Maps for Lost Lovers, page 28
He says: “Forgive me for accusing you of manipulating me, because I myself contemplated deception. While lying with you here earlier, making love, I thought for a moment that I wouldn’t tell you this afternoon about your husband’s call, that I’ll wait until you yourself decided to reveal your plan to me at some future date. I knew I’d lose you this very afternoon if I told you I knew what you wanted from me, and that my answer is no. I didn’t want to lose you, your company . . . and, yes, your body.”
She waves her hand in the air: “That’s all over and done with.” And sitting up, she says, “I have to go. What’s your answer?”
“I can’t do what you want. But I will help you begin custody proceedings for your son.”
“That’s out of the question.” A look of fear crosses her face. “The case could go on for years, and if I lose they’d never let me see my boy out of vindictiveness. I know of women who have never been allowed near their children. You’ve forgotten what Pakistan is like. I sometimes wonder why my mother sent me to that country.” She’s silent for the next few moments and asks: “Why did you marry your daughter Mah-Jabin to someone in Pakistan?”
“It’s complicated . . . She wanted to go . . .”
He wants to touch her—wishing to siphon some of her pain into himself—but knows he’s not allowed; he mustn’t. (For many years now, similarly, every time he touches Kaukab he feels he is committing a sin.) He cannot bear the thought of not being able to see her anymore. In the future how would he know what has become of her (just as he doesn’t exactly know what’s befallen Chanda and Jugnu, where in India his aunt Aarti is)? He tells himself once again to stop being selfish, to stop thinking about the consequences of her departure on his own spirit and inner life. What matters is Suraya and her predicament.
“Please don’t make me look for someone else,” she says. “Please don’t make me humiliate myself with another. Please.”
As though a storm has carried her away, she’ll leave in a while and he’ll never see her again, will be alone with the Cinnabar moth dressed like a woman from the Subcontinent. She’ll vanish from his life, a small figure dressed in blue hurrying through the rain, in the grey, blue-black and white downpour, leaving him behind surrounded by the wallpaper deer in their flame-of-the-forest bowers, out past Scandal Point and then under the high cable that brings electricity to the Safeena and is twined this month by the pure-white-flowering bindweed, the arrow-shaped leaves dripping with rain.
“No.”
“Would you like some time to think about it? Ten days, a fortnight?”
“My answer would still be no.”
“Say no then, not now. I have ordered the Koh-i-Noors for you: they’ll arrive just in time and I’ll bring them. Meet me here one last time, by our Safeena, our Scandal Point. Let’s decide on a day.”
She kisses him on the forehead before leaving. She is a believer, and sex outside marriage is one of the greatest sins in Islam. He has an image of her going home after their meetings and frantically scrubbing herself.
He stands at the window, and the sight of his face—reflected ghostlike on the glass pane—fills him with disgust: she must have loathed him secretly, at what she had to do to regain entry into her real life. How the feel of these hands must have repulsed her! In her eyes he was a beast letting loose his lusts on her flesh. Licking those orchid-sap stains from her breast and thighs. He hates himself for acting like an animal, a bull rejoicing in the cow. Clouding the glass with his breath, he makes himself disappear.
Before she left, she asked to be forgiven for her husband threatening him with violence over the telephone last night; and she said she forgave him for deceiving her earlier this afternoon. But he cannot silence the accusations inside himself the way it is said that deer are troubled by the musk that springs from their own bodies, that sometimes, driven insane, they begin to describe circles around themselves, start to run madly in the deserts and the forests in the hope that they may locate the origins of that encircling perfume, that they may discover the reasons why it clings and seems to chase them.
