Maps for Lost Lovers, page 5
It was high summer, and on the day of the dinner Kaukab worked in the kitchen all morning. She went to sit out in the sun for a few minutes as the afternoon wore on, all the summer foliage giving a sea-tinge to the light in Dasht-e-Tanhaii as though a green scarf had been draped over the sun. That was when Charag came home on an unexpected visit: Charag—the son whom she had sent away to university in London to get an education—had come to inform her that he had a girlfriend who was not only white but also pregnant. The news stunned and repulsed Kaukab, and she held Jugnu responsible for her misfortune. Once, on seeing a diagram of a moth’s innards in one of Jugnu’s magazines, Kaukab had wondered how there could be room in so small a creature to house so many mechanisms, and that summer seven years ago, her own despair was immense although she was tiny: she accused Jugnu of leading her children astray. After Jugnu, her mind, flooded with bitterness and sorrow, had turned on Shamas because Shamas himself had confused the children with his Godless ideas, undermining her authority and devaluing her behaviour as though it was just neurotic and foolish—Jugnu only finished the job Shamas started years ago.
And then she held her own father responsible for having chosen an irreligious husband for her, the father whose impeccable judgement—she had said at other times—could be counted on to remain unclouded during all circumstances, uncowed even by the most monumental of world events so that he had sent a nine-page telegram to Ayatollah Khomeini following the Iranian Revolution to ask him to reconsider his zeal, quoting from the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, against his excesses.
She accused her father of not checking what kind of people he was handing over his daughter to: surely, the clues were everywhere if he had cared to look. Just after the engagement, Shamas’s mother had wondered whether Kaukab would like to rub bird shit into her face, claiming it would enhance her complexion, and she sent her a cage of Japanese nightingales which Kaukab kept just for their song!
Charag, after giving her the devastating news, stayed for less than an hour, leaving her alone with her grief and tears.
She wept as she prepared the food in honour of Jugnu’s white woman—a feast celebrating the fact that they were sinners! The two guests would come after eight, around the same time as Shamas, who had a Communist Party meeting that night; and since Ujala was staying with a friend, Kaukab was alone in the house, alone in the house just as she was alone in the world, alone to let out a noisy sob whenever she felt the need, and as though in harmony with her own state the sky darkened around six and it began to rain noisily. It was just after seven that she happened to see herself in the mirror: the whites of her eyes were veined with blood, her face was red, her eyelids were swollen, and her hair was in disarray (she had beaten her head with her hands several times in a fit of grief ten minutes ago).
She did not have the energy to clean herself up—let Shamas come home and see what he and his family and his children had done to her— but she washed her face nevertheless and oiled and combed her hair because the white woman was coming.
She sprayed perfume into her armpits, and rubbed moisturiser into her flaky grey elbows. She had never met a white person at such an intimate level as she would tonight, and for several days now she had been wondering which of her shalwar-kameezs she should wear, settling on the blue one that had a print of white apple blossoms. She clicked open the lid of the face-powder container for the first time in ten years and the smell the cracked pieces of powder gave off took her back to her younger days. Delicately, she patted the fawn-coloured powder over the eyelids, to hide the dark circles and the wrinkles, to bring out the eyes that had sunk into her skull over the years. Allah, the pores on either side of her nose were deep enough to lose coins in. She plucked hairs out of her eyebrows. (Must remember to take out exactly the same number from the other brow.) She wondered which earrings she should wear as she painted her mouth with the pale reddish-brown lipstick. Too much? She wiped it off and started again, and wondered whether she should try eyeliner and just the smallest hint of mascara, wishing her daughter was still living at home to provide guidance on such matters. She struggled hard not to cry at that but failed; in the end, however, she had to restrain herself because she had also to practise her English in the mirror. And it too was hopeless: what was a person to do when even things in England spoke a different language than the one they did back in Pakistan? In England the heart said “boom boom” instead of dhak dhak; a gun said “bang!” instead of thah!; things fell with a “thud,” not a dharam; small bells said “jingle” instead of chaanchaan;the trains said “choo choo” instead of chuk chuk . . . The eyebrows were still a little unruly, she decided towards the end, and rummaged in the cupboard where Ujala kept his things: she managed to locate the jar of hair gel and smoothed a little of it on each brow to tame the hairs. Shouldn’t she take some of the powder off her face: the layers looked so thick she could’ve scratched a message on her forehead with a nail. After she was ready, at last, there was just enough time to attend to the few last details of the meal: she went into the back garden with her sewing scissors to clip leaves of coriander to sprinkle over the mung dahl. And that was when a ten-year-old girl from the neighbourhood saw her from the other side of the lane, crossed over, looked at her contemplatively for a few seconds, and then said quietly in the flat tones of one making an innocent observation:
“But surely, auntie-ji, you look like a eunuch.”
Shooing the child away, who must have seen eunuchs dancing at a wedding during a visit to Pakistan or India, Kaukab rushed indoors burning with shame and humiliation, wondering whether she hadn’t in fact got carried away with the cosmetics, and she pleaded with Allah for help because now there was no time for her to correct her appearance: the doorbell rang to announce the arrival of Jugnu and the white woman, she who no doubt had a perfectly made-up face framed by perfectly arranged hair. She stood frozen in the middle of the room and heard the key slide into the lock of the front door: Shamas must be with Jugnu and his guest.
“My Allah, come to my help! Save the honour of your servant, O Parvardigar,” she mouthed to herself because the door was about to open any second and disgrace her. But had she forgotten that the Almighty had nothing but compassion for His creatures? The moment the front door opened, the electricity in the entire street happened to fail and—praise be to Allah—the house plunged into darkness. Kaukab managed to move and clambered upstairs to wash her face while Shamas brought in Jugnu and the white woman.
Most of the meal was taken by candlelight, the wet prints the white woman’s high-heeled shoes had made on the linoleum of the kitchen floor shining like exclamation marks in the yellow light. The kitchen table was carried into the pink room next door and there was a vase of flowers at its centre. The spoons had been polished and the meal was among the best Kaukab had cooked. The white woman wore a lilac blouse of shimmering silk that Kaukab couldn’t resist the urge to finger just for the pleasure of it—it looked like a fabric known in Pakistan as Aab-e-Ravan, the Flowing Water—but despite all that the evening was not a success: what happened during the get-together would eventually lead to the end of Jugnu and the white woman’s relationship.
Trying to keep Charag’s revelations of the afternoon out of her mind, and trying not to dwell on the fact that the white woman’s legs were bare below her knee-length skirt (made, incidentally, of a checked fabric that reminded Kaukab of Bulbul Chasm, the Eye of the Songbird), Kaukab busied herself with the food and was reluctant to sit at the table with the other three, saying she must bake the chappatis freshly, that the aloo bhurta had to be turka’d moments before it was served, that the sweet zarda rice had to be got going so that they would be ready just in time for the end of the dinner. The candle flames corrugated each time she arrived in the room with another tray, another bowl, another tureen. The white woman praised Kaukab’s skill as a cook whenever she took a mouthful of something new on the table, the candlelight throwing dark shadows under her breasts, emphasizing them obscenely. Kaukab’s stomach twisted into a knot when Jugnu shamelessly planted a small kiss on the woman’s cheek in passing, and she gritted her teeth at Shamas’s expansive behaviour towards the white woman and towards her own self: “Come sit with us, Kaukab, and talk. Let’s prove to our guest that Pakistanis are the most talkative people on earth. My goodness, we use seven syllables just to say hello: Assalamaulaikum.”
Kaukab was glad Ujala was out of the house: she wouldn’t have wanted him to think there was anything normal about a Pakistani man bringing home a white woman to meet his family.
