Maps for Lost Lovers, page 29
Perveen. Shamas had told Suraya that her name was the Persian word for the constellation of Pleiades, the Seven Sisters: “As is the other common girl’s name—Perveen.”
“She just moved into the area two days ago,” Kaukab tells him.
“Now,” Kaukab turns once again to Suraya, waving Shamas away, overexcited by the company she has found unexpectedly this afternoon, “I must tell you about Mah-Jabin. She’s sitting over there in America as we speak, wearing immodest Western clothes, no doubt.”
But Shamas remains where he is, trying to understand what she is doing here. His heart beats so loudly he fears his eardrums will split.
“You said earlier that you had sent Mah-Rukh, sorry, Mah- Jabin, to Pakistan to marry. Why?”
“Well, I feel I can tell you these things, Perveen, but you must promise not to tell anyone. What happened was that Mah-Jabin fell in love with a boy when she was young, and when he married someone else, well, she insisted on being sent to Pakistan.”
Suraya lifts her eyes towards Shamas for the briefest of moments, and then looks back to Kaukab: “You are right: it is complicated.”
“Such a nice boy she married, but she abandoned him.” Kaukab’s eyes fill up with tears. “He wrote to her earlier this year, but when she came home for a visit, way way back at the beginning of spring, she threw the letter away—unopened. Imagine, Perveen! I must show you a photograph of his. I used to keep it here in this room but then I put it away upstairs because it pained me too much to think how my daughter had pained him.” And now suddenly she turns to Shamas: “My Allah, Shamas, we forgot to tell you that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has just died. Perveen just told me.”
“Yes,” Suraya says to Shamas. “A woman went by, weeping out in the street, and I asked what the matter was.”
Is she lying? Is “Nusrat’s death” a coded way for her to refer to their first night together and how nothing came of it eventually? Is she here to torment him?
“And Meena Shafiq rang me just now to let me know,” says Kaukab.
The news is genuinely devastating: “Who will sing about the poor, now?” he whispers in shock.
“And about the women,” says Suraya—his whispers are audible to her.
“And in praise of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him?” adds Kaukab.
Shamas looks at Suraya: “How did it happen?” He is troubled by how familiar she already is to him in the surroundings of his house. He shifts his gaze to Kaukab: “How did it happen?”
“In a hospital, hooked up to a dialysis machine.”
“Probably unsterilized equipment,” he thinks out loud. “The hospitals there . . .”
Kaukab is immediately indignant: “I knew you would find some way of badmouthing Pakistan in all this.” She turns to Suraya: “See, Perveen, this was what I was talking about when I said he had turned my children against me.” She stands up, almost in tears. “I’ll go and get that photograph of Mah-Jabin’s husband. You’ll see for yourself how handsome he is, Perveen, and then you’ll agree with me that it was totally unreasonable of Mah-Jabin to leave him. I’ll let you decide.”
Shamas enters the room the moment Kaukab goes into the staircase: “What are you doing here?”
“I had to see you.”
“Are you sitting here making fun of her, a foolish old woman?”
“I don’t think she’s foolish in the least. Do you?”
She takes a step towards him but then they both hear Kaukab’s voice from the stairs: “I have just remembered that the photograph is actually down there, hidden in one of the books.”
In the time it takes for Kaukab to re-enter the pink room, Suraya quickly hands him an envelope—the faint rattle tells him that it contains a small box of Koh-i-Noor pencils. He pockets it and she whispers, “Come to the Safeena at dawn tomorrow, please.” Her voice glows with emotion, a voice reeling with contrasts, at once caressing and corrosive.
Kaukab, smiling now (she’s like a child after too much sugar), sends Shamas upstairs—“Leave us women alone”—and begins to hunt for the photograph. “Yes, indeed: while he pines away for her in Pakistan, she’s in America, her long long hair cut short like a boy, wearing jeans and skirts. Why can’t she wear our own clothes, like you, for example—the very personification of Eastern beauty—?”
