Maps for Lost Lovers, page 32
“He said to tell you that they have made enquiries and that the negatives have been thrown away.”
She places the roses on the shelf and stands there, not wishing to move any closer to him, fearing he would become affectionate again, the condemnation and abuse of the seventy-two houris ringing in her ears. Some vulgar people ask that if a pious man will get seventy-two wives in Paradise, how many men will a pious woman receive? That of course is the height of ignorance and indecency: a pious woman cannot bear the thought of letting a man other than her husband touch her—so in Paradise, where there is nothing but ease and satisfaction, why would she be put through the torment of being groped and fondled by strange men? In Paradise everyone will have at least one companion, for there is no celibacy in Paradise, and so the pious woman would be happy just to be given an eternal place by her earth-husband’s side after Judgement Day. Kaukab sighs. Allah is all-wise. The couple will become young again and eternally beautiful and purified. There will be no urine, no faeces, no semen, no menstruation; erections and orgasms will last for decades, and men will often hear their earthly wives say, “By the power of Allah, I could find nothing in Paradise as beautiful as you.”
Shamas tries to move his lips to convey a smile to her.
She smiles back, hoping he has not noticed that she is wearing her outdoor clothes: England is a dirty country, an unsacred country full of people filthy with disgusting habits and practices, where, for all one knew, unclean dogs and cats, or unwashed people, or people who have not bathed after sexual congress, or drunks and people with invisible dried drops of alcohol on their shirts and trousers, or menstruating women, could very possibly have come into contact with the bus seat a good Muslim has just chosen to sit on, or touched an item in the shop that he or she has just picked up—and so most Muslim men and women of the neighbourhood have a few sets of clothing reserved solely for outdoors, taking them off the moment they get home to put on the ones they know to be clean. Kaukab has been wearing one of her outdoor shalwar-kameezs for five days now because she has to clean Shamas after he has emptied his bowels. One day he had diarrhoea—like an hourglass—and her hands were covered with the filth, but things are better now. She would like to use water to wash the sphincter as prescribed by the Prophet, peace be upon him, but that is impractical, the water hurting the bruised areas, and so she has been reduced to using toilet paper. So each time she touches him afterwards she can’t go past the fact that he is unwashed and unclean.
Shamas calls her to himself and she sits on the bed for a while before leaving—it’s time for the third of the day’s five prayers.
“I wish you could remember who did this to you,” she says from the door. “They say it was probably the work of Chanda’s family. And I don’t mean to cause you pain by saying this, but I blame Jugnu for doing this to us. If he had stayed on the decent pathways of life then none of this would have happened.”
“It wasn’t anything to do with Chanda’s family.”
“How do you know who it was? You say you were grabbed from behind and passed out after being hit on the head with something heavy. You are just defending Jugnu, reflexively, as always, that’s all.”
He can’t tell her the truth. Helplessly, he watches her leave—not knowing what he can do to alleviate her suffering. He closes his eyes. Out of the fog of the painkillers her words about the photographic negatives now come to him but he is not certain what she was referring to.
He does however remember everything that happened that morning and hasn’t told it to anyone lest his attackers reveal the truth of his affair with Suraya to Kaukab. It’ll destroy her.
And he hasn’t wanted the children to know about it because they might come to visit and ask intelligent questions about the events of that morning—why, when, how? Someone might catch him out.
But even if he wanted to tell someone about what happened, he is not sure he would be able to find a voice in which to do it. The very minor fracture in his trachea is beginning to heal but he’s having trouble speaking. He is not entirely mute but there have been bouts when he couldn’t put a sentence together without stuttering or stammering.
As soon as he is well enough to walk (the doctors say it could take several weeks), he’ll go to Suraya’s house. He has failed to show up twice for a meeting with her. What happened to her that morning? Did his assailants make it to the Safeena while she was still there? He feels nausea.
What has Suraya done about their baby? He hopes, for her sake, that she isn’t pregnant after all, that the pregnancy test was inaccurate. His liaison with her has complicated her life needlessly.
