Maps for Lost Lovers, page 4
Suddenly he understands why the investigation was called “Operation Ivory”: the police knew that there was every possibility of there being bones to gather up.
Language can provide some refuge from terror, as when the words “lethal injection” are employed to refer to “poisoning”; to “send someone to the electric chair” means to “burn them alive”; and to hang is to “strangle.”
The rumours concerning the missing couple—he must try to think of them as dead now—are many (they had turned into a pair of peacocks!), but these are the facts. Last summer, Chanda and Jugnu went to Pakistan for four weeks. It was the last week of July and they were expected back in August. Chanda—the daughter of a nearby grocery-shop owner—had moved into Jugnu’s house back in May, against her family’s wishes. They did return from Pakistan—the passports and luggage were found in the house, the documents showing that they had come back a week earlier than expected—and were murdered sometime over the next few hours or days. Neither Shamas nor Kaukab saw them arrive, nor were they aware of their presence in England—right next door.
Inside Chanda and Jugnu’s house, there are numerous glass-topped cases containing moths and butterflies of every colour, from the dull and inconspicuous to the glossily enriched, the visual equivalent of a nightingale’s vibrant note, the long pin impaling each body reminiscent of the shaft that passes vertically through the wooden horse of a carousel.
Button-shaped or bottle-like, truncated cones or spheres full of spines like sea urchins, or domed as though intended for the roof of the smallest mosque imaginable: sometimes the eggs of butterflies are laid on tree bark, in neat groups like vases in a potter’s courtyard, and sometimes they are positioned on the surface of a leaf, as far apart as the tastebuds are on a human tongue, or they may run around a twig like a spiral staircase. They come in as many colours as contact lenses, as disposable cigarette-lighters, and possess a similar translucence. They may be left exposed, glued to the selected base, while the females of some species cover theirs with a blanket of hairs which they free from their abdominal surface.
And if Kaukab was puzzled one brightly hot summer morning as she came across her three children intently licking off tiny beads from their hands and arms, she was appalled on being told that they were butterfly eggs, her eyes narrowing critically, her endurance reaching its limit when Jugnu told her, in all seriousness, that there was no cause for anxiety because he had made sure that the eggs were safe. “Some butterfly eggs do contain poisonous chemicals as protection against predators, especially those species which lay their eggs in clusters and produce brightly coloured eggs . . .” Such information was second nature to him and he often forgot that he could not assume a similar learning in others. “. . .And nor is there any need to worry that the children may jeopardize a species by eating its eggs: these came from the butterflies that scatter them during flight, the Skippers and the Browns. They had no chance of hatching any way, so don’t worry—”
He stopped there, having noticed the look on his sister-in-law’s face.
One of the children said: “They landed on us while we were out by the lake.”
After that morning Kaukab tried on a few occasions to prevent the children from going out to the hills with Jugnu to collect butterflies and moths, but her wish proved a net of weak threads.
Paper turns yellow over the years because it’s burning very slowly due to contact with the air. Stacked chronologically, the photographs of Jugnu in the various boxes in the house the police had termed “the house of death” would form a spectrum of pale browns.
The earliest photograph, showing the gentle nineteen-year-old boy their mother always said was Allah’s way of compensating her for the daughter she had always wished for, dates from 1966, the year he arrived in Moscow to study at the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University. Learning Russian and obtaining a bachelor’s degree would take him five years; and afterwards he would return to Pakistan briefly, shortly before their father died. There followed a few months in a damp cold house in England with Shamas and Kaukab, and then he moved to the United States.
“Who is this green woman in a sari?” Kaukab had held up the Statue of Liberty postcard he had sent from New York, a short note informing them of his safe arrival and asking about the seven-year-old nephew’s tuberculosis, with love to the baby niece—the girl who would try to contain her laughter in a decade’s time, when he had returned to England, as she asked him to explain the large moustache a photograph showed he had grown during his six years in the United States.
On the day she spotted a bottle of whisky in one of them, Kaukab had had all the photographs sent up to the attic, away from the impressionable eyes of the three children in the house, and they would remain there until Jugnu moved out to live next door.
On the road with the chestnut trees he hears footsteps behind him on the snow, but there’s no one there. There have been moments over the past few days when he has felt that it is he who has died and been buried— and he hears his own footsteps as though someone has come to find him and dig him out.
Two months after Chanda and Jugnu disappeared, the police had contemplated extending their investigation to the United States but the passports of the two lovers were here in England, in the house next door to Shamas’s.
From Tucson to the orange groves of California and then on through Oregon towards Washington, the journey Jugnu made during his first three springs in the United States with migratory beekeepers took him two whole months, stopping along the way to let the bees pollinate the crops. As he drove, the truck hummed with the three-million bees in the back and he reeked of banana oil long into each year. He painted radium dials in a clock factory one winter and it was there that a spillage had left his hands with the ability to glow in the dark, making them irresistible to moths.