He stands on the stairs and tries to hear what Suraya is up to; but at a sound from Kaukab—“Let me fill up the bowls with more strawberries and then I’ll come and tell you all about my brother and a Sikh woman called Kiran . . .”—he withdraws upstairs. Kaukab is, on the whole, wary and quite guarded when it comes to revealing information about her family to other women, not knowing how this or that fact will be interpreted or retold, and she has been distressed by how some of the secrets have been turned into gossip in the neighbourhood; and now, Shamas understands, that she has seen this “newcomer Perveen” as someone to whom she can present her side of the family truths first, before she can learn the others’ versions.
He can hear her through the floor: “My brother is now a widower, and when he came here for a visit last year, I kept a vigilant eye out, in case Kiran tried to entice him. Men are nothing more than children when it comes to these matters. You and I both know how wily a woman can be when she wants to.”
No, he mustn’t assume that Suraya is here to sabotage his marriage. Perhaps she has decided after all to begin a legal battle for her son and wants his help. He’ll do all he can, write to MPs, find the best lawyers. Or perhaps she just wanted to see him for one last time, and hand him the pencils. The original Koh-i-Noors—from the factory in Bloomsbury, New Jersey—were given fourteen coats of golden-yellow lacquer, had their ends sprayed with gold paint and the lettering applied in 16-carat gold leaf, but these modern mass-produced ones are said to be no less exuberant when light plays on them. He tears open the envelope but it doesn’t contain a box of pencils. Home Pregnancy Test—says the wording on the box. He opens it and, after a few minutes of consultation with the leaflet inside, realizes that the test in his hands is positive.
“She left as soon as you went up,” Kaukab tells him when he rushes downstairs. “Nice woman, very beautiful. I wanted to show her the lovely embroidery patterns that Charag used to draw for me when he was a boy . . .”
He wants to run after her but restrains himself because Kaukab would be suspicious.
Tomorrow at dawn, at the Safeena?
No, he must pretend that he has to go to the mosque, to see how matters are there, and then telephone her from a street telephone-box.
“You just can’t believe your luck that you have the chance to defame and ridicule Islam at last,” Kaukab says to him bitterly as he tells her he is on his way to the mosque, having given Suraya enough time to drive back to her house. “I feel sorry for the poor pious cleric-ji, who has to interrupt his worship and do the rounds of the police station because of that junior cleric.”
He is suddenly filled with rage. I don’t think she’s foolish in the least. Do you?
Kaukab meets his fierce look equally fiercely, and continues: “You want to go back in there and unearth more shameful things, no doubt. I always wanted my husband to frequent a mosque, but never thought it would be like this.”
He closes the door, resisting the urge to bang it as loudly as he can, and steps outside. But Suraya’s telephone continues to ring interminably without answer.
Tomorrow at dawn, at the Safeena.
YOU’LL FORGET LOVE, LIKE OTHER DISASTERS
Shamas learns that a galaxy was stolen during the night.
Some figures came out of the warm night. They waited behind a screen of camomile and foxglove to let a freight train cross the tracks two or three feet away from them, the dust-covered petals shaken loose by the draught and flung onto their faces. And then they crossed over into the open countryside beyond to move towards the section of motorway cordoned off for repairs, sweating freely under their clothes in that damp herbal darkness. They bent on the tarmac and, working with cheap toy flashlights, prised out the cats’ eyes embedded in the motorway lanes, reaching back and dropping each star-like bead into the rucksacks fitted onto their backs. The silent group of thieves worked undisturbed for many hours in the darkness full of the late-summer heat and in the morning the authorities discovered that more than three thousand sockets had been emptied.
The police remain perplexed, Shamas heard on the radio as he woke up, the motive for the theft of the galaxy incomprehensible, the case one of those cases that will probably remain unsolved.
Walking towards Scandal Point to meet Suraya, Shamas sees that the honeysuckle and the woody nightshade are displaying both flowers and berries, as though torn between the seasons. The year is about to enter its last phase.
He tried to telephone her last night but there was no answer.
To think of Suraya is still to bring about a chemical change in the blood, an instant physical lightness slow to ebb like the effect of an intoxicant, and there have been mornings when he has known upon waking that he has dreamt of her, even if he couldn’t recall the details.