Chinks between the blankets are letting cold air in. He can hear Kaukab moving about downstairs, it being a small house, so little that all the doors slide into walls: Kaukab, mixing up English expressions, had said once, “There is not enough room in here to swing a door.” He can’t remember what he had been thinking about before falling asleep but now he does: Suraya had said she would welcome death, and now he’s afraid that she might try to kill herself—perhaps she already has. Suddenly he is convinced she has committed suicide; and he wonders whether he himself hadn’t died by the lakeside that morning. The two ghosts that are said to be roaming the woods near the lake—surely they are he and Suraya, their baby glowing inside her womb, his hands burning, giving out light, from the newspapers he’s carrying, the searing pain of the world? No, no, he must stay lucid: he must get up immediately and try to obtain all The Afternoons for the days he’s been bedridden—to see if a suicide has been reported. He must get up immediately. He tries to fight the drugs and stay awake but, like a doll that must shut its eyes whenever it is horizontal, he cannot help but sleep. Yes, yes, he tells himself as he drifts off: he’ll find her the way Shiva had found Parvati when she had walked away from him after a quarrel: he’ll follow her footprints on the ground, a row of paisleys—like the ones on her jacket.
Kaukab looks out to see if she can find someone on their way to the shop, to ask them to get a packet of pistachios for her. All ears, Adam’s apple, and brittle vanity, a teenager goes by but he is going in the opposite direction; he is smoking and she resists the urge to tell him like a good aunt that he should be fasting.
Kaukab shakes her head to drive away the smell of food from her head, the smell of Shamas’s lunch—it has mostly evaporated but the tip of its long tail is trapped under the lid of the enamel pan in which the leftovers lie. An Eid card has arrived from her father in Pakistan, full of pop-up doves in flight and minutely detailed palm fronds and jasmine garlands: it is impossible to open without risking a rip to the various tines and frills that stick to each other like eyelashes after sleep.
She goes to the window and looks out and sees a newspaper photographer taking a picture of the vicar outside the church; it is typical that the white people are treating their holy man as though he is ridiculous for having stood up against the moral vacuum of this obscene and degraded country. For once she would like to go from her house to, say, the post office without being confronted by the decay of Western culture.
Jesus Christ must be spinning in his grave.
Why is she stranded at a point in life where just about everything has stopped making sense? She begins to cry, wondering how what He does to humans can be called justice. Why has He chosen this life for her, written down such things under her name in the Book of Fates? May He forgive her for these thoughts. Yes, His justice cannot be defined by human terms. Let’s imagine a child and an adult in Paradise who both died in the True Faith. The adult, however, has a higher place in Paradise than the child. The Child shall ask Allah: “Why did you give that man a higher place?” “He has done many good works,” Allah shall reply. Then the child shall say, “Why did you let me die so soon that I was prevented from doing good?” Allah will answer: “I knew that you would grow up to be a sinner, therefore, it was better that you should die a child.” Thereupon a cry shall rise from those condemned to the depths of Hell, “Why, O Master, did You not let us die before we became sinners?”
It does seem unjust to us humans but we cannot fathom His ways, she tells herself. Stella, her ex-daughter-in-law, once told her that her middle name—Iris—comes from a beautiful girl of Greek and Roman myths who had iridescent wings, but lack of sufficiently varied pigments had meant that she is rarely depicted in paintings from ancient times. This is a little like how things are with Allah. We humans just don’t have enough shades and tints at our disposal to make a picture of Him. Here Kaukab is, away from her children, away from her customs and country, alone and lonely, and yet He tells her to have faith in His compassion. And that is what she should do uncomplainingly, reminding herself that she is not lost, that He is with her in this strange place. And yet she doesn’t know what to do about the fact that she feels utterly empty almost all the time, as though she has outlived herself, as if she has stayed on the train one stop past her destination.
