Maps for Lost Lovers

move away.
    She remembered the comment four or five days later and asked Shamas about the feather but he said that Chanda’s mother must be mistaken. Kaukab had agreed: “Her daughter’s death has hit her very hard. I fear for her sanity at times.” There are words to describe all kinds of bereaved people—widows, widowers, orphans—but none for a parent that has lost a child: it’s a fate too terrible for even language to contemplate.
    She builds up her resolve after twenty yards and begins to walk back. Should she go in?
    Suraya, on her way to see Shamas, brings the car to a halt when she realizes that the shop she’s approaching on her right is owned by the parents of Jugnu’s dead girlfriend. Her curiosity roused, she sits in the parked car wondering whether she should go in. There is still enough time before her meeting with Shamas, who had called her unexpectedly this morning asking to see her.
    She looks at the coming and going outside the shop. She has had to be intimate with Shamas a further six times since that night at the Safeena after Nusrat’s performance. But she is becoming surer of the dividends. Two days ago she even told her husband the name of “the very promising candidate” she had earlier mentioned to him and his mother. He got her to give him the man’s address so he could have him scrutinized by the people he used to know when he was in England. She hadn’t wanted to give him that information but had relented after he asked for it repeatedly because she didn’t want him to think she was being contrary or disobedient, lest he refuse to marry her again, or go ahead and marry some other woman that that mother of his is no doubt searching for even now.
    She cranes towards the mirror to check her appearance. Belonging to a hairy race, she had her entire body waxed last week, and has also had electrolysis on her face; all this she had somewhat neglected over the past few months. Shamas says he finds talking to her a comfort and a delight, that beauty isn’t what he wants in a woman; but, like all men, he is as muddle-headed as a child: what he means is that beauty alone is not what he wants—a woman must be intelligent as well as beautiful. An intelligent but plain woman won’t do. And so Suraya has started to pay attention to her physical appearance. And, yes, it must be admitted that there are times when she enjoys his compliments concerning her beauty, a sense of well-being spreading over her for a while, before she is reminded of her adversity, of her husband, her son, her Allah.
    A woman goes by her car for the second time in five minutes. Her hair is clumsily dyed at home and the parting in the middle shows the stains on the scalp.
    The tumble of Suraya’s own hair is gathered up at the nape of the neck by the narrow red-silk scarf that she dislikes; but she has it upon her each time she sees Shamas because it must remind him pleasantly of the first time they met, “the cares of all the world falling out of my hands,” he’d joked during their last meeting, referring to the newspapers.
    The interior of the car is filled with the heated scent that she has sprayed on her clothing and blue-purple veil, the colour of bluebells. She knows Shamas’s daughter Mah-Jabin was sent to Pakistan to get married: she must have missed things about England when she was there, just as she, Suraya, had when she was in Pakistan; and so this afternoon she plans to use the colour of her veil as a segue into talking about her homesickness in Pakistan—aligning herself with his daughter in an effort to deepen his fondness. She had looked through her wardrobe carefully to find something that was the colour of bluebells, something that would lead to the necessary transition in the conversation.
    She watches the women and children go in and out of the shop, the July sun burning. She knows by now how good a heart Shamas possesses. Not long ago, while talking about the neighbourhood, he seemed to shock himself by the desperation of most people’s lives here, family life frequently reduced to nothing more than legalized brutality. He counted nineteen mentally ill people in his own street, the street book-ended on one side by a house where lives a middle-aged Sikh woman whose husband left her and their twenty-year-old Down’s syndrome daughter and went back to Amritsar to marry a young woman of twenty-five, the wife saying, constantly, “May God keep the coffers of Queen Elizabeth filled to the