There is a faint citrus smell in the dawn air as though he is in a room in which an orange has recently been eaten. Soon, come autumn, the sun would be cooler and the sky would darken daily. Kaukab’s roses and jasmine—the ones “Perveen” had been pretending to admire while she loitered outside the house yesterday—will die for another year in about five or six weeks, each round rosehip with its tall crown of long hairy sepals looking as though a berry has fused with a grasshopper. Their colours would be as bright as sunlight on a bag of boiled sweets.
He cannot contemplate a termination, but what is the alternative? They will have to talk. A child isn’t what even she wants. That was not why she was with him.
Surely she could not have lied about the pregnancy? Perhaps she wants to hurt him—plant pain in someone—for the injustice she has suffered in recent months. Powerless, demeaned, and discarded, her spirit poisoned—she must dream of revenge and mayhem. He goes under a birch tree whose foliage will begin to yellow soon and by November will lie on the ground under the white-skinned trees like bags of potato crisps spilled by children—oh, how everything must remind her of her son! The boy is said to have—beautifully—observed on the telephone during the summer that “Little whales live in our garden hose, spouting arcs out of its punctures when it is in use.”
He feels ashamed for entertaining the thought that she might be lying. No, everything he knows about her tells him that she’s not lying. The trees drip last night’s raindrops on him as he goes. In a few weeks it would be like being surrounded by wounds—the red leaves of autumn. The light is already mellower, each ray only half full: the summer was a time of things in light, while autumn is light on things. Kaukab was preoccupied with thoughts of “Perveen” all yesterday evening: “She said she lived on Habib Jalib Street . . .” (She doesn’t—the house she inherited from her mother is on Ustad Allah Bux Road.) “Shamas, she was as beautiful as your mother, may she rest in peace, but she seemed Allah-fearing with it, not that I mean to speak ill of the dead . . . She is a widow, her husband was a poet she said . . . I wonder, Shamas, if her parents or older relatives worked with us in the factories back in the ’50s . . .”
Coming home from work two days ago, walking slowly through the town centre, Shamas noticed that the photographer to whom all the Asian immigrants used to go to have their portraits done, back in the late 1950s, and the 1960s and 1970s, is selling his shop. He must have thousands of negatives, chronicling the migrants’ early years in this town, he had remarked to himself in passing; and now—as he walks towards Scandal Point to meet Suraya—it comes to him that the town government should buy the negatives from the photographer for its archives. Today is Saturday, and so first thing Monday morning he’ll see what has to be done to set the process in motion, and later today he should visit the photographer in town to tell him not to dispose of the negatives until he hears from him next week. The negatives are far too important to end up at a landfill site.
Suraya. He remembers something Kaukab has often accused him of in the past: that he retreats from the problems around him by thinking about his work. And now he wonders if he’s trying to drive Suraya from his thoughts—yet another disowning and banishing of her. No, the thought of the negatives came to him just now out of its own accord— that’s all.
He edges away from a small Japanese knotweed tree of whose pale cream flowers—looking as though dusted with custard powder—he had tried to discover the smell of a few years ago, and found himself taking in a lungful of decay, suppuration, the shock throwing him back on his heels where he had reached up with his neck stretched like that of a hanged man’s. Perfumes come from plants; it’s animals who produce disagreeable odours, humans included. Musk, honey, milk—these are as much an exception in the animal world as those tropical plants said to produce blossoms smelling of festering flesh or this Japanese knotweed around whose shimmering flowers he had cupped both hands that day, the way a young man kisses his first girl. He’ll never now kiss her mouth again while his penis is engorged and sticky at the tip like a bull’s muzzle, or lie with her head on his chest while from somewhere nearby comes the summer noise of a bee that’s got stuck inside a snapdragon flower, a panicked wing-thrash, as it tries to back out. According to her, what she did with him was a “sin,” and she, according to her, will have to bear the “stigma” of that sin “till Judgement Day and after.” She’ll view the pregnancy as the beginning of her punishment.
There must be a way that the baby in her womb can be saved. He will not—cannot—marry her, but perhaps she could have the baby and live here in England while they begin a custody battle to get her boy away from that wife beater.
