Maps for Lost Lovers

these.” He speaks softly in a voice that is wearing mourning clothes.
    “I think I remember where it . . . she . . . is,” Shamas says, having recovered. “Come this way.”
    “I watched the funeral from the trees so I thought I’d remember the location,” the boy says, looking down at the flowers as he walks. “There are almost a thousand graves here but I knew how to find her when I came in the evening, thinking the funeral was over and there would be no one here, but a lot of women were visiting her at that time. I went away and now I am lost in the darkness.”
    Shamas nods. Women aren’t allowed to be present at the burial, and must come to the cemetery later. The dead girl’s sister had wanted to watch her being buried but she had been told that it was an impossibility. In her grief she would have rebelled—it was her first direct experience of death so she wasn’t familiar with the rules that must be observed, and she would have thought that her great loss entitled her to break Allah’s law— but it turned out that she was having her period: so they informed her that she couldn’t go anyway because of that reason, because she was in an unclean state. Forbidden to touch the Koran, enter a mosque, pray, even prepare food according to certain sects—that she was impure and polluted during menstruation was something she had known for some time, something she had come to accept by now, her arguments against it fully exhausted. And so she had acquiesced, agreeing to visit the grave later.
    “It’s there,” Shamas points to the mound where the wreaths and garlands are dying, furred with shadows. The boy takes a step towards it but stops. In the moonlit darkness his skin looks blue as Shamas’s own must appear to him: the colour of Krishna, the god who multiplied himself a thousand times so he could be with the thousand maidens simultaneously in the night forest—and so all lovers are one. The boy shakes his head: “I don’t really know which rules to observe at a Muslim grave-site. Earlier I thought Muslims burned candles on their graves because I saw a light flickering on her resting place but then it disappeared—it must be one of those fireflies that have been discovered hereabouts.”
    Muslims do burn lamps on graves and the moths they attract are said by some to be angels, the spirits of the departed by others, or lovers in disguise come to say prayers for their beloveds’ souls. “Fireflies, here in England?”
    The boy takes another tentative few steps, fearful of protocol. “Yes, there have always been rumours of their sighting in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, but last week they were confirmed.”
    Shamas waits until the boy has reached her and kneeled down, and then he withdraws. In Shamas’s thoughts, the girl—during her last few days on earth—appears as the moon threatened by the dragons of the eclipse—surrounded by her criminally stupid parents and that monstrous holy man. He goes back the way he had come, and when he arrives back at where he’d met the boy he sees that there is a heart lying in his path, there, in a patch of moonlight falling from the foliage above, a heart sliced neatly into two halves: the two pieces are lying next to each other— the inner chambers are exposed in cross-section, curved and muscular. Shamas backs away when the two halves are suddenly and weakly illuminated as though from within. The red light colours the ground and only then does he see that they are two orchids fallen from the cluster the boy had been carrying. The firefly that had alighted on them has just given a pulse of light—it arcs into the air and vanishes, leaving behind a blinding smear on Shamas’s retina, a long trail slow to fade. He picks up the two blossoms, looking around for other fireflies, remembering how he captured those luminous insects in his childhood and kept them in glass bottles topped with perforated caps to make lanterns that quivered like liquid. A mass of them moving in the distance after a monsoon shower: the points of light opened and slowly closed like mouths of fishes. The air would be alive with responsiveness, and he could see them even with his eyes closed: in the darkness they conferred a facial vision that the blind are said to possess—a trembling warm sense of something there, nearby.
    Could the presence of fireflies be the origin of the stories about the two ghosts wandering in the lakeside woods? He sets out again carrying the blood-coloured