Maps for Lost Lovers, page 43
After the British police had collected the testimonies of the people in Sohni Dharti, they would check to see if any telephone calls had been made to Jugnu’s house at that particular hour on that particular date. They would learn that the call was from Chanda’s husband. Drunk in the middle of the night, he had decided to use the number Kaukab had given him: “I wanted to tell her that I wanted her back. But no one answered, and I woke up with the receiver in my hand, the mouthpiece full of bubbles from my saliva, as though someone was trying to shout through water on the other end.”
“It was doubly fortunate that we went in because we saw something else,” Chotta would say in Pakistan. “When wiping a shelf with a rag, to get rid of any fingerprints on the wood shortly before we carried Chanda’s body out, I had let fall all the dust of the shelf onto the small table stand ing below it. The gun was on that table. And I picked it up just before we left the house with her body. On this return visit to the house, I saw that there was a perfect silhouette of the gun on the table. The fine waft of dust from the shelf had fallen onto the weapon and the surface surrounding it. It was like a stencil.”
“And as for peacocks that burst out when the police forced their way in the following week,” Barra would say, “we have no idea how and when they got into the house.”
The birds urinated on the dinner plate, picked pinned butterflies off the frames and ate them, spitting out the pins everywhere the way humans spit out fish-bones, and the female laid an egg in an open suitcase. The males had got into a fight, over food, over the female, ripping each other with their snake-killing claws and beaks, and the liquids seeping from their wounds and gashes would mean that the blood samples found on the floor would never prove to be conclusively human, conclusively Jugnu’s.
The house itself—the house of Sin, the house of Death, the house of Love—went through a destiny of its own, shut up, abandoned to dust and insects. The police dug up the back garden.
A spider’s web—sagging under the weight of a hundred dewdrops, no two the same size—had hung between two apple trees in the garden, and the late morning sunlight was a deep translucent yellow—as though the sky was being seen through a bar of Pears soap the day Chanda came to the house for the very first time. It was March. The sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five-hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm, to return to their summer plumage of three-thousand feathers each. The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers (the blossom would be out in May, and Chanda would be dead by the time those very flowers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would continue to lie in a circle of bright red dots under each tree until the Siberian snows of this year’s January).
Her veil caught on a branch (as though she were being clairvoyantly prevented by the tree from advancing any further, as though the crop of fruit last year was not apples but crystal balls full of blood, predicting red rage and red death), but she freed herself and moved towards the door.
On her upper lip there was a mole the size of a kiwi seed; and her eyes always changed colour in keeping with the seasons: in spring they were the bright green of budding leaves, but in summer they were darker, the colour of mature foliage, and while they were a pale yellow-brown at the beginning of autumn when the leaves were beginning to turn, with hints of pinks and reds here and there, they became and stayed wholly brown for the rest of autumn and winter, the cycle beginning again the following spring.
She knocked several times on the door but there was no sign of life inside the house; she hesitated and then went in.
Inside, the walls were decorated with pinned butterflies in glass frames that appeared to be strays from Paradise. The girl—carrying the little wooden stars—didn’t yet know that some of the butterflies she was looking at had stood at the centre of man’s interest since their discovery, the glinting creatures named after the heroes and heroines of Greek mythology and the queens of the great maritime powers, that at one time some of the rare specimens had been paid for with gold and others used as royal gifts. She moved around the room, slowly, and then came to a standstill. There were ten dead butterflies on the sky-blue table before her. They were large and belonged to the same species, the bodies as long as match-sticks, the wings breathtakingly lovely to her, and she—the girl dressed in straw-yellow—lowered her head to examine them. The charcoal-black forewings were rounded ovals while the outline of each hind wing was tear-shaped and had three thin spurs protruding from the base; the forewings were marked with white bars, and each hind wing—although the same colour and pattern as the forewings on the whole—had a circle the size of a ten-pence piece on it, divided into three vivid bands, one berry red, the middle one blue, and the lowest yellow, a thin streak from this yellow band emerging and flowing deep into each of the three spurs.