And that was when she panicked. Ujala! She had already lost one son to a white girl; wouldn’t Jugnu marrying this white woman make it possible for Ujala to marry white one day too? Outside the rain intensified, and she shook with fear as she heard the sounds of conversation from the table, the clinking of glasses, the cutlery on the plates: it sounded like a normal family gathering, yes, but she herself—and everything she stood for—was excluded from it. They were talking in English and too fast for her to keep up. She tried to follow the conversation and her fear began to turn to anger. “I was born into a Muslim household, but I object to the idea that that automatically makes me a Muslim,” Jugnu said. “The fact of the matter is that had I lived at the time of Muhammad, and he came to me with his heavenly message, I would have walked away . . .” Stunned, Kaukab knew that it was the white woman’s presence that was really responsible for this utterance of Jugnu (she who herself didn’t add anything disrespectful, just listened intently): he felt emboldened to say such a thing in her company—he may have thought these things before, but the white person enabled him to say them out loud. And sure enough, soon Shamas too was dancing in that direction:
While Kaukab was in the kitchen—adding to the refilled salad bowl the radishes she’d carved into intricate twenty-petalled roses with the tip of a knife—Shamas laughed above the conversation in the pink room and, raising his voice, addressed her in Punjabi: “Kaukab, you should really come and talk to our guest: she’s just said something which I have often heard you say, ‘But, surely, the rational explanations of how the universe began are just as shaky. Every day the scientists tell us that their long-held theory about this or that matter has proved to be inaccurate.’ ” Yes, Kaukab had indeed made this observation when defending religion, and now she tried to follow Shamas’s words as he switched to English and said to the white woman, “I am still inclined to believe the scientists, because, unlike the prophets, they readily admit that they are working towards an answer, they don’t have the final and absolute answer.” Kaukab had still not recovered from this when Jugnu added (to Shamas, in Punjabi, proof yet again that the white woman’s presence was just a catalyst for the two brothers to air their blasphemies):
“And anyway, the same procedures and the same intellectual and analytical rigour that went on to produce the car we’ve driven in this evening, the telephone we talk on, the planes we fly in, the electricity we use, are the ones that are being used to probe the universe. I trust what science says about the universe because I can see the result of scientific methods all around me. I cannot be expected to believe what an illiterate merchant-turned-opportunistic-preacher—for he was no systematic theologian— in the seventh-century Arabian desert had to say about the origin of life.”
It took Kaukab several minutes to understand what she had just heard, and then she had to steady herself against a wall because she realized that Muhammad, peace be upon him, peace be upon him, was being referred to here.
Praising things like electricity: the very thing that’s failed this evening, she had fumed inwardly, making you all sit in the darkness!
Soon her children would be further encouraged towards Godlessness.
What would she tell her father-ji? She remembered how horrified her entire family had been when her brother had wanted to marry a Sikh woman back in the 1950s, despite the fact that the Sikhs were a people of the Subcontinent, a people whose habits, language, skin colour and culture were somewhat familiar. Who was this white woman? How clean was she, for instance: did she know that a person must bathe after sexual intercourse, or remain polluted, contaminating everything one came into contact with? She had an image of Jugnu and the woman stopping by at the house next door to fornicate before coming around to dinner here: and she felt nausea. And all this had been going on with her own son too, Charag. Kaukab had touched the white woman and would have to bathe and change her clothes to be able to say her next prayers. She refilled the bowl of raita and took it to the table in the pink room, and she had just placed it next to the vase of roses when the electricity returned. The abrupt brilliance so surprised Shamas that he let drop the bottle of wine he had been holding: the liquid splashed onto the carpet and Kaukab stepped back to avoid being touched by the repulsive stuff.
So they had been drinking wine in the darkness. Kaukab had a sudden illumination: she was hoping to get some sympathy later that evening from Jugnu and Shamas, concerning Charag’s news, but now suddenly she saw how mad that hope was—they wouldn’t see it as debauchery. She was the only one who thought there was anything wrong with the preg nancy, and for that they would silently accuse her of being inhuman, moribund, lifeless. It wouldn’t surprise her if they weren’t all secretly longing for her to die so they could start to “enjoy” their lives.
