Maps for Lost Lovers, page 40
A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF FATES
On the last day of his life, Jugnu was awakened an hour and a half before dawn by the sounds the peacocks made as they entered his back garden.
A man was hurrying towards the mosque because the cleric had collapsed with his left hand on his heart, and the peacocks—who were roaming the dark streets—were made to scatter in every direction by him. The peacocks were a nuisance—liable to scratch the paintwork of cars, and last week they had entered the mosque and several had snatched up rosaries, the beads dangling from their beaks as they were chased out and down the street.
A few of the birds now entered Jugnu’s back garden for safety amid the branches of the apple trees. The birds had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight ago—no one could tell where they had escaped from. They spent most of the daylight hours in the lakeside woods and in the secluded hilly meadows around the neighbourhood, away from humans, but they came out to the streets at dawn. Their presence in the neighbourhood was disturbing to some. The faithful have always been ambivalent towards peacocks because it was this kind-hearted creature that had inadvertently let Satan into the garden of Eden. Disguised as an aged man, Satan had asked to be admitted but the door-keepers had recognized him and refused, but then the peacock—who had watched the entire incident from its perch on the boundary wall—had gone down and lifted the bedraggled old man with its feet and flown back in with him.
Leaving Chanda asleep, Jugnu got out of bed. He approached the window and its dimly lit view of the peacocks. A pale summer moon was decomposing in the dark blue sky, which, at dawn, in an hour and a half, would be painted with a light as red as a Kandahar pomegranate. Jugnu was wearing an improvised dhoti: it was his habit, upon getting up in summer, to tie around his waist the light sheet of linen he had slept under.
Jugnu and Chanda had arrived home from the airport after ten last night, and, exhausted from the long eight-hour flight, they were asleep in each other’s arms just over an hour later; Jugnu had often remarked that an aeroplane journey was surely worse for the body than a ride on a primitive bullock cart along rutted backwoods-village roads. As her dark-green eyes closed last night, Chanda had no inkling that she would never see Jugnu again.
They hadn’t unpacked. And upon getting up and going downstairs on this the day of his death, Jugnu began to open the suitcases and he soon became engrossed in the notebooks in which he had recorded the information about Pakistani lepidoptera during his visit. He had witnessed a Paradise Flycatcher tear up and feed a Common Mormon to its fledglings in the Kaghan valley. After the monsoon shower in the Salt Range of the Punjab, he tracked the south-easterly drift of Blue Tigers, and he managed to observe the annual migration of the Pale Lemon White through the Khyber Pass.
In the kitchen patterned with rows of cedars—more gift-wrapping than wallpaper—he opened one of the many small cardboard boxes that contained the butterflies he had brought from Pakistan.
One box—which held several Common Guava Blues that had been caught in the guava orchards of Malir and Landhai, just outside Karachi—would be found on the kitchen shelf when the police forced their way into the house thirteen days later—because the couple had returned earlier than they had planned, no one would miss them till then.
As there was no food in the house, Jugnu boiled some water and drank a cup of black coffee while he waited for the first sign of life in the house next door so he could go and borrow bread, milk and eggs from Kaukab. He went outside and hesitantly approached the denim jacket that had been hanging on the line since spring because a wren had built a nest in one of its pockets. He noted that the bird family seemed to have thrived in his absence.
Going past the lily tangle of the garden next door, he dug up an onion from Kaukab’s small herb patch for an omelette, his hands glowing in the gloom-rich corner. He didn’t know that he was being watched.
All but two of the peacocks had dispersed by now, and they were sitting near Jugnu, also watching him. But they too had vanished by the time he came out of the house for the second time (the suitcases lay in the kitchen like gutted carcasses) to knock quietly on Kaukab’s door because a light was now on in there.
There was no answer.
On the small patch of grass in front of the back door there was dew, and Jugnu, using his hands as a brush, wiped the words The Vision onto it. The words were a clear green amongst the silver-grey-green beads. It was a message for Chanda: Jugnu had decided to walk to the farm of that name where fresh bread was sold at this hour. He’d buy other provisions for breakfast from there too.
The farm was a mile away, beyond the lake and its xylophone jetty. The family that owned it also bred orchids in a glasshouse presided over by a lightning-shattered elm. Since long before Jugnu knew them, they had been trying to breed a flower resembling the one to be found at the centre of a gold-and-ruby Fabergé egg. The dazzling heirloom had travelled through the decades and each new generation of those tenacious yellow-haired giants seemed obsessed with creating a living copy of the jewelled sculpture. “But that flower is the work of the imagination,” Jugnu had once said to them with a smile. “It’s like trying to live a life described in a beautiful poem or a perfect novel.” They came to the neighbourhood of Asian immigrants every year to invite children to take part in the annual “worm-charming” competition held on the farm. There could be up to fifty-million earthworms beneath an acre of land; and each team of children was allocated one of the tablecloth-sized squares in a field. The ground was beaten with sticks, pounded with fists, stamped on, until the vibration brought the worms to the surface. There were prizes for the most earthworms collected (the record had been standing at 763 per-square for several years), for the longest earthworm, and the heaviest. But the mothers in the immigrant neighbourhood were always apprehensive about letting their children take part because the field where the competition was held was next to the cemetery and they did not want their children to handle anything that could have fed on corpses.
Jugnu took his keys and came out of his back garden. The barber’s son—having driven his taxi all night—was just pulling up outside his parents’ home when Jugnu emerged into the street. The old man sat in the car next to the son, who, as testified by the black-and-white photograph that hung in the barbershop, looked exactly like his father when he was young.
Jugnu stopped because his way was blocked by the car door opened on the pavement side. And with a greeting and a smile, he reached in and relieved the old barber of the box he had been holding on his lap. There was a scraping of claws inside when the box tilted in his hand. A strong smell of bird-droppings and feathers came from the box which told Jugnu that on his way home from his night’s work the son had collected the father from an all-night quail fight. Some members of the older generation indulged in this passion which was illegal in England but wasn’t prohibited back in the Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi towns and villages they came from. Most young men, born here in England, were uninterested in the activity, but there were younger men at these fights here in England: they were the sons-in-law (mostly nephews) the older generation had imported from the villages back home for their British-born daughters. And increasingly the other young men present were the asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.
The birds were starved for a fortnight and fed on seed soaked in alcohol just before the fight, the men handling the Islamically unclean bottle of alcohol with rags, and then spurs were attached to the back of the birds’ legs.
“The box contained dying blood-soaked birds,” the barber’s son would say later, in the months to come, “and I was afraid Jugnu would grow suspicious and land us in trouble. He was an educated man. Not like us: the sons had failed their O-levels just as, in another time, another country, the fathers had failed their Matriculations.”
The barber’s son let Jugnu help his father—in spite of the fact that the old man was overcome by disgust when he saw Jugnu, whom he considered a loathsome and immoral sinner.
After helping the old man out of the car, Jugnu carried the box of quails to the front door. The son was about to drive off but then the car stopped: the window was rolled down and the son told the father what he had just heard over his communication radio—that the cleric at the mosque had collapsed of a suspected heart attack. The barber, fishing in his pocket for the key to the front door, was shaken by the news. During Jugnu and Chanda’s stay in Pakistan the cleric had had a most-holy dream, a dream that had had an electrifying effect on the Muslims of the neighbourhood; and it had also been mentioned in letters and telephone calls to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, where too it had proved sensational. A saintly figure, holding a thousand-bead jade rosary, had appeared and told the cleric to write a letter to the American president, inviting him to convert to Islam. The holy man was standing in a mosque carved out of a single pearl that was—it was the cleric’s understanding in the dream— washed twice daily in rose water. The saint told the cleric that he had pleased the saint by his unwavering piety, and that—as a sign of his pleasure towards him—it would be at the cleric’s prompting that the American president would convert to Islam.