There is dandelion fluff caught in a spider’s web, out there, looking as though the arachnid had taken off a fur stole and hung it in one corner of its dwelling (as little Ujala said once; or was it something he’d read in The First Children on the Moon—he is aware that a part of his consciousness is influenced by his father’s magazine, looking at the world as though it is a bright toy). A lapwing sounds from somewhere around the lake—. . . bewitched . . . bewitched . . . The high bindweed has folded its flowers to prevent the rain from diluting their perfume and nectar. Now and then giving a lazy flutter to its brilliant cerise wings, the Cinnabar is still there: the wind has changed direction and the creature is now being lashed by water drops; he goes out and brings it in, placing it on a shelf beside a book with a bluebell-coloured jacket, reminding him also of the blooms of a Pakistani jacaranda tree. The colour of her veil.
There is nothing he can do to help her.
There on the opposite shore of the lake, in the dense trees, is where the ghosts of the two murdered lovers are said to wander, calling out to him, aglow, giving out a light without heat like fireflies. Pale eyes change colour soon after death—Caucasian pupils appear a greenish-brown—and he wonders what colour Chanda’s eyes became after her murder, she whose eyes used to change with the seasons. Her ghost’s belly is said to be brighter than the rest of her, an indication that it contains a luminous child, the child that died with her.
Time makes memories of everything. Would he forget Suraya, her memory coming to him only occasionally? But he doesn’t think he has enough time to be able to forget her, because many decades are needed for such processes, and he is too old now. This one will go with him to the grave.
AT SCANDAL POINT
Beside the Safeena stands a leafless tree resembling an antler, as though a deer buried there is beginning to emerge free of the earth’s grip, and it is there that Suraya awaits Shamas’s arrival. She shakes order into the garlands printed on her clothing, the August sun blazing around her. How hot it burns. A summer breeze comes in from the lake’s surface, from the sharp slopes of tight purple heather and patches of willow herbs with bright pink light clinging to them.
The agreed hour has come and gone. So his answer is no? But even now there is a vague hope that perhaps he’ll come here eventually— having changed his answer to yes after all. She tries to hold back her tears when she realizes how absurd the thought is. And now, as the drops of sweat slide down her body, activating the nerve-endings, there is a surge of anger: how dare he reject someone as intelligent, beautiful and desirable as her, how dare he not come! And she recriminates herself for her temper—Satan the Stoned-One is aware of her pride and vanity and takes full advantage whenever he can. Yes, you need to be confident and self-possessed in life, but only a little. There are limits you shouldn’t go beyond. There are some substances that are regarded as medicines up to ten drops, but are included in the list of poisons on the eleventh.
Her quick temper is a trait she seems to have passed on to her little son. “Why did you go to that house anyway,” he said last night on the phone. “It’s all your own fault.” Shocked by the authority with which he accused her, she suspected that her mother-in-law had started filling the boy’s head against her. He must hear things around the house and streets all the time too. Had he said something as objectionable and insolent as that to her while she was in Pakistan, she would have slapped him, hard, knocking all the brazenness out of him. When he grows up will he torment her with his accusations, ever wilder, ever more obscene? She shudders. She fumes at his grandmother, and her husband, he who had dared to hit her, beat her. Three days ago, she had found herself fantasizing for a few moments about how delicious it would be to taunt her husband, to torment him, torture him, by giving him all the details of her lovemaking with Shamas, telling him he was a better lover than him. But—she had mused—surely that would jeopardize my getting back together with my son. But then she had come to her senses: My Allah, Suraya, you love your husband and are a worshipper of Allah—where have such thoughts come from!
She hears a sound nearby and looks up, her heart full of hope, but it’s only the wind brushing past the reeds.
She’s dizzy from the sun. The thought suddenly panics her that Shamas has been waylaid by some friends of her husband’s. My Allah, he’s lying in a ditch somewhere, dead to the world.
Her hands tremble, the Koh-i-Noor pencils rattling slightly in their box.
No, no, Shamas is not lying somewhere, dead or dying—she reassures herself, with no cause for this optimism but the compassion of Allah.
