Maps for Lost Lovers

body hard and fast, recalling the details of her debauchery. From outside the Safeena had come the buzz of a night-flying bee while he touched her everywhere, sowing little fires on her skin, small detonations, and from the wallpaper the pairs of deer in their red flame-of-the-forest bowers turned their necks to look at them, their noses depicted by black heart shapes. On the snakes-and-ladders squares of a Sindhi rug, he kissed off the pale red orchid-sap that his hands had smeared on various places of her body when he helped her undress—the saliva a magical liquid erasing bruises from her body. He whispered, saying he was surprised that he was already familiar with her breathing when he placed his face against her body. “This small shadow that your earlobe casts on the side of your neck is also known to me.” They lay side by side, adrift in a boat, borne along by their story. “I should open the window a little so that the three butterflies of Madame Bovary can fly out at dawn to feed on the nectar outside.” “What?”
    She weeps among the reeds, scrubbing herself, while he is asleep indoors. She told her husband over the telephone that she has a most-suitable candidate and that he and his mother should give her a few more weeks before deciding on a new marriage for him.
    She has the urge to lie down in the black water and stop breathing but the prospect of her son—soon to be on the mercy of a stepmother?— gives her courage to remain living. She has asked her husband to let the boy come to England for a few weeks but he says he fears she won’t let him return to Pakistan. “The laws in the West are favourable to women: the authorities will side with you and I won’t be able to do anything.” And Suraya knows that his suspicions have some basis in truth: if she could have possession of her boy, she would gladly live with the wound of having lost her husband. “Why don’t you both come for a visit,” she’d suggested not long ago. But he had developed an intense dislike of England during the two years he had spent here after their marriage. She had been lonely in Pakistan and had persuaded him to come and settle here. “This country may be rich but it is too different from ours,” he’d declared finally. “We have to go back. A person can’t do anything here that he can freely over there. A dog was asked by another why he was fleeing a rich household where they fed him meat every day. ‘They feed me meat, yes, but I am not allowed to bark.’ ”
    She pleads with Allah as she purifies herself. One day when she was a little girl, she had gone home from the mosque in tears, having just learned that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said there would be more women in Hell than men. The girls had been chattering during the lesson and the cleric had threatened them with that information. Weeping, she told her mother that she no longer wished to be a Muslim. She consoled her and explained that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had indeed made that statement but that it had been made good humouredly: in a mosque, when the collections were being made, he had joked with the women who weren’t giving up their jewels to feed the poor and finance the jihad against unbelievers. The moment he made that statement the women stood up and argued with him merrily. But now, amid the reeds, Suraya wonders whether her childhood cleric might not have been right all along: We women are wicked. She had resisted having to do what she had done with Shamas last night, but had she resisted hard enough? Perhaps she should have tried to find another way of resolving her difficulties rather than sinning? But there is no other way.
    She shivers with terror as she weeps. The moon’s age-old eye watches her from above, the midges flickering firmly in perfect silhouettes against it—the orbits are strong enough to not let the breeze blow the insects away. She washes her face and wonders if her crying had been heard in there. Shamas said last night that occasionally when she speaks the songbirds in her throat awaken and he can hear the voice that as a girl had sang the poetry of Wamaq Saleem, accompanying itself with a guitar and a peacock-feather plectrum. She can hear those songbirds when she cries now. She gathers up her hair, pulling off the damp locks that are gently pasted onto her shoulders, each leaving behind an impression of itself in cool skin, a sensory shadow in low temperature. The gusts and ripples of breeze