The barber bid a perfunctory, distracted farewell to Jugnu, after saying, in a voice full of awe, “Only the pious die on a Friday.” And he’d claim later that when his fingers touched Jugnu’s—as he took from him the box containing the wounded birds—Jugnu’s hand had felt cold and stony, like a dead man’s.
After seeing the old barber to the front door, Jugnu continued on his way towards the maple-lined side-street that rose between the church and the mosque.
He stopped before he began the ascent because at the corner he noticed the ladder rising towards the sky. The previous month—while he was in Pakistan—the workmen who came to replace the telephone pole had discovered that a letterbox was fastened to it, as red as a fire engine and hot under the summer sun despite the shade of the nearby maple trees. They did not have the official keys needed to release the clips and decided to ease the box over the top of the pole and slip it down the replacement like a wristwatch. The new column turned out to be thicker nearer the base and the box rested twelve feet above the ground. It would remain in that position for several months and a ladder was put up for the posting and collecting of letters. Some people in the neighbourhood would see it as a blatant and obvious attempt by the whites to stop the Asian people from keeping in touch with their families back home. Bindweed raced up the ladder and pole, the tendrils candystriping the rungs, the beautiful white flowers lolling in the air on delicate branches that were full of sculpted heart-shaped leaves.
Just under two weeks from that day, Kaukab would drag this ladder trailing a straggle of dusty green hearts into the front garden of Jugnu’s house and set it against the top window, sending a boy up to have a look through the window—wishing Ujala was home so she could send him up instead of having to ask someone else’s son.
Standing there, he was smiling to himself when Naheed the seamstress hurried out of her house and asked him to please go up there and quickly post this letter, brother-ji. In the months to come she would debate with herself whether or not to let anyone know that she had been one of the people who had seen Jugnu during that predawn hour. The letter was to her sister, who lived in Bangladesh, and she wanted it kept a secret from her husband: during a visit to Pabna over a decade ago, the man had been accused of assault by Naheed’s younger sister, and, shouting down the girl’s claims, he had forbidden Naheed to communicate with her family. Naheed wrote to her parents and sister whenever she had the opportunity and posted the letters while he was asleep, on occasions going out into the street in the middle of the night.
If I tell the police about having met Jugnu, she would write in a letter to her sister several weeks after that dawn, he would want to know what I was doing out at that hour, talking to other men. And the police visits to the house and questionings would abrade his vindictive nature.
As for the barber and his taxi-driver son—who were the other two people to have seen Jugnu by that time that day—they would not wish to get involved because they feared the quail fighting would land them in trouble with the law.
After posting the letter for Naheed the seamstress—a letter that had been sealed with dabs of chappati dough because the tube of glue was somewhere upstairs and Naheed hadn’t wanted to go looking for it lest she wake her husband—Jugnu continued up the maple-lined street, towards the corner where the mosque was situated.
The street lights were still on and they cast an apricot glow on the pavement.
As Jugnu walked past the mosque door, Shaukat Ahmed, who had a knitwear stall in the covered market, came out and, on seeing Jugnu, asked him grimly to step in and look at the cleric. (“I always thought he was a doctor!” he would say of Jugnu later.) The cleric was talking slowly with his last breaths, and wanted to be laid out on his prayer mat. He used a cured deerskin as prayer mat and Jugnu brought it to him from where it lay folded and spread it.
As the news of the cleric’s death spread in a short while, there would be a large gathering of people in the mosque, but when Jugnu went in there was only a handful of people, listening to the cleric, the American president’s letter crumpled in his right hand.
Everyone except Jugnu was terrified by what the old man was saying: The “bearded figure” in his dream, referred hitherto as just a saint, had been none other than the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. The cleric had kept this fact from the Muslims due to humility: “I did not want to appear to be a braggart. I am not one of those over-zealous men to whom Gabriel would appear to be a poor catch: they would want to track God.”