She contemplated them with a serious and absorbed expression as though about to whisper a magical formula to reverse death. And, inexplicably, as she looked at the ten luxuriant insects, she began to think of how her mother, after she had washed her hair, liked to prepare a brazier of smouldering incense, cover it with a small upturned basket and then lie down for half an hour with her head resting on its base, her eyes closed in lassitude, her long hair collected about the sloping sides of the basket, the warm fragrant smoke escaping through the weave to simultaneously perfume and dry the locks, a few stray wisps of the smoke climbing onto her forehead and dancing there as though, below, her brain and thoughts were on fire.
Wondering what had triggered the memories concerning her mother’s hair, the girl realized that the wings of the dead butterflies issued a fine odour, the scent of garments stored in jasmine and sandal, of dark hair dried in incense and gentle musk.
The girl’s face hung above the ten butterflies and the sky-blue rectangle of the table’s surface, and she wondered where Jugnu was. She was eight when Jugnu arrived from America—twenty-three years younger than him—and had grown up thinking of him as an uncle like almost every other child in the neighbourhood. She had sometimes heard people say that his was an unconventional family. Once a woman said it wouldn’t surprise her if she was told that some member of this family, after he had died and been made ready for burial, had suddenly sat upright to tear the shroud away from him, not wishing to be bound by any tradition or custom even then. He loved butterflies and the butterflies loved him equally in return, gathering around him as though around a rose, and, said a number of children, although they were his passion, whenever their fluttering hampered his daily routines he collected them all in the palm of his hand and swallowed them, but he soon began to miss them and, growing sad, brought them out of his mouth one by one to fly about him once again.
Just before Chanda entered the back garden, Jugnu had been studying the charcoal-black butterflies that lay on the table. Bhutanitis lidderdalii. Bhutan Glory. A relative of the Festoon butterflies, the species was extremely precious and listed in the Red Data Book: Threatened Swallowtail Butterflies of the World. It lived in the eastern part of the Himalayas, in Bhutan and adjoining Assam, and also in one locality in Burma, its natural habitat being mountains and mountain valleys where tall trees grew. They liked to flutter about in the high crowns and laid their eggs on poisonous lianas. The Bhutan Glories had a fragrance which even lingered for some time after they died, and Jugnu had dipped these ten live specimens in dry ice to induce deep sleep in order to study the scent-related mechanisms. Having finished, he had put away his microscope and the notebooks, leaving the butterflies to revive in their own time, and had gone upstairs.
While he was up there, the heat from Chanda’s face had roused the Bhutan Glories.
Failing to find her full voice, she let out a small startled cry when a “dead” Bhutan Glory gave a rustling spasm, flapped its white-striped wings and—all compressed power—lifted itself from the surface of the blue table to—extraordinarily, without losing any of its elegance, in spite of the recent somnolent state—begin dipping and swilling about through the interior, and it was followed immediately by another and then one by one the rest as though they were all threaded at regular intervals onto an invisible string, were the bowed tail of an unseen kite that swayed and undulated.
The bag of star anise fell from her hand and the spice—an ingredient for the food of some of Jugnu’s butterflies, and for which he had telephoned the shop earlier, saying they were to send it to his house if someone was coming this way—scattered on the floor.
“I didn’t know they were alive, that I hadn’t just dragged them out of their graves,” she explained to Jugnu as he helped her gather the wooden stars a few minutes later, all ten of the Glories scraping their wings against walls, probing the objects in the room and the ceiling above them, slowly whisking a million molecules of perfume into the air.
Beginning in about a month, they—Chanda and Jugnu—would lie in the various rooms of this house on secret trysts, the windows curtained and the clocks daringly put away the way they are in casinos—but they wouldn’t know in enough time that they were gambling with their lives.
