Maps for Lost Lovers

brim, for she provides me and my daughter with food and housing. I don’t care if she is holding on to our Koh-i-Noor diamond so tightly her knuckles are white!”; and on the other end, by the house occupied by the Sylhet family, whose mentally ill father has been missing for several years, and the once-proud factory-working mother is now devastated because the young son has walked out of university where he was training to be a doctor and has taken up radical Islam, grown a beard and proclaimed everything from democracy to shaving cream unIslamic.
    Of course the matter of Chanda and Jugnu has filled Shamas’s own house and his own life with grief.
    He said—and she was filled with an immense love for him at that moment, fantasizing for a moment about being his wife forever—he said, “Did I do all I could to make sure those around me didn’t come to any harm? Has there been a time when I failed to condemn the pernicious excesses of the wicked, the unjust, the exploiters, robustly enough in the past? Was I unaware of their lethal nature because I myself had not been unduly affected by them yet, the way I am now that Chanda and Jugnu have been murdered?” He read a line of Syed Aabid Ali Aabid,
    Chaman tak aa gaee dewar-e-zindan, hum na kehtay thay.
    I did warn: the prison out there has been expanding slowly, and now its walls have almost reached your own garden.
    His melancholy voice singed her heart. And this is the good man around whom she has been made to weave her web of insincerity and chicanery?
    Overcome by remorse, she sits in the car and wonders if she should get out—but now she thinks of her son, and, her resolve and conviction strengthened, decides that she probably should go in and walk around the shop, perhaps buy some material for a couple of new shalwar-kameez s . Surely from amid the bazaar-like hustle-and-bustle she could glean some information that she might be able to use?
    After the ting! of the bell above the door has announced a customer’s departure, Chanda’s sister-in-law is alone in the shop. She looks out onto the street, watching as Shamas’s wife goes by, surely for the third time this afternoon, but perhaps she’s mistaken. The shop is as wide as it is deep, is the converted ground-floor of the house in the upper rooms of which the family lives. She can hear footsteps in the ceiling—her little daughters, and parents-in-law. The shop front—behind her—is almost all glass, and she casts an occasional glance over each shoulder to keep an eye on Kaukab. If Allah let the dwellers of Paradise engage in trade, I should choose to trade in fabrics, for that was Abu Bakar the Sincere’s profession —reads the sign nailed to the wall above that fabric counter to the left of the sister-in-law, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Here there are shelves loaded with bolts of cloth with a long counter under them and the floor is littered with sequins and glitter-dust that have come off the fabrics, swept by the feet into galaxies and milