Maps for lost lovers, p.8
Maps for Lost Lovers, page 8
A marriage to a Pakistani girl was now an impossibility—who would want a neutered husband for their daughter?—and Kaukab was to be denied the ally the Pakistani daughter-in-law would have proved to be.
“How could you have made such a big decision without first consulting me and your father?”
“What?”
“If you don’t want any more children, then why couldn’t you have been just careful, instead of doing something as drastic as that?” She couldn’t believe she was having to conduct this conversation with her son.
“You can never be sure. That first time was an accident.”
“Really? It wasn’t planned? I have sometimes wondered whether that white girl hadn’t trapped you by deliberately getting pregnant.”
“I am sorry, but I can’t listen to any more of this.”
Charag went back, leaving her alone with the four photographs and her thoughts. She kept having the same dream every night: she was hanging from a noose and also standing beside the scaffold. “I can’t help wondering it’s all my fault,” said the corpse. “Stop wondering,” said the executioner-self. But during the waking hours, as usual, she could find no one other than the old culprits for this new disaster that had befallen her. Shamas. Jugnu. England. The white race. The vasectomy was a Christian conspiracy to stop the number of Muslims from increasing. Her parents were responsible for marrying her to an infidel. Her in-laws were Godless. Afflicted with loneliness and maddening fury, she finally accused Shamas of not being a Muslim at all, the son of a Hindu, whose filthy infidel’s corpse was spat out repeatedly by the earth no matter how deep they buried it the next day—a phenomenon which she had up until then ascribed to the angel of death regretting his action in having removed that most-virtuous and -loving man from the world, a man whom she loved as much as her own father.
Chanda and Jugnu were staying in Shamas’s parents’ olive-green house—and were pretending to be just friends during their stay there; and it was to that olive-green house that Kaukab made a telephone call after Charag’s departure: she could talk to the people in the house and tell them they had two sinners under their roof.
She hasn’t revealed this fact to anyone, not even Shamas.
Her telephone call was probably why the pair had returned to England earlier than expected: they had been asked to leave. They came back to England and . . . disappeared.
Kaukab’s anger and distress were beginning to subside somewhat as the time drew closer for the couple’s expected return. But the day of the expected arrival passed. And then another, and another . . . When the police eventually forced their way into the house, the passports revealed that the couple had come back to England thirteen days earlier. A peacock and a peahen burst out of a room and escaped to the freedom of the street—this would eventually lead to the talk that Chanda and Jugnu had been transformed into a pair of peacocks. The corpse of another peacock was found in one of the downstairs rooms, the injuries revealing that it had been pecked to death by the other two. A dozen-strong flock of peacocks had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight or so previously: they had escaped from the menagerie of a stately home on the other side of the lake, and they would be rounded up eventually—the foliage falling from the trees in the coming months of autumn meaning that they would have no groves or clusters of bushes to hide in. For the time being, however, no one could tell where they were from. They roamed the streets, scratched the paintwork of the cars and attacked the cats and sparrows. How three members of the flock had managed to enter Jugnu’s house and how long they had been in there could not be determined. There were sweeps on the dust on the floors, made by the males’ tail-feathers. On a white plate on the dinner table there was a puddle of urine the pale-green colour of gripe water. The hen had laid an egg in one of the open suitcases that lay on the bed upstairs.
Jugnu had put up a framed photograph of a peacock on one wall and for a moment it was as though the live peacock had left its reflection in a mirror in the house.
She finishes her tea and says, “I am soaking some rice for you to eat with the masar this evening. I’ll have to make chappatis for myself because there is a little dough left over from Friday and it’ll spoil if not used today.”
“Won’t it keep until tomorrow? The weather is cold enough,” Shamas says quietly; it could almost be a thought being passed into her head from his.
“Perhaps you should have chappatis also. You had rice last night too and it’s bad for the bones two days in a row, especially in this cold country.” She pauses, waiting for him to dreamily say that now that he has reached the year of his retirement they would soon move back to the hot climate of Sohni Dharti, as they had planned decades ago. They have discussed the matter several times over the past few months and each time she has told him he would have to leave without her—she would remain in hated England because her children are here.
“If only Jugnu was here, there would be no leftovers—” She stops, having got carried away with her thoughts, and looks at Shamas, but he doesn’t react. Quietly she turns to the work at hand, and sighs:
Dear Allah, if only things had gone another way. Only the other day the matchmaker was talking about one of the young women she had suggested for Jugnu all those years ago, someone called Suraya, who has now been divorced by her drunk husband and is now looking for someone to marry temporarily. Kaukab shakes her head: she doesn’t remember who that woman was, but if only Jugnu had married her the poor woman wouldn’t be in this predicament, and he himself wouldn’t now be missing. Instead, he took up with white women. Kaukab knew that the few nights a week that he spent away from home were spent in the arms of one of his white girlfriends. Kaukab lived in fear of such contemptible and unforgivable behaviour rubbing off on her three children, but there was nothing she could do. He was discreet and she liked him for that—he was secretly colluding with her, preventing her children from seeing immoral conduct.