But now, once again, there’s anger: what if he hasn’t come to any harm but has rather become afraid that he might be beaten up by her husband’s friends, and has not come to see her out of cowardice?
The anger at him is such that it makes her want to go to his house immediately. But, suddenly restored to sanity now, she knows that she must resist the impulse—any confrontation would endanger her chances of being accepted by Kaukab. Over the past four days she has found herself circling his house at odd hours, but every time she has remained clearheaded enough to withdraw. Once she caught a glimpse of the woman who must be Kaukab.
She recognized the roses and the jasmine in Kaukab’s front garden: they were added to the bath water in which was washed the corpse of the girl beaten to death by the exorcist.
Another sound and Suraya tells herself not to look up and have her hopes smashed again—he’s not coming, Suraya, but you are a strong and resourceful woman: with Allah’s help you will cope with anything: You don’t need Shamas—but her resolve fails within seconds . . .
LEOPOLD BLOOM AND THE KOH-I-NOOR
Semen was found on the mosque floor late last evening.
It’s almost a year since Chanda and Jugnu disappeared. This time last year they were in Pakistan. Shamas looks down at his own and the missing couple’s house, from the slope at the back, at the base of which the narrow lane and the stream are. Here the ground rises to form an angled backdrop of sycamores and hawthorns that throw shadows through every back window at sunrise, the earth here deep with zigzagging twigs, green and scarlet berries, mouldy winged samara and rain-rusted leaves lying under the trees like The Moral: at the bottom of a fable. The scent of hawthorns in bloom in May is as thick inside the house as out, the air drowsily astir in summer with the weightless seeds of the poodle-tail dandelion clocks.
Yesterday morning—a few hours before his meeting with Suraya—he went into the mosque to consult the cleric about Muslim divorce laws, to see if there was any possible way out for Suraya other than having to marry someone and obtain a divorce from him. The cleric wasn’t in the building, though children were chanting their lessons. Shamas thought he might be upstairs and was moving towards the stairs when he heard a child’s cry from behind a closed door. “Uncle, I don’t want to.” He went into the room and saw one of the junior clerics, a bachelor in his fifties, with his erect penis in a child’s mouth.
Shamas shouted out and grabbed the man. Soon every official of the mosque was in the room and Shamas was told respectfully to go home, that the matter would be handled by the mosque. He left, insisting the man should be handed to the authorities, but by early afternoon, as the time approached for him to travel to Scandal Point to meet Suraya, concerned that the police had not approached him for a statement, he returned to the mosque only to discover that nothing had been done.
He came home and called the police himself to report the assault: he had to wait for an officer to visit the house. He would make it to her just in time, he reassured himself—but when the police did arrive he couldn’t get away from their questioning and procedures.
As the investigative process got under way, other details emerged of previous assaults on children involving the same man. A group of mothers had, two months before, confronted mosque officials, saying the man had assaulted their children, but they were told that the scandal would give Islam and Pakistan a bad name, that the man would be prevented from doing it again, that if the police got involved and shut down the mosque no one would teach their sons to stay away from the whore-like white girls, and that their own daughters would run away from home and wouldn’t want to marry their cousins from back home, that the Hindus and the Jews and the Christians would rejoice at seeing Islam being dragged through the mud. Some of the men had just laughed at the women and told them to go away and get the dinner ready for their husbands; others were even more contemptuous and told them to stop cackling like hens in the place of worship, adding that a woman should be a creature of the home and the night, and had no place outside in the world of men.
The mosque denied any attempt to cover up the man’s activities. “This is the house of God and if anyone had known about it, it would not have been tolerated,” the cleric said to the police. “The females say they complained—but then they get excited over everything and are not very intelligent, they don’t know what they are saying.”
There was no way for Shamas to contact Suraya and arrange to meet elsewhere. It was early evening by the time he was free: and by then it was too late. He tried to telephone her several times but there was no answer: she was either not at home or chose not to answer.