They contrived to meet for sensual dalliance in other places too, in the age-old manner of lovers, Jugnu telling her about Keshav Das, the court poet of Rajah Madhkar Shah of Orchcha, who wrote in the sixteenth century of how every day in summer the cowherds gathered on the banks of the Jamna, the girls on one side, Krishna and the crowd of boys on the opposite side: the two groups dived into the water and after a while emerged once again on their own side of the river, each lover having met and entwined with the beloved under the surface, their longing satisfied for now, the disapproving world unaware that any contact had taken place.
GHOSTS
Carrying the jar of coins, Shamas nears the lake. The sand lines on the shore emit a pale brightness like the dry smears of grainy starch left on the knife that has been used to cut potatoes. Is it here that the ghosts of Chanda and Jugnu are said to roam? The lake reeks of minerals, the deep centre of the mass rising in response to the tug of the moon, making a sudden and momentary hill of water that causes the leaves floating on the surface to roll down towards the margins, the leaves that would stick coldly to the bodies of children whenever they braved the chill and went swimming in early autumn, marking them like fawns, and which they would pluck off each other when they emerged onto the land.
Standing here at the edge of the lake in night darkness with the long jar of coins that shine in the moon, he could be a figure out of a fairytale published in The First Children on the Moon—perhaps a fisherman who is releasing back into the water a fish that is in reality a marine princess whose grateful father would then give him a boon, bestow on him the ability to bypass reality. He walks along the water’s rim until he comes to a point where the water is deep and lowers the jar into the lake. It sinks, sending up a noise of bubbles. The water is full of large stones here—each the size a horse’s egg would be if horses could lay eggs (as the child Ujala had once described something). He turns back, crossing leapingly the little wet patches of the sand as though jumping from one square of a hopscotch grid chalked on a pavement to the next. While the moon dances on the waves, he goes past the Safeena and takes a mouthful of whisky at the xylophone jetty where lovers have carved English, Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu initials into the wood. When Kaukab was screaming at him earlier tonight he had thought, for one terrible moment, that, in addition to everything else, she had somehow found out about Suraya: rumours do begin and widen their rings with time. He sets off again, under the tall pines that the children are fond of climbing, Charag once saying that when he was up there he felt like a bird clinging to a giraffe’s neck. The night-air is frozen solid by now but, as he walks, the heat of his blood melts a burrow for him to slip through, the lake continuing to dream audibly in the darkness. He stops where the path forks and, instead of beginning the journey that would take him back home, he takes the path that leads to the cemetery, the narrow passage that is lined in summer with thimble-shaped foxgloves attracting gauzy Peacock butterflies. Could Suraya be visiting her mother’s resting-place in the darkness— avoiding him? Climbing a hawthorn-planted slope that is increasingly steep under his feet, he ends up suddenly lost in the fringe of bracken whose tips curve like violin necks, not knowing when he had left the path that in late summer is covered with the red paste of dropped hawthorn berries. He is very high up and can look down on a stretch of the lake shore that would take five minutes to walk along. He is lost, alone here with his mind. Every now and then he steps into a stream, one of the many that go towards the lake and the paths of which the children know the way they know the lines on the palms of their hands.
He is lost. His hands are trembling with the cold and as he puts them into his pockets he discovers a matchbox in one of them. Charag had put the coat on to go outside into the cold for a smoke. He takes the matchbox from his pocket but there isn’t any strength in the fingers for a forceful-enough strike: he just sheds a little three-dimensional constellation of orange sparks at each attempt. He achieves a flame successfully with a deafening hiss the sixth or seventh time, and raises the light in the air to see where he is. The oval flame colours the smoke that feathers out of its circle of light. Further match-heads unfurl a path of light along the soaked frost-singed grass for him. He is shivering. He decides not to screw the lid back onto the bottle after he’s taken a mouthful. It’s hard to believe even in the existence of the sun at an hour like this.
He stops: there, ahead of him, is movement in the darkness.
He stands still—there is a throb of expectancy in the air, a slight quiver. He walks towards where the movement had been and the boy turns when he hears him approach. It’s the Hindu boy whose lover was beaten to death whilst she was being cleansed of the djinns. The whites of his eyes are shining in the moonlight: he looks away in the direction he had been earlier, enraptured by something.