Jugnu left the mosque after the misunderstanding about him being a doctor had been cleared up.
To contemplate that the Prophet Muhammad can be wrong—on anything—was to risk a deep spiritual trauma; and so, after the cleric died, soon after Jugnu departed, the men who had been present at the deathbed decided that what the dying man had revealed to them should never be made public. These men would not come forward to testify officially that they had seen Jugnu that dawn. They would have, of course, talked to some of their most-intimate friends or to their wives about meeting Jugnu in the mosque if they had decided to keep quiet for some other reason—say, that they did not want to get involved in a murder inquiry. But this was a matter of religion.
All except one of them would remain utterly silent. And the one who would speak would say to his wife, “When I saw Jugnu I knew he was as good as dead. I knew Chanda’s brothers were waiting for them to come back from Pakistan to kill them. Had my sister set up home with someone that shamelessly, I would have dissolved them both in acid much sooner.”
It was only when he had got up to say his predawn prayers that the cleric remembered that he hadn’t opened yesterday’s post: he found the letter from the American president, politely declining to convert to Islam. The world’s most-powerful country was not to be headed by a Muslim anytime soon! Everyone in the neighbourhood knew the details of the dream, and some of the faithful had made plans in anticipation of the President’s assenting reply. When the prophet Suleiman (or King Solomon, as the Christians called him) had sent a letter to Bilquis (the Queen of Sheba), inviting her and her people to submit to worshipping only Allah, she had decided to pay him a personal visit; and while she was journeying towards him, Suleiman had had his djinns transport her throne to him so that she would know that he had Allah on his side. The people in the neighbourhood had wondered whether the President would turn up in Dasht-e-Tanhaii upon receiving the letter, and they had wondered if Allah would command a few of His djinns to transport some famous American landmark or other to this town. How would the Statue of Liberty look up there on the highest hill, next to the Iron Age fort? Was the earth in the town centre strong enough to take the weight of the Empire State Building? Was the Golden Gate Bridge long enough to span the lake, a girdle around the embedded giant’s waist?
Having left the mosque on his way to The Vision, Jugnu had to walk past Chanda’s family’s shop. Chanda and Jugnu had returned to England earlier than planned, but their killers knew that they were back because the taxi driver who had driven them home from the train station last night had casually mentioned the fact over his vehicle’s communications radio. Chanda’s brothers happened to be at the taxi firm in the town centre and were told the news. The police would never find out who it was that had driven the couple home from the station. The taxi place was staffed mainly by illegal immigrants who were either too afraid to come forward with leads—because the police would surely detain and deport them—or they had moved on to another job or another town by the time the police came to make enquiries.
Chanda’s elder brother, Barra, he who was born holding in his hand a piece of clotted blood, was already awake because when the cleric had collapsed at the mosque earlier, someone had run to the shop and rapped on the door to get a packet each of star anise and cinnamon to make a fortifying brew for the patient. Through the glass of the window, Barra saw Jugnu go by in the half dark.
During the police questioning soon after the couple’s disappearance, the two brothers would declare that they knew absolutely nothing of Chanda and Jugnu’s arrival back in England. But during their talks—part boasts, part confessions—to family members and close friends back in Pakistan, they would admit that Barra had seen Jugnu go past the shop during that early hour.
Jugnu, being watched by Barra from the window, stopped when he noticed the time on the clock-tower that stood in one corner of the Mount Pleasant primary-school playground. It was a quarter to five— fifty-five minutes to sunrise. His wristwatch showed Pakistani time and he took a few seconds to wind the hands back. Barra went into the room of his younger brother—Chotta—in order to wake him. “You preferred being murderers to being the brothers of a sister who was living in sin?” one of the people they would tell the truth to, over there in Pakistan, would ask them. “Yes,” they would say, “because it was we who made the choice to be murderers. We are men but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by not paying attention to our wishes.”
