise inside his chest as though being produced by a dynamo attached to his legs. The tips of thorns of various bushes break and become lodged in the weave of his clothing as he thrashes his way forward. Where has Suraya gone? He’s back on the lake’s edge where the sand-grains glitter because all impurities have been washed out of them by the waves’ motion. The beautiful radiant-skinned girl is no more and the boy was wearing black clothes, black as the wisp of smoke that remains when a flame is snuffed out. And now suddenly he knows where Suraya is: his search has stopped being a search and become a journey. Taking the moon with him like a balloon on a string he is walking towards the Safeena, towards Scandal Point, a mile and a half away. He feels he’s moving further and further away from death with each step he takes towards her, holding a broken heart in his hands, pushing aside the blue brocade-and-velvet of the foliage as he shortcuts through the trees and grasses, the wetness on his fingers and palms making him think that a bunch of overripe cherries must have burst in his hand when he gripped a low branch for balance in the darkness, but then he remembers that it’s only May and that the fruit won’t appear till August, and he realizes that the wetness on his palms and fingers must be the sap that the two flowers are releasing, and he continues, the passage through the vegetation now narrowing like the neck of a bottle, now widening to bring him at last to the stir-less vicinity of the Safeena. He can see no one.
The night awakens at the sound of her earrings.
She is here as he somehow knew she would be, waiting for him. Going past the reeds’ thicket of knives, he walks into the black lozenge-shaped moon-shadow thrown by the Safeena and lets it close over him like water. In the darkness he gently wraps his left arm around her neck and lowers his mouth onto hers, his other hand letting go of the orchids so that they fall at her feet, and then this free hand sinks up to the wrist in the curls of her head, her skin giving off the scent of birch bark and almonds. Bright gnats of static electricity dance in her hair and he tries to prevent the pulsing world of fireflies from invading his mind. She struggles at first but then kisses him back and he leads her to the Safeena. She’s life. The angel of mercy. A clock-tower strikes one somewhere far away and the fragrance she’s wearing is an olfactory smear in the hot dry air. He is aware of the noisiness from her lungs and of the difficulty she is having breathing in an orderly manner. When Zeus came to lie with Alcmena he stretched the night to three times its length; and so he too now wishes for dawn not to arrive at the appointed time.
Up to her waist in the water, swaying with the coming and going of the buried giant’s heartbeat, Suraya washes herself in the darkness. The reeds lick her skin as she weeps quietly, desperately cleaning herself between the legs, on her breasts. “My Allah, please forgive me for what I have done. O Compassionate and Merciful One, forgive my sins.” She scoops up water and rubs her body hard and fast, recalling the details of her debauchery. From outside the Safeena had come the buzz of a night-flying bee while he touched her everywhere, sowing little fires on her skin, small detonations, and from the wallpaper the pairs of deer in their red flame-of-the-forest bowers turned their necks to look at them, their noses depicted by black heart shapes. On the snakes-and-ladders squares of a Sindhi rug, he kissed off the pale red orchid-sap that his hands had smeared on various places of her body when he helped her undress—the saliva a magical liquid erasing bruises from her body. He whispered, saying he was surprised that he was already familiar with her breathing when he placed his face against her body. “This small shadow that your earlobe casts on the side of your neck is also known to me.” They lay side by side, adrift in a boat, borne along by their story. “I should open the window a little so that the three butterflies of Madame Bovary can fly out at dawn to feed on the nectar outside.” “What?”
She weeps among the reeds, scrubbing herself, while he is asleep indoors. She told her husband over the telephone that she has a most-suitable candidate and that he and his mother should give her a few more weeks before deciding on a new marriage for him.