Years passed and then one day a little boy stopped her in the street and asked her whether it was true that Jugnu’s “place of urine” was also glow-in-the-dark like his hands. She puts the boy’s obscenity and impertinence down to the corrupting influence of Western society, but within hours she learned what some of the neighbourhood’s adults had known for about a week and its children for about a fortnight. A group of boys had peeped into the upstairs bedroom of Jugnu’s house—where the cage containing the female Great Peacock moth had swayed one night with the passionate wing beats of the male velvet clinging to the wires, the bedroom papered with twisted leaves and indigo berries. Those children had dimly seen the two secret lovers in bed, the light from his hands illuminating her skin.
And, just as the king of Samarkand had come upon his wife locked in the embrace of a kitchen boy and set into motion the Thousand and One Nights, what the five young boys espied through the window that afternoon—when they climbed up to the boughs of the purple beech to bring down a kite—became the starting point of another set of tales.
The children told them to each other, adding and subtracting this or that detail, and it eventually reached the adults’ realm. Kaukab was on her way into town when the boy had stopped her to ask about the light-giving properties of Jugnu’s manhood; coming back from the town centre the bus was crowded so she had to sit next to the white woman who had burnt her Muslim husband’s Koran, but when a few stops later a seat next to a Gujarati woman became vacant, she had moved. The Gujratan gave her the news that Chanda and Jugnu were lovers.
She waited for Jugnu to come home from work that night. “I may only be a woman and not as educated as you, but I won’t stand by and let you damage further that already-damaged girl. Have you considered the consequences for her when her family finds out about this? You men can do anything you want but it’s different for us women. Who will marry her again when people find out that she has been engaging in intercourse with men she’s not married to?”
Chanda moved in with Jugnu a few days after that.
Over the coming weeks Kaukab began to time her trips outdoors in order to avoid the girl, because that was what Chanda was, a girl. Instead of the drawstring that adults use, she used elastic in the waistband of her shalwar; Kaukab could see her clothes hanging out on the washing line between two of the five apple trees. She sensed the girl’s own reluctance to let her gaze meet hers.
And it was by that washing line that Kaukab, having crossed over into the adjoining garden, had eventually told the girl to move out of Jugnu’s house.
Chanda tried to pull her arm back but Kaukab tightened her hold: “If truly offered, repentance is honoured even on one’s deathbed and wipes out a lifetime’s worth of sins to deliver the sinner into Paradise along with those who led virtuous lives. Only on the day that the sun would rise out of the west, the Judgement Day, would the gates of forgiveness be barred shut.”
The girl freed her arm with a jerk, her green eyes igniting. “There is no alternative. He says he’ll marry me but I am not divorced and my husband cannot be located.” She flicked the dripping muhaish-work kameez back on the line—like flipping a giant page—and went back into the house, but not before stopping at the doorstep to say to Kaukab: “We love each other deeply and honestly.”
Kaukab had looked her directly in the eyes: “I care about what it is, yes, but also about what it looks like.”
“And I care only about what it is.”
It was Kaukab’s first and last conversation with Jugnu’s lover. His own visits to the house were already dwindling. It was a sin to offer food to a fornicator, and Kaukab—the daughter of a cleric, born and raised in the shadow of a minaret—stopped soaking that third glassful of rice and peeled two aubergines instead of three. And then on a July afternoon heady with the pine-soup heat of the lake, Jugnu and Chanda left for Pakistan for four weeks, and Kaukab busied herself with trying to arrange a marriage for Charag.
After the hopelessness and despair that resulted from the disclosure about the vasectomy had settled a little (she had startled herself by abusing her father-in-law, that loving and beloved man, he who was so good that when he visited a saint’s shrine the holy man’s hand was said to have emerged from the grave to shake hands with him) and, stunned and repentant at her thoughts, feeling Allah’s spit land on her soul because she was so evil-minded, feeling so small in her own eyes that she would have had to fight to subdue a beetle, she had told herself that she must try to accept the world’s realities; it was almost time for the couple’s expected return to England. By complete chance she ran into Chanda’s third husband in the street and told him he had to release her by divorcing her: “Immediately contact her parents to tell them that that is what you plan to do. Allah will never forgive you if you don’t. If not out of the fear of Allah, then do it out of gratitude towards the girl who made you a British citizen.”
Chanda and Jugnu could now get married!
She propped open the back door with the lobster buoy from Maine to keep an eye on the activity in Jugnu’s back garden: the front door of his house was always locked because The Darwin filled up his front garden. The boat’s actual price was £3,000 but he had bought it, a battered wreck, for £650 in 1985, and then spent the following few years renovating it with the help of the three children. It lived at the front like a huge clothes iron and so the back door was how everyone always entered the house.
As the days passed without the couple appearing, she telephoned Pakistan and was told that they had left a week earlier than planned. She asked a boy in the street to climb the purple beech in the back garden to look into the upstairs bedroom. She then dragged a ladder and put it to the upstairs windows at the front. Were they in England or still in Pakistan? Perhaps they had left the house in Sohni Dharti and gone butterfly collecting around Pakistan? The boy she had sent up the ladder shouted down that he could see open suitcases through one of the windows.