DARD DI RAUNAQ
Ki pata-tikana puchde ho—
Mere sheher da na Tanhaii ey
Zila: Sukhan-navaz
Tehseel: Hijar
Jeda daak-khanna Rusvaii ey.
Oda rasta Gehrian Sochan han, te mashoor makam Judaii ey.
Othay aaj-kal Abid mil sakda ey—
Betha dard di raunaq laii ey.
The words of the Punjabi song come to Chanda’s mother as she prepares to open the shop, the yellow leaves of early November scraping on the road outside because they are being blown about by the breeze. Fossilized dragonflies: there are faint marks on her cheeks and temples from the creases on the pillow where she had lain awake most of the night.
You ask for my address—
The name of my town is Loneliness
District: The Relating of Tales
Sub-district: Longing
And its post office is Condemnation and Disrepute.
The road leading to it is Devoted Thought, and its famous monument is
Separation.
That’s where Abid, the writer of these lines, can be found nowadays—
There he sits, attracting everyone to a lively spectacle of pain.
She stacks the shelves with items taken from brown cardboard boxes. It is forty minutes till opening time, when the shop will at once fill up with little children ready to buy sweets and chocolates by the handful, it being Eid today. In ten or so minutes she will be able to track her own little granddaughters above the shop as they thump the floor, running about to put on their frocks and veils stitched with sparkling gota and kiran. All dressed up, bespangled and a-clink with toy jewellery and glass bangles, they will come downstairs to get a blessing from their grandmother on the happy day.
A woman, smiling, knocks on the glass of the entrance door, and they exchange Eid greetings as she lets her in—the woman has run out of honey to marinate the chicken for tonight’s dinner.
As Chanda’s mother is pointing towards where the jars of honey are kept, another woman enters and gives them both her Eid greeting: “Though, of course,” she continues, “what is the point of Eid in this country—no relatives, no friends, no going up to the roof to see the Eid moon the night before, no special Eid programmes on the TV, no balloon sellers in the streets and no monkey-wallahs with their monkeys leaping about dressed up like Indira Gandhi in a sari and a black-and-white wig? In short, no tamasha, no raunaq.”
Except dard di raunaq—thinks Chanda’s mother, remembering the Punjabi verses from earlier. A spectacle of pain.
The woman with the honey agrees with the newcomer. “We are stranded in a foreign country where no one likes us. I heard someone say only yesterday that our poor Shamas-brother-ji was beaten up by, who else but, white racist thugs.”
“By the whites? One of the rumours I have heard is that the people from the mosque had him beaten up, to stop him from testifying against the man who he is said to have seen abusing a child.”
The new customer has come to pick up the mince meat which she had ordered over the phone and which Chanda’s father had prepared last night and placed in the freezer. “This is cold. I feel for poor brother-ji’s frozen hands. Why don’t you hire a full-time assistant?”
“Sister-ji, don’t be inconsiderate,” the woman with the honey says. “Why should they hire an assistant? Next month there will be a trial and then, Allah willing, both the boys will be back here and take over the reins of the business from their aged mother and father.”
The other woman looks ashamed and says to Chanda’s mother, “Forgive me, sister-ji, I didn’t mean to imply that your sons would never return. They are going to be acquitted, of course they are. And from December onwards, brother-ji would never have to touch these hatefully chilly pieces of meat. Allah will deliver both your boys to you safely. Just you wait. But when I referred to a full-time assistant, I was thinking of that boy I saw here three days ago. I thought it was someone you had hired part-time, to relieve the load a little.”
Chanda’s mother takes an invisible blow to the stomach and holds her breath. “I don’t know who you are talking about,” she manages to say in a tiny voice.
The other customer joins in with a frown. “I saw a boy here last week too, sister-ji, at the back. No?”
Chanda’s mother has become a reed that’s sounding the plaintive note. “It must have been a customer who had wandered back there. We haven’t hired anyone.”
