Maps for Lost Lovers

women, to be false, teaching themselves to become the figures in men’s dreams and fantasies. Now she realizes how lost she is at times because a dreamer isn’t there. Well, they can all go to Hell. The only love worth striving for is her child’s, her son’s.
    With a riot in every vein, she walks up to the Safeena and watches Shamas sleeping on the floor; the two orchids he’d been carrying when he arrived—a gift for her, obviously—are set beside his head, their ruffled edges aglow: he had dropped them outside but had gone out an hour later to retrieve them, one miniature reflection of them shining in each of his eyes. There are beet-coloured almost-black marks on one of the orchids— injuries suffered by the petals when they were dropped, or when the fingers pressed too deeply on to the thin succulence.
    He has told her that his father was a Hindu and the terrible persecution he suffered in Pakistan; and so she wonders whether, to gain his sympathy, she should tell him that at school she herself had fallen in love with a boy of another religion—a Sikh—and that her mother had taken her out of school. But now suddenly she is ashamed: Such cold-blooded shrewdness, Suraya! What would Allah think? —and she lets out a whimper in desperation. But what am I supposed to do: become nothing more than his sex slave, and then when he tires of me, go and find another man so that he can pasturethe black scorpions of his eyes on my nakedness? But, no, no, she won’t allow herself to exploit the horrific death of Shamas’s father. He has mentioned something about his wife’s brother wanting to marry a Sikh woman back in the 1950s, and it was obvious that his sympathies lay with the two lovers (she herself had, of course, approved of the actions taken by the young man’s family: imagine, marrying a non-Muslim!); and so she decides that she should tell him about her own young Sikh love, and that her disgusted mother had taken her out of school and enrolled her into a girls-only Muslim school, the segregated school where daughters could be taught traditional values like modesty and submission. The headmistress—and founder—of the Muslim school lived in the outlying suburbs and drove to the poor neighbourhood every morning, having dropped off her own daughter at a private co-education school; the Muslim school wouldn’t do for her girl but was good enough for “these” people. While her own daughter sang about the pussy cat that went to London to see the Queen, the girls at the Muslim school sang, Fatima, Fatima, where have you been? I’ve been to the mosque with Nur-ud-Deen.
    Suraya had resented being sent to the Muslim girls’ school, but that was just a young person’s petulance, she knows now. She is glad her mother took her out of the co-education school and sent her to a place where they taught her to fear and love Allah, made her think of the afterlife—saved her soul.
    Yes, she will tell him about the Sikh boy: it would be another layer of sympathy for Shamas to view her through. But, of course, she can always use the girl who was buried today: Shamas has told her how he had seen her in the company of a Hindu boy—a conversation about those two secret lovers can be easily steered towards Suraya’s own forbidden love. And now once again she is ashamed and distressed at how she is having to exploit the dead to free herself from her predicament. She holds her head in her hands as she remembers that the exorcist had made the poor girl urinate on to an electric heater so that she fainted from the shock she received.
    She realizes that a wet scrap of paper—obviously part of the torn letter she found bobbing on the water earlier—has been sticking to the side of her neck from when she washed herself in the lake: on the piece a whole sentence is legible, undissolved—
    They say that the heart is the first organ to form and the last to die.
    A clock’s three strikes spread across the lake’s surface like ripples. She should awaken him and drive him home. This much time away from home can just be explained— a group of us men got together and ended up talking after Nusrat’s performance —but he cannot be away from home all night. She remembers how she used to lie awake at night when her husband went out drinking, every sound in the night making her think a ghost was about, that the djinns were abroad, or that he had arrived home intoxicated at last, each thought filling her with more dread than