And then Kaukab suddenly knew what had happened: the couple had returned from Pakistan and gone straight to Chanda’s family’s shop to ask for their forgiveness. The decadent and corrupt West had made them forget piety and restraint, but the countless examples in Pakistan had brought home to them the importance and beauty of a life decorously lived according to His rules and injunctions, Pakistan being a country of the pious and the devout, a place where boundaries are respected. She rushed to the shop, absolutely sure that Chanda and Jugnu had gone there in repentance and—Oh, the miracles of Allah!—Chanda’s parents had in turn told them that the girl’s third husband had been on the telephone recently to say he was ready to divorce her. But when she got to the shop Chanda’s brother told her bluntly:
“Stop bothering us with all that, auntie-ji. As far as we are concerned, that little whore died the day she moved in with him.”
She returned, shocked by the vehemence. All the way there she had been thinking that the family would have forgiven the couple, that the parents would have remembered that everyone loved someone before marriage, love being a phenomenon as old and sacred as Adam and Eve. Women joked amongst themselves: “Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It’s for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past—‘you were born and then I married you’—but men are fools.”
The size of a matchbox, the old piece of cooked fish in the fridge is stiff with the cold and ought to be thrown away but Kaukab wraps it in a slice of bread and eats it, bending forward at the second bite because she has neglected to check for bones. It’s like a metal hook in her throat. She coughs and splutters, gasping for air, and manages to swallow, her throat raw. She takes a glass of water and sits down to steady her nerves, the danger passed, her mind returning to what she was thinking about earlier.
Love.
Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love. And, said the True Faith, it did not even begin with humans and animals: even the trees were in love. The very stones sang of love. Allah Himself was a being in love with His own creations.
In their youth Chanda’s parents themselves must have loved someone other than the person they were married to now, for Kaukab certainly had, she who was the daughter of a cleric . . .
But it seems that the danger from the fishbone has not passed: she leans forward and watches in horror as a small wrinkled kerchief of blood issues from her mouth and spreads on the table before her.
Before she has had time to realize what is happening, Shamas has called for a taxi to take her to the hospital, another small pool of blood on the stairs as she goes up to the bathroom, feeling faint.
Suspicious at first, she lets Shamas hold her hand in the taxi as she presses the bloody tissue-paper to her lips with the other.
She is examined and X-rayed and it turns out to be only a minor injury. “Nothing to worry about,” says the white doctor. “Date of birth?” he asks her, flipping through the forms before him.
Shamas looks at her to be reminded of it, and she whispers it. It hurts her to speak.
“On your birthday you should have had trouble with swallowing cake not fish,” the man laughs good-naturedly.
“It’s your birthday?” Shamas asks quietly.
“You didn’t know?” The doctor looks at him, amused.
“I didn’t remember myself,” she interjects. She scrutinizes Shamas’s face. Surely, he is more embarrassed about what the white man is thinking of him than upset that he’d forgotten the date, that she would be hurt by it. But then she drives the wicked thought away.
Back home through the snow-covered roads and streets, she wants him out of the house so she can ring Ujala’s voice, but he is reluctant to leave her and go to the bookshop as had been his plan. She pretends she is in less pain than she really is. There is also the fear in her that he might become amorous again, this time in repentance for having forgotten the day, as though she cares in the least about frivolities like birthdays.
The trip to the hospital had taken more than an hour but it had passed blankly for her: there’s nothing for her out there in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, to notice or be interested in. Everything is here in this house. Every beloved absence is present here.
An oasis—albeit a haunted one—in the middle of the Desert of Loneliness.
Out there, there was nothing but humiliation: she’s hot with shame at what the white doctor would now think of Pakistanis, of Muslims—they are like animals, not even remembering or celebrating birthdays. Dumb cattle.
She convinces Shamas to go at last and watches from the window as he walks away between the twenty maples, her husband—who, all those years ago, very nearly wasn’t her husband. Kaukab hadn’t seen a man up close without there being the gauze of her burqa between him and her since the age of twelve—she had been made to wear it because it was well known that certain men marked out beautiful girl-children and then waited for years for them to grow up. Her vigilant mother lifted the stamp of every letter that came into the house to make sure no clandestine message was being passed. And then on a certain monsoon Thursday when she was in her twenties, and sitting in the back room working on the articles that would one day soon become part of her dowry, for her parents had begun the preliminary negotiations for her marriage, she heard a short tap on the window. She put aside the fabric she was cutting up into a kameez and went to open it, expecting it to be the little boy she had seen through the same window wandering through the street earlier and sent to the shop at the corner with a swatch of fabric the size of a teabag to buy a spool of thread “matching exactly that colour, or I’ll send you back to exchange it. And show me your pocket so I can make sure there’s no hole in it, otherwise you’ll lose my money and come back with a long face.”
Only after he left had she regretted not having told him to get an adult—preferably a woman—to match the thread with the cloth.