He had briefly married an American woman whose trade it was to marry illegal immigrants and divorce them after they had been granted legal status. He never knew how lonely he was during those six years until the news of his mother’s death reached him in Boston where he was working on a doctorate. The following year he flew to England.
It was 1978, and the cry in Britain was that immigrants should be sent back to the countries they had come from: Just look in the telephone directory:there are thousands of them here now. He was thirty-one; and the children whose spirits he began to revive immediately upon arrival were thirteen, eight and four. “The droppings of a moose look and smell the same as deer droppings,” he told them, “and if you try you’ll find that they taste the same too.”
Perhaps the most recent photograph in the bundle which was consigned to the attic is the one that shows the three children sitting cross-legged beside a beached minke whale, its pink corduroy belly resting on the wet packed sand, the reflection of the setting sun stretching like a golden path from the sea’s edge to the horizon, the sky above them a combustion of emerald feathers that were, perhaps, the tattered outer-edges of the thunderstorm that happened to be raging here in this inland valley town that afternoon. As evening passed and night descended, Shamas and Kaukab had looked out of the rain-lashed windows of their house with rising panic:
Lightning strikes without caring whose nest it burns: Shamas and Kaukab were terrified that the four of them would not make it home in time before the pubs shut and the streets were full of drunk white people.
On the road through the cherry trees, Shamas enters a sphere of street-light like a day and emerges from it as though into night, again and again. He turns into the sloping side-street between the church and the mosque. Verses from the Bible translated into Urdu, especially those extolling the virtues of Christ as saviour, are regularly pinned to the noticeboard in the churchyard and they are torn down in the middle of the night just as regularly.
From the incline between the church and the mosque, Shamas sees the faint shimmer of heat haze clinging to the roofs of all but one of the houses in his street—Jugnu’s. The Darwin—Jugnu’s Sheridan Multi-Cruiser speedboat—is still there in his front garden, covered by a faded tarpaulin.
As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka. Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had re-christened everything they saw before them. They had come from across the Subcontinent, lived together ten to a room, and the name that one of them happened to give to a street or landmark was taken up by the others, regardless of where they themselves were from. But over the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they themselves are from—Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. Only one name has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
The Wilderness of Solitude.
The Desert of Loneliness.
IN DARKNESS
Kaukab looks out of the window and watches a little boy climb the sloping side-street lined with the twenty maples. The six-year-old is on his way to the mosque and his grandmother has just telephoned Kaukab from three streets away: “Keep an eye on him, sister-ji. He won’t let me walk him to the mosque anymore. He is becoming independent and wants to go alone. I am telephoning everyone I know along his path because you have to be careful—every day you hear about depraved white men doing unspeakable things to little children.” And the woman rang off with a sigh: “We should never have come to this deplorable country, sister-ji, this nest of devilry from where God has been exiled. No, not exiled—denied and slain. It’s even worse.”
Kaukab remains at the window after the boy has disappeared from sight, and then she blots her eyes with her veil. It has been seven years and a month since she and Shamas heard from their youngest child, her beloved son Ujala. She lifts a small framed photograph from the shelf and looks at him, his hair falling on his shoulders, the body beginning to stretch in adolescence, his mouth grinning, and she recalls that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said that Allah had revealed Himself to him in the beautiful guise of a long-haired fourteen-year-old boy. She presses the picture to her breast. He was always recalcitrant—everything she did seemed to disgust him—and he left home as soon as he could. The daughter Mah-Jabin calls every month or so and visits once or twice a year. Charag, the eldest child, the painter, came during summer last year, and hasn’t telephoned or visited since. He is divorced from the white girl—which means that Kaukab hasn’t seen the grandson for two years and seven months.
Her children were all she had, but she herself was only a part of their lives, a very small part, it has become increasingly clear to her over the past few years.
Alone in the house, she looks out in a daze. Snow has begun again.
Kaukab knows her dissatisfaction with England is a slight to Allah because He is the creator and ruler of the entire earth—as the stone carving on Islamabad airport reminds and reassures the heartbroken people who are having to leave Pakistan—but she cannot contain her homesickness and constantly asks for courage to face this lonely ordeal that He has chosen for her in His wisdom.
She often reminds herself that Allah had given Adam his name after the Arabic word adim, which means “the surface of the earth”; he—and therefore the whole of mankind, his descendants—was created from earth taken from different parts of the world. His head was made from the soil of the East, his breast from the soil of the Mecca, his feet from the West.
She lowers herself into a chair, the veil pressed to her eyes, remembering how the fridge door feels lighter these days because it is not as weighted with bottles of milk on the inside as it once was, when the children were here and Jugnu was still taking his meals with the family, as he would continue to do even after he went to live next door. How grateful she was at the beginning for Jugnu’s being here in England! When he was in America, he used to send coin-like postcards and, like a jukebox, she would sing a lengthy song in return, page upon page detailing the family’s life, asking him to come back, telling him that circumstances had improved a little since his first short visit to England. He did return and Kaukab found it hard to contain her pride when the neighbourhood women wanted to know who that flesh-and-blood Taj Mahal was they saw sitting in her garden yesterday. She recruited them in her search for a bride for him but he said he needed to find his feet in England first. She was grateful to him for being here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii because the move to England had deprived her of the glowing warmth that people who are born of each other give out, the heat and light of an extended family. She prepared for him all the food he had been missing during his years away. Bamboo tubes pickled to tartness in linseed oil, slimy edoes that glued the fingers together as you ate them, naan bread shaped like ballet slippers, poppy seeds that were coarser than sand grains but still managed to shift like a dune when the jar was tilted, dry pomegranate seeds to be patted onto potato cakes like stones in a brooch, edible petals of courgette flowers packed inside the buds like amber scarves in green rucksacks, chilli seeds that were volts of electricity, the peppers whose stalks were hooked like umbrella handles, butter to be diced into cubes reluctant to separate, peas attached to the inside of an undone pod in a row like puppies drinking from their mother’s belly: she moved through the aisles of Chanda Food & Convenience Store and chose his favourite foods. Coriander was abundant in the neighbour’s garden and it was just a matter of leaning over the fence with a pair of sewing scissors. If the ingredients were heavy as hailstone in the carrier bags, the final dishes were light as snowflakes, so delicate and fleeting was the balance of spices and the interplay of flavours. She feared her successes were accidental but with the help of Allah she repeated the error-free performances, and the diners proclaimed her to be the eighth, ninth, and tenth wonder of the world.
He was her husband’s brother, her children’s uncle, her own brother-in-law. Daily and deeply, she loved these words and what they meant. It was as though, when the doors of Pakistan closed on her, her hands had forgotten the art of knocking; she had made friends with some women in the area but she barely knew what lay beyond the neighbourhood and didn’t know how to deal with strangers: full of apprehension concerning the white race and uncomfortable with people of another Subcontinental religion or grouping.
She had had no schooling beyond the age of eleven, but when she arrived in England all those years ago, bright with optimism, she had told Shamas she planned to enrol in an English-learning course as soon as their material circumstances improved, and, in anticipation, she filled a whole notebook with the things she overheard, words whose meaning she didn’t know, proverbs jumbled up, sayings mistakenly glued to other sayings:
The grass is always green with envy on the other side. Love is in the air but is blind as a bat. Blood is thicker than water through thick and thin. It will be a cold day in Hell when Hell freezes over. A friend indeed is a friend, indeed. Heaven is other people.
This last she had heard and remembered correctly, Hell is other people, but she had later begun to doubt herself: surely no one—no people, no civilization—would think other people were Hell. What else was there but other people?
She never did take that language course. But when they bought a television in the 1970s—it was a Phillips because her father had owned a radio made by that company back in Pakistan so she found it a reassurance and also knew it could be trusted—she began to watch children’s programmes with her children, but each one of the three moved on eventually, leaving her and her rudimentary grasp of English behind.
Now she stands up and moves towards the telephone. Dialling carefully, she waits for the call to connect but then hangs up after the first ring, her courage failing. A minute later she dials again and, bravely, keeps herself from walking away. She lets it ring. The answering machine at the other end has a message in Ujala’s voice. He has refused to speak to her personally for years now, but she rings his number every few days to hear his voice, always afraid lest the boy himself pick up the phone and proceed to say something unpleasant to her, something abusive, telling her she is heartless, is partly or wholly responsible for the deaths of Jugnu and Chanda, having been outraged when they set up home together.
Overcome by fear, she hangs up for the second time.
Yes, she had objected to Chanda moving in with Jugnu, but she is not heartless and hadn’t disapproved of their love. When she heard the rumour about the pair, she remembers being secretly relieved that Jugnu had chosen a Muslim this time, all his previous women having been white. Jugnu was in his late forties, and Kaukab knew he must marry this girl and settle down. But then they began to live together in sin and Jugnu refused to listen to her no matter how reasonably or passionately she tried to make him see the error of his ways.
She was already anxious to see Jugnu settle down and raise a family long before Chanda appeared. Shamas—unwilling to think about such things unprompted—agreed with her whenever she insisted on raising the subject. They would then talk to Jugnu together. The last time the two of them broached the subject with him, seven years or so ago, he startled them both by replying: “Good. I have been meaning for you to meet her.” He was referring to the white woman Kaukab had seen with him in the town centre on two occasions during the last month.