Police were sure that the samples they took from the floor of the room in which Shamas came upon that terrible scene were the assaulter’s semen.
He was devastated that she got his final answer in such a cruel manner, and he has been wondering whether he should try to contact her again today—just to explain his non-appearance. But, surely, a telephone call from him now would raise her hopes for the first few seconds as she hears his voice. And then he’ll have to dash them again.
He doesn’t know what to do. He stands still, unwilling to move any muscles, almost believing himself to be a column of separate parts that would scatter at the smallest movement or vibration.
She had said: “I had to degrade myself with you. In our religion there is no other way for me to be united with my beloved son.” She of course regretted the first thing, not the second: a system conditions people into thinking that it is never to blame, is never to be questioned. We have to beg, say the beggars, the accursed belly demands food: it is the fault of the belly, not the unjust world that doesn’t allow enough sustenance to reach the bellies of everyone through dignified means.
He climbs down into the back lane, carefully leaping over the stream, and goes into Jugnu’s back garden. The deep blue of a peacock’s neck, a denim jacket of Jugnu’s was washed by Chanda and hung out to dry in May last year: a wren began building a nest in one of its pockets and the garment was allowed to remain on the line, Shamas taking it off only in October, removing from the pocket the small bowl constructed of one dead leaf each of maple and sycamore, one of elm, which he recognized due to its lopsided nature—one-half bigger than the other—and three leaves from the apple foliage; there were dandelion whiskers, and several consecutive layers of spiders’ web trying to separate which was like pulling apart a sheet of two-ply tissue paper or entering a well-starched shirt. There was a piece of the purple thread that Kaukab had used to sew a kameez a few months earlier. The earth around him was covered with yellow leaves being dropped by the trees, the edges of everything giving out pulses of sunlight because last night the glint-slippered frosts were abroad. Berries, like chewy pearls, were everywhere. And no one knew where Chanda and Jugnu were.
Shamas crosses over into his own back garden, thinking about Suraya waiting for him at Scandal Point, beside the Safeena, holding the Koh-i- Noor pencils in her hand. Years ago at the Safeena, while he was sitting in convivial geniality with the shop’s owner, both locked in a habit of concentrated silence, a recently read paragraph or poem always in their heads like tealeaves releasing flavour in two cups of hot water, Jugnu had come in with a butterfly net to ask if there was an Urdu-language Ulysses: “A moth circles the light in the brothel sequence. I wonder which Urdu word for moth they would use—parvana or the more prosaic patanga?” Shamas said he remembered a path by Browning where lichens mock the marks on a moth, and small ferns fit their teeth to the polished block, but he didn’t recall a moth in the Circe chapter of Ulysses. “Are you sure you are not thinking of the kisses that flutter about Bloom in Nighttown? He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers, fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.” Jugnu joined in with a laugh of pleasure: “They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins. Yes, but there is an actual moth in that chapter also. Bloom wears the Koh-i-Noor diamond on the fingers of his right hand at one point in that chapter.”
“I cannot think of anyone more appropriate than him to have that jewel,” Shamas had said.
And now he goes into the kitchen through the back door, and moves towards the pink room in order to consult the Urdu Ulysses. “ Parvana or the more prosaic patanga?” he mutters and looks up to discover that Suraya is sitting in there with Kaukab.
They are looking at a photograph of Ujala, and Kaukab has obviously just told Suraya something about the boy, because Suraya says, “I wish I could say something to make you feel better.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” Kaukab says. “My wounds aren’t the kind that heal easily.”
They hear him come in and both stand up, Suraya looking him squarely in the eyes.
“And this must be your husband.”
Kaukab smiles at Shamas. “This is Perveen. I saw her admiring my roses from the footpath and we ended up talking. We have been sitting here for about an hour and a half, finishing off the strawberries I bought yesterday.” She indicates the two bowls on the coffee table, swirled pink and white with the cream and berry juice. “We even said our prayers together.”
