Maps for Lost Lovers, page 33
Chanda’s mother lowers herself onto the front step, moving aside to let the daughter-in-law go back into the shop. The young woman mimics in passing what she had said earlier: “ ‘You saw my Chanda? You saw my Chanda?’ ” And hisses: “For God’s sake! She’s dead.”
Chanda’s mother stays on the front step for five minutes, looking dazedly ahead but then the daughter-in-law comes back down full of remorse and places a hand on her shoulder, telling her to come in out of the cold. “I am sorry, I forget sometimes that things have been just as bad for you. If not worse. I am losing a husband, but in your case it’s two sons and a daughter. I am sorry.” She tells the daughter-in-law not to worry about her, sends her up to dress the little girls and begins to rearrange the joss-stick packets on the shelf, mechanically picks up the olive-green Kasuri methi.
The light of the world has gone out. Above all she has to beg forgiveness from the souls of Chanda and Jugnu, for the elaborate lie she has helped construct in order to save her sons. If only there was a grave: she’d go and bury her face in the earth where they lie waiting to be questioned by the angels on Judgement Day.
She stands in the shop, holding a dozen bottles of rosewater, and brings Chanda’s face before her eyes. How to explain the bond she had with her daughter? There she was, thinking that she had had her last ever period more than seven months ago, that that was it now as far as menstruation was concerned—her breath changed odour, her heart palpitated, her hands and feet became chilled—but then one night she dreamt of Chanda and woke up to find herself flowing again from down there, the place that, in her case, had proved to be the portals both of life and of death: Chanda came out of there, as did her killers.
WINTER
A THOUSAND BROKEN MIRRORS
December; and today was the last day of the trial. It lasted a total of five days and the jury returned the verdict two hours ago. The outcome was what most people expected. There were no last-minute witnesses bursting into the courtroom. There were no new pieces of evidence. Though of course there were some people who thought the verdict would go the other way. Someone even floated a rumour that Chanda’s parents had paid a young man to say that he and his girlfriend had bought Chanda and Jugnu’s passports from them in Pakistan and had entered Britain with them. It is said that Chanda’s parents had paid a substantial amount of money—the amount varies from person to person—to the young man for telling that lie to the police. But he had taken the money and disappeared, never arriving at the police station—Chanda’s parents had not received the telephone call from the police they were expecting, telling them that the trial was being postponed, cancelled, because they had received some new information.
Shamas stands outside the courts, waiting for the bus that will take him home. The sun has vanished completely and, here and there, there is a rain of cold thin droplets that gusts of wind push closer together so that briefly they look like pale-blue veils and banners floating away in the air, swaying. The trees toss as though rubbed with itching powder.
He stands holding the black flower of his umbrella, beside the shop called The Enchanted Forest that sells sawdust-filled hummingbirds in glass jars like sweets by the dozen, flamingos so life-like they can be mistaken for artificial, trout with carnation gills, and hornbills posing on sea-kneaded driftwood, and where the tawny lioness in the window becomes a striped tigress when the sun is in the right place and the bars of the shutters throw their shadows onto it.
Only this week has he been able to get out of bed following the assault. And the first thing he did was to go to Suraya’s house—the house she had grown up in, her mother’s house, the house where Shamas and she had made love on two occasions back in the summer. But it turns out that she has sold the house. He doesn’t know where she is. He rang the infirmary because he remembered wondering in his weeks’-long delirium whether she had killed herself, whether she had had a miscarriage. He even went to the cemetery to see if he could find her mother’s grave—in the hope that she would visit—but to no avail.
It’s December and this morning there was a layer of ice on the puddles as thin as the glass light-bulbs are made of. Kaukab has been unable to attend the trial because her condition is worsening. She needs surgery for her womb but the doctors have been unable to find a place for her at the hospital; the operation will be in January. She is in severe pain, he knows, and having to nurse him back to health has not been easy.
He raises a hand in greeting on seeing Kiran walking towards him, the misty rain accumulating on her umbrella, too insubstantial to collect into beads and slip down the outer slope like children sliding down a hill.
His heart kicking, he listened as the jury convicted Chanda’s brothers today. Feeling weightless and heavy at the same time, he heard the judge say that the killers had found a cure to their problem through an immoral, indefensible act; a cure, a remedy—and their religion and background took care of the bitter aftertaste. Their religion and background assured them that, yes, they were murderers but that they had murdered only sinners. The judge said that Chanda and Jugnu had done nothing illegal in deciding to live together but, Shamas knows, that the two brothers feel that the fact that an act is legal does not mean it’s right.
Kiran was at the courts too today. Charag, his former wife Stella, Mah-Jabin and Ujala have been attending the trial too; they are staying with some friends while in Dasht-e-Tanhaii. He was surprised to see Kiran there this afternoon but appreciated her gesture in coming.
“This cold weather,” she says quietly upon arriving to stand beside him, shaking that head full of greying hair, the hair that she used to weave into a plait strong as a leather belt when younger, coiling the locks and fastening them with a series of diamond-like rhinestone pins.
“This morning I discovered a single icicle, thin as a thermometer, outside my window.”