The bottle rolled across the floor and came to a stop. There was silence and then Jugnu stood up and said, “Salt is what you need for a red wine stain—isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know, never having allowed that abominable thing into my house,” Kaukab had said, trying to control her rage and disgust. “What else have you learnt from her and her people,” she wanted to ask him, “what else do you plan to pass on to my children?”
Jugnu remained where he was but Shamas got up to retrieve the bottle, despite Kaukab glaring at him. The white woman leaned over and tried to place a hand on Kaukab’s arm, but she shrank away: “Don’t touch me, please. May Allah forgive me, but I don’t know where you’ve been.” She remained standing where she was, now about to break down and cry, now ready to sweep everything from the table onto the floor and begin shouting, but had then turned around to go back into the kitchen: “I’ll get the dahl. I completely forgot to serve it.” She lifted the lid off the dahl and tested a grain of it between her fingers to see that it had cooked to perfection; it had, and so she picked up the ladle and looked for something to serve the dahl in.
Shamas came and stood behind her. “I thought they would enjoy wine with dinner.”
Aha! Kaukab nodded. “Enjoy”— just another word for the works of Satan the Stoned-One!
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You yourself seem to be enjoying yourself a good deal too this evening,” Kaukab said, doling out the dahl, her back towards Shamas. “Conversing away, using big words to show off to the white woman.”
“Showing off? How old do you think I am?” He had sighed, and on hearing Kaukab’s sobs had approached her. “What do you want me to say to you?”
“Nothing. I want you to listen to me.”
“I will. Why won’t you let me help you with the food? Go and sit down.” And when she pushed him away he added: “Please don’t throw a tantrum.”
“Who is the one treating the other as a child now? I am not throwing a tantrum: I am angry. Take me seriously.”
“What are you doing? For God’s sake!”
Kaukab had arranged four shoes on a tray and was pouring dahl into them as though they were plates.
Shamas was unable to stop her as she slipped from his repulsive wine-contaminated grasp and carried the tray into the pink room and placed it on the table before Jugnu and his white woman with a loud bang— dharam!
Kaukab rings Ujala’s number and stays on the line until the answering machine has played the two sentences spoken by him, and then she quickly replaces the receiver. Just then the doorbell rings.
“Jugnu?” Kaukab whispers to herself and then rushes across the room on legs trembling with excitement to let him in. Ujala? Charag and his littleson? Mah-Jabin?, but it’s a neighbourhood woman, the matchmaker, come to ask Kaukab if she has a veil that would go with the mustard-coloured shalwar-kameez she’s brought with her.
“I’ll need to borrow it just for one day, Kaukab. Moths chewed out holes the size of digestive biscuits from my own mustard-coloured veil and I haven’t been able to find the replacement of the exact shade,” she explains.
“I think I do have a veil of that colour upstairs. Its edges are crocheted, though—that won’t be a problem, will it? A row of little five-petalled flowers. Quite discreet.”
Standing at the bottom of the stairs, the matchmaker talks while Kaukab goes up to her bedroom, taking the mustard kameez with her. Of course the woman wants to talk about the arrest of Chanda’s shopkeeper brothers.
From the stairs, Kaukab says, “They are saying, sister-ji, that the police got the breakthrough completely by chance. They had spent hundreds of hours investigating the case but the main clue came not in England, but in the Pakistani village where Chanda’s parents are from. A white Detective Sergeant from here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii had flown to that village to make enquiries into a suspected fraud case—a case totally unrelated to the lovers’ alleged murder, I say ‘alleged’ because I don’t believe Jugnu and Chanda are dead—and there he happened to hear a chance remark: apparently Chanda’s brothers had confessed everything to their relatives in the village. The Detective Sergeant flew to England and informed his colleagues who then went to Pakistan to collect witnesses. Sister-ji, the white police are interested in us Pakistanis only when there is a chance to prove that we are savages who slaughter our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters.”
The matchmaker narrows her eyes: “Imagine, they flew all the way to Pakistan just to be able to brand us Pakistanis murderers, at £465 a ticket, £510 if they minded the overnight stop at Qatar and went direct.”