Shamas stops where he is, not wishing to frighten him by moving towards him.
“Can you see her, uncle-ji? She’s there, look.”
“What are you doing out here at this hour?”
He points into the trees. “Can you see her ghost? I am with her too. Both of us there.”
There is of course nothing there. The boy has become unhinged. “Ghosts? People said it was my brother Jugnu and his girlfriend Chanda. Jugnu’s hands glowing as always. Chanda’s stomach glowing brightly because of the baby she’s carrying. Three ghosts. Two adults and an unborn baby.”
The boy shakes his head. “I heard about that. But it’s not them. It’s me and her: her stomach glows because that’s where on her dead body my letter was placed, the letter I wrote to her on the day of the funeral. And my hands glow because of the orchids I am carrying for her.”
The boy is hallucinating perhaps, or sleepwalking. “You should go back home, put. It’s cold.”
“I know you don’t believe me, uncle-ji. But it is the two of us, over there.” He is far away, staring blankly.
Shamas moves closer and manoeuvres his face in front of the boy’s face until their eyes finally engage: “You are not dead, you are alive—standing beside me. Come with me, I’ll walk you home. Remind me where you live?”
The boy looks around to find his bearings, and then sets off, Shamas accompanying him in silence, knowing he mustn’t leave him.
They emerge onto a lakeside road, the boy having led him out of the forest he had got lost in. The boy motions with a hand towards a house on the other side of the road: “She was married to the man in that house. He is obsessed with the idea of having a son but so far none of his wives have given him a boy.”
It’s beginning to snow.
“He married again not long ago.”
Shamas looks up at the house. And there standing in the upstairs window is Suraya.
She withdraws as soon as their eyes meet but he is sure it’s her, her eyes emitting a light stronger than the moonlight, than the falling snow. Tears? She was wearing her yellow jacket. Paisleys. The paisleys that Parvati’s footsteps formed when she hurried away from Shiva after a quarrel.
Wasn’t there a curve to her belly—or is he mistaken?
He turns but the boy has disappeared from his side.
Shamas looks at the number of the house and, walking away, reads the name of the road from the sign at the corner. “Neela Pathar” Road. The snowflakes are settling on him, a thick crust of them growing on his shoulders. Does Suraya know that the man she has married has no intention of divorcing her soon, that he wants to see if she can give him a son first? Perhaps she didn’t tell him why she wanted to marry him beforehand, thinking he would refuse to marry her under those conditions. She herself has no intention of bearing a child for him—she just wants him to divorce her so that she can marry her original husband again, to be with her son again. But the man has married her solely because he wants her to have a child. He must be forcing himself on her every night, taking her violently. What is she going through?
He hears footsteps behind him and, without stopping or glancing back, he knows that Suraya is following him through the falling snow. He should continue, continue, away from this road where someone who knows her might see them talking. He takes the turning and finds himself walking towards the lake, where the giant lies buried below the water, trapped but still alive. He looks back but she is not there—she has not been keeping pace with him. But he continues because she’ll know where to find him. At the Safeena. Their Safeena. Their Scandal Point. He’ll wait for her there. There is so much he has to tell her. The third time they met they had talked about the fact that the people from the Subcontinent love wordplay, take great delight in language. And a few hours ago he had had cause to remember that: when his grandson—who is the same age as her son—wanted a drink and asked what choice was available, he had been told there was Vimto, but he had pulled a face and said, “Vomit!” Has she been following the details of the murder trial? Did she hear the rumour that Chanda’s parents had paid a young man to go to the police and say that he and his girlfriend had bought Chanda and Jugnu’s passports from them in Pakistan and had entered Britain with them? But that he had taken the money and disappeared, never arriving at the police station? And now there is another rumour that yesterday Chanda’s parents received a package in the post containing the money they had paid him: there was a note saying he was sorry not to have found the courage to do what they had asked but he didn’t want to keep their money.