“Do you remember the year when winter unexpectedly arrived in September and everywhere the rain being held in the bowls of garden flowers froze into ice? About twenty years ago.”
“Was it really that long ago?” From this existence of two moments, we have to steal a life.
“Shamas, I haven’t heard whether the police have found out anything about who assaulted you.”
“No. I didn’t see who it was, so there are no leads. None of my children had been told about it, but they found out when we met at the courts this week. I am mostly healed but they were still shocked by my condition. They gave me a headache as they asked me a hundred concerned questions. Had the police done this, Had the police done that?” They had offered to drive him home, but he didn’t want their company—afraid that a shrapnel of the truth might be extracted from him by them.
The bus is almost full and they have to sit upstairs. Their bodies become warm soon after the journey begins while, outside, the rain intensifies, big drops that each hit the windows diagonally and break into a row of six to eight smaller drops, sticking there to the dry glass that is vibrating like a harp string.
“Your sons reminded me of you—the way the elder stands, the younger’s way of talking. I can see them in you.”
“The children will come home tomorrow for a few hours, much to their mother’s satisfaction. They are terribly missed by her.” His distorted reflection in the steel tubing of the seat in front reminds him of the time he saw Jugnu leaning over a scarab beetle: his face was being reflected in the insect’s polished silver back.
“I wanted to come to the courts yesterday too,” Kiran says.
Someone rustles a broadsheet newspaper at the back and it sounds like a peacock dancing with its tail fanned out, the feathers aquiver.
In the seat in front of Kiran and Shamas a small boy of about eight or nine (the same age as Suraya’s son, surely) is talking to an adult man, an uncle or father; he’s eating an apple, journeying bit by bit along its equator, and his talk is obviously a complaint about school, “Everyone these days is doing the sideways thumb-flick thing when they want to point to someone standing next to them, copying the new boy in class . . .” He stops to take a bite.
A new boy in class? Shamas’s heart begins to beat faster as it occurs to him that the new boy could be Suraya’s son: could it be that she has managed to bring her son to England? Which school does this apple-eating boy attend?
“. . . who’s called James Hamby. Everyone thinks he’s so cool . . .”
The new boy is obviously not Suraya’s son. Just for a moment back then Shamas had had an image of himself standing outside this boy’s school to meet Suraya as she comes to pick up her son. His heart is hammering inside his breast—from now on he’ll see everywhere a possible map that’ll lead him to her. He fears he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.
Kiran says, “I know how painful the past few days have been for you. When they set up home together, there were rumours that Chanda’s family would soon poison them both. Of course, it didn’t happen—our neighbourhood runs on gossip.”
“Kaukab, I know, sometimes blames Jugnu and Chanda for what happened. They tried to turn their back on the world, on the world’s trouble, and found themselves stabbed in the back.”
“Meaning: No one on the planet has yet earned the right to be that innocent?”
Shamas nods, but his attention is drawn towards the people waiting to get on the bus, out there, now that they are approaching a stop: no, Suraya is not among them. He turns to Kiran. “Do you know this Punjabi couplet?
Kuj Sheher de loke vi zalim san Kuj mainon maran da shauk vi si
It’s by Munir Niazi.”
Kiran translates the words into English, “On the one hand, the city surrounding me was easily provoked. On the other, I was curious about ways of dying. Though, of course, it’s their curiosity about ways of living that led to Chanda and Jugnu’s death.”
“The second verse should be, ‘On the other, I was curious about ways of living.’ Kuj mainon jeen da shauk vi si. They did not have a death wish. They had a life wish.”
“Jugnu, with a blindfold of butterflies on his eyes,” Kiran says after a while.
“Why weren’t they careful? Even animals know to retreat from obvious danger. For all his love of the natural world, Jugnu should have remembered that all animals retreat from fire.”
“All, except moths.”
The sky is getting darker. Evening is on its way, planting flags of sadness as it comes.
Kiran says, “You mustn’t feel too sad. In this life we are duty bound to dig up a little happiness. Remember Kaukab’s brother visited England last year?”
Shamas looks at her.
“I met him,” she says quietly.
Shamas nods: “I thought you would be curious.” He smiles at her: “I hope Kaukab didn’t see you two together.”
Shamas glances at the newspaper in front of him. He cannot remember the last time he looked at the news. A seventeen-year-old Palestinian girl was beaten to death in the Gaza Strip by her father for having lost her virginity . . . The Bahamian authorities found 56 Haitian migrants and the body of another on a desolate shore six days after their sailing boat foundered, the US coastguard said yesterday. The survivors said about 130 people were on board when the 30 ft boat left Haiti for Miami ten days ago . . . In Saudi Arabia, a fifteen-year-old boy has been publicly beheaded for changing his religion from Islam to Christianity . . .
Shamas waits to see if she would resume telling him about the lost lover. There was a shameful expression on her face when she mentioned him, mentioned her search for happiness. Perhaps she thinks people would judge her? The world doesn’t rub salt into our wounds exactly: it has coated us with salt so that whenever we happen to get injured it is doubly painful.