Will he have to tell Kaukab eventually?
He has been into the town centre to pick up the Saturday papers and is now walking towards Scandal Point and Safeena, hugging to himself the heavy news of all the world.
He arrives at Scandal Point, but there’s no one there. He waits for a few minutes and then sets off in the direction where she usually parks her car. The lake is striped Kashmir-blue where it reflects the dawn sky, and here and there on a higher wave a patch of red is burning from the east because the sun is rising—red as the beast blood that was poured into the mosque at the beginning of the year. The glitter is uncomfortable on the eye, and heat seems to come off it whenever the head is aligned with it at its brightest.
More details of the unconscionable crime he witnessed at the mosque involving the little child—no older than Suraya’s son, surely—have been emerging. It turns out that the junior cleric has been to prison for assaults on children at a mosque in the Brick Lane area of London. He had assaulted a seven-year-old girl and the mother had called the police. As the court date approached, a petition supporting him was circulated on mosque-headed paper. We the undersigned support the respected Imam Amjad and want him to return to his job as soon as possible. We have every confidence in his ability as a cleric . . .
The parents of his victims were under enormous pressure not to go through with the court case. When the date was arranged the father went to the police and said he did not want his girl to go to court—her chances of marriage would be ruined, she will be tainted by the scandal, the reputation of her sister too ruined. The people at the mosque had written to his parents back in Pakistan, asking them to tell him to drop the case against the holy man.
But in the end the family did have the courage to go through with it, and the man was convicted of one count of indecent assault and an act of gross indecency. While he was awaiting sentencing the mosque circulated another petition for signatures. We the undersigned continue to support the respected Imam Amjad. While we regret the circumstances which led to his arrest, we nevertheless confirm that if he is allowed his liberty we will have no objection to him being employed by the mosque . . .
Despite their pleas, he was sentenced to six months and placed on the sex-offenders’ register.
Shamas stands under the pine tree where Suraya’s car was always parked during her visits to the Safeena—he can see the tyre marks from last time (“The marks left by the passing of a python are exactly like the treads of a jeep’s wheel,” Jugnu said).
The man was released after three months and the police were alarmed when they learned that he was back at the mosque, but they were reassured that he was not allowed anywhere near the children. Soon he moved on to a town in Lancashire and began attending the mosques there, leading the prayers at some. From there—after another incident, his followers threatening the parents of his little victim with a gun to keep quiet—he came to Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
And here he has been caught.
It remains to be seen whether someone would approach Shamas in order to dissuade him from testifying.
Perhaps Suraya has decided to park elsewhere, and so he sets off again towards Scandal Point, madly. His temples are burning and he is sweating, unable to think about where she is or what’s going to happen in the future.
He returns to Scandal Point but she is still not there, and, after a wait, he sets off on one of the many paths that lead to the Safeena —impatient to see her, hoping to catch her as she arrives. The leaves of the rowan trees, there ahead of him, will begin to turn many kinds of yellow next month, from bright amber to the pale brown of a parchment lantern over a weak bulb, and almost as many kinds of red—sienna through to vermilion. The colours would be a reminder that what sunset is to the day, autumn is to the year.
Perhaps she has had a miscarriage during the night? Is she at the infir mary at this moment? Perhaps he should go home and try to ring the Accident and Emergency department?
No, no, she’ll be here. He goes past a bank of late-summer wild grass and his dawn shadow is sliced up into thin uniform strips on the tall narrow leaves like a sheet of black paper coming out of a paper shredder. Once, pointing to the drawing of a porcupine-like clump of grass in a book of butterflies and moths, Jugnu said, “It could be argued that this species has taken part in all stages of civilization’s progress: used for making spears, as support for vines, and, finally, wind instruments for music.” Shamas is sure he has seen that species growing behind the church of St. Eustace, and now his mind turns yet again to the controversy that the vicar has generated over the last few days. The reverend told his 200-strong congregation not to associate with two people who have left their spouses to live with each other, that the two—although regular church-goers—are adulterers who would go to Hell if not persuaded to repent. His diktat, he says in The Afternoon, is guided by Christian love for the couple and a desire to bring them back to the church.