She has the urge to lie down in the black water and stop breathing but the prospect of her son—soon to be on the mercy of a stepmother?— gives her courage to remain living. She has asked her husband to let the boy come to England for a few weeks but he says he fears she won’t let him return to Pakistan. “The laws in the West are favourable to women: the authorities will side with you and I won’t be able to do anything.” And Suraya knows that his suspicions have some basis in truth: if she could have possession of her boy, she would gladly live with the wound of having lost her husband. “Why don’t you both come for a visit,” she’d suggested not long ago. But he had developed an intense dislike of England during the two years he had spent here after their marriage. She had been lonely in Pakistan and had persuaded him to come and settle here. “This country may be rich but it is too different from ours,” he’d declared finally. “We have to go back. A person can’t do anything here that he can freely over there. A dog was asked by another why he was fleeing a rich household where they fed him meat every day. ‘They feed me meat, yes, but I am not allowed to bark.’ ”
She pleads with Allah as she purifies herself. One day when she was a little girl, she had gone home from the mosque in tears, having just learned that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said there would be more women in Hell than men. The girls had been chattering during the lesson and the cleric had threatened them with that information. Weeping, she told her mother that she no longer wished to be a Muslim. She consoled her and explained that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had indeed made that statement but that it had been made good humouredly: in a mosque, when the collections were being made, he had joked with the women who weren’t giving up their jewels to feed the poor and finance the jihad against unbelievers. The moment he made that statement the women stood up and argued with him merrily. But now, amid the reeds, Suraya wonders whether her childhood cleric might not have been right all along: We women are wicked. She had resisted having to do what she had done with Shamas last night, but had she resisted hard enough? Perhaps she should have tried to find another way of resolving her difficulties rather than sinning? But there is no other way.
She shivers with terror as she weeps. The moon’s age-old eye watches her from above, the midges flickering firmly in perfect silhouettes against it—the orbits are strong enough to not let the breeze blow the insects away. She washes her face and wonders if her crying had been heard in there. Shamas said last night that occasionally when she speaks the songbirds in her throat awaken and he can hear the voice that as a girl had sang the poetry of Wamaq Saleem, accompanying itself with a guitar and a peacock-feather plectrum. She can hear those songbirds when she cries now. She gathers up her hair, pulling off the damp locks that are gently pasted onto her shoulders, each leaving behind an impression of itself in cool skin, a sensory shadow in low temperature. The gusts and ripples of breeze can be heard murmuring in the night foliage around the jetty’s xylophone.
There must be a jasmine creeper somewhere nearby because it has shed some flowers into the lake—with outspread fingers she sieves a few out of the water and only now sees that they are in fact small pieces of paper, covered on one side with writing that she is unable to read due to the lack of light. Someone’s torn letter, perhaps.
She sits in the darkness and wonders what her next step should be. Tonight she gave him what he wanted and now she has to ask for something in return. He turned out to be a great sensualist, probing her gently with his tongue and hands so that she moaned in shame and humiliation (and once with pleasure). He was gentler than her husband, whose member had been so large that she frequently suffered from cystitis. Afterwards, as they lay beside each other, he slid his hand out from under her head and gave her a book of henna patterns to rest her head on: “Quite appropriate. Pillows filled with henna blossom are used to induce restful sleep.”
She has taken the first step back towards her son, he who made her feel she was at the place that was the planet’s navel whenever she was near him or with him, the place where the earth was connected to the sky, he who said last month that no one makes zarda the way he likes it, “the way you used to make it, Mother. Grandmother always puts too much raisins in and it’s too gooey.” She could see him waving his hand in indignation, his small faintly hairy forehead creased furiously. Suraya had tried not to laugh out loud. In order to pass on the correct recipe, she’d had her mother-in-law brought to the phone, that woman who perhaps even then was planning to find another “mother” for Suraya’s boy. How she would like to cut off her grey rat’s tail of a braid! She has always resented Suraya, that woman, jealous (perhaps like all mothers) because the wife can give her son the only thing she herself can’t, is not allowed to give by law and by nature. How shocked she was when the day after the wedding she caught sight of Suraya’s back: Suraya had had a flowering vine painted with henna along her spine for the wedding night, from the small of her back up to the spot between her shoulder-blades. Her strong and handsome husband had become excited beyond measure by the surprising detail during the night, but the old woman read it as a sign of decadence.