“How is your father, Kiran?” he says to indicate that she doesn’t have to continue with the earlier subject, in case she has begun to regret having confided in him during the minutes away from him. “Is he still finishing every sentence with a laugh as though ridiculing his illness?”
Kiran however does wish to return to the earlier topic, and says, “I didn’t meet him while he was visiting your house. Remember he left Dasht-e-Tanhaii to go to London, to spend his last two weeks in England looking up old friends in the capital. Well, one day I received a letter from him—from London—saying he was coming back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii just to see me. The look on my face had alarmed my father. ‘What was in that letter?’ he asked, having seen me reading it earlier. ‘Has someone died?’ I wanted to say, no, someone dead has come alive.”
“He wrote to you and came back to Dasht-e-Tanhaii? I didn’t know that. Did you know he had named his daughter after you?”
“No, I didn’t, but he told me when we met. You knew?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want to mention it in case it hurt you. I am sorry.”
“There he was, at the doorstep one day soon after the letter. All my life I have looked at other men with the hope of catching a fleeting glimpse of one of his gestures, a skin-colouration like his, a smile resembling his. Now, there was the accumulated sadness of compromises in his features that comes to everyone in old age.”
“I don’t think he knew you had gone to Karachi.”
“No. I told him last year.” She is sitting stiffly, spine held away from the back of the seat. “He brought for me what he called ‘the five arrows of Love, the mind-born god’: there was a red lotus, a deep-red asoka flower, a coral-green froth that was mango blossom, yellow jasmine, and a blue lily.”
“Yes. Spring is the time associated with romance and they were the five flowers of the Subcontinental spring.”
“He stayed in a hotel and I visited him at various places in town.” She looks at Shamas. “What must you think of me, Shamas? An old woman living in the past.”
“Most people live in the past because it’s easy to remember than to think. Most of us don’t know how to think—we’ve been taught what to think instead. And, no, I don’t think badly of you.”
She doesn’t say anything more and looks out of the window, craning her neck occasionally to keep this or that in view as the bus rushes along the road.
Two days ago, Shamas thought for a brief moment that he recognized Suraya’s paisley jacket in the window of a charity clothes shop—but on second glance they turned out to be someone else’s footprints, not hers.
The bus passes an electrical appliances shop that has a poster claiming that theirs is the Best deal ON/OFFer. The photographs of the immigrants are lost forever. A jeweller’s shop will open soon in the place where the photographer’s studio used to be: empty wristwatch boxes and little finger-ring cases are arranged in neat rows in the window, the lids open: a miniature cinema theatre of satin-and-plush seats. A chair can be glimpsed inside, for the customers to sit in, its tall ornately moulded back bringing to mind the frame of a mirror.
“When he left me in England all those years ago,” Kiran says, “he said he’d be back in twenty-five days. When we re-met, he said if he were a religious man, he’d believe that God had turned those twenty-five days to twenty-five years as a punishment for not saying ‘God willing’ after telling me about his return. I told him that as far as I was concerned, he didn’t go even after he’d gone.”
“I never understood why you hadn’t married anyone else.”
“There were other possibilities. I’d get frightened of the loneliness of old age, and the members of the Sikh community would try to match me up with people. Some good, some not. But.” She waves her hand in resignation. “There was even a white man I had gone to school with and had been terribly in love with as a girl. I was the only Asian in my school, and I used to wonder why no one had ever asked me out on a date. I approached that boy to see if he’d go out with me but he said no. And when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘Well, you are a darkie!’ The word ‘Paki’ wasn’t invented until the 1970s, otherwise he would have used that.
When he said that to me, I suddenly realized, ‘Of course I am a darkie.’ And because I loved him I didn’t want him to be called a darkie-lover, and decided to stay away from him. He said, ‘It’s a pity you are a darkie, because if you were white you’d be really pretty.’ And then some years after we left school we ran into each other . . . but nothing serious happened. The Sikh friends and acquaintances still try sometimes—they mean well, I suppose—but these days it’s mostly widowers and illegal immigrants.”
He wonders how long Kaukab’s brother had stayed with her last year and asks her.
She is silent and then says, “He was still here around the time Chanda and Jugnu died—late summer.”
“Do you still write to each other?”
She gives no answer.
He sees a tear slide down out of her eye and, appalled at his insensitivity at asking her so many intimate questions, he says, “I am terribly sorry.” And this after she has shown him the great kindness of coming to the trial.
“I have been crying for a while: the tears’ve caught up with me only now.”
She doesn’t say anything further and Shamas looks away, out where the rain and the ice-clusters have stopped falling, and a day-moon is shining in the winter sky.
Kiran, composed now, sighs and paraphrases what she said earlier, “I met him on five occasions around Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and a sixth time in my house. That was the last time. I kept his presence in England from my father, and—during that sixth meeting, when he came to the house—I also tried to hide the fact that he was in there. He came very late at night and I took him upstairs . . .”
“You don’t have to tell me any of this, Kiran. I know it must be painful.”
“You are too kind. But please let me talk. I was upstairs with him. We poured all our longing into those moments. When we made love, it was as though we were trying to kill each other. And then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs but it was too late . . .”