On their way out, the two women laugh. “That’s who it must have been—a customer. Anyway, sister-ji, I heard poor Kaukab is having problems with her foetus-container, that it’s slipping out of her. Is it true? They had to pin back mine last year but then I made the mistake of lifting a heavy plant pot in the garden and the whole thing came undone again. I’d better pay Kaukab a visit soon to warn her not to exert herself too much after the operation.”
After the two customers have left, Chanda’s mother bolts the door and has to steady herself against it, feeling as alone as the young Joseph at the bottom of the well.
So: people have seen that boy—the fake Jugnu—here? No one must know that they have had anything to do with him—or have a hand in his version of what happened to Chanda and Jugnu. He will say that he and his lover had been on the run in Pakistan, moving from city to city, town to town, because they had wanted to get married against the wishes of the girl’s family who were hunting them in order to kill them—one of the many hundreds of “honour killings” that take place over there every year.
They haven’t managed to find a counterfeit Chanda. And until they have found a girl, the boy must not be spotted here. They have rented him a room in a faraway street and he has come to the shop on three occasions so that the family can go over the finer details with him.
Under cover of darkness, Chanda’s mother had taken him to Jugnu’s house and pointed out which window belongs to which room, what piece of luggage was found where, which door was normally used by the couple to enter and leave the house.
But from now on, the boy must not come here. The family will pretend to be as shocked and surprised as anyone else by his tale when it is made public. He wants a down payment but they’ll give that to him the day before he (or he and a female) presents himself to the station—while she and Chanda’s father and their daughter-in-law are sitting by the telephone, waiting for a call from the police to tell them of what has transpired.
Falling asleep last night she had had a few monents of panic, thinking about the dead body found under the rubble of the building that was blown up earlier in the year: an illegal immigrant, in all likelihood—what if this fake Jugnu of theirs takes it into his head that the mangled boy is his lost brother and goes to the police to make inquiries, not caring that his true story would contradict the tale Chanda’s family has concocted? She imagines him asking the police to check if the dead boy has a single gold hair amid the black ones on his head. So far he has given no indication that he knows of the newspaper reports—he can’t read English very well and, even if he did, he would think buying The Afternoon an extravagant waste of 45p. He is insecure about—if not frightened of—talking to white people, so if he hears about the story it will be from an Urdu- or Punjabi-speaker. From now on they must make sure he doesn’t talk to Pakistanis and Indians. They must frighten him into not contacting anyone about anything: Some careless word of yours could easily reach the authorities and have you thrown out of the country—without you first having earned the money our plan will bring you.
She leaves the door to continue the work she had interrupted to serve the early customers, the sound of her granddaughters reaching her through the ceiling as they get up to begin celebrating the festival—this dard di raunaq, this Eid of unhappiness. But five minutes later and it’s her daughter-in-law that has come down the stairs, pointing at the shop’s entrance as she rushes towards it, shouting: “She’s outside. Open the door and stop her.”
“Who?” she asks her, but the daughter-in-law—her breathless haste upsetting a stack of Metro Milan joss-stick packets, which tumble to the floor from the shelf in a fragrant primary-coloured heap—is struggling with the door.
“Who is outside?” she repeats and then the olive-green boxes of Kasuri methi fall from her own hands: Chanda? “My Chanda? Where?”
She runs to the door—murmuring, “My Allah, does Your kindness towards Your creatures know any limits?”—and follows the daughter-in-law outside. The road is empty, and the daughter-in-law is looking around, now rushing to stand in the middle of the leaf-strewn road, now coming back to its edge.
“You saw my Chanda? Where? Just now?” Some hours are potent beyond measure, making wishes—uttered by heart or tongue—come true, regardless of whether they are genuinely meant.
Instead of answering, the daughter-in-law whispers to herself: “But she was right here, a moment ago.” And to her mother-in-law she finally explains, trying to keep exasperation out of her voice, “No, not Chanda, mother-ji. It was the girl who came here back in the summer. I told you about her. The illegal immigrant.” She goes to stand in the middle of the road again. “Where has she gone? She couldn’t have gone far in the time it took me to come out here. She wears one of those lockets containing a miniature Koran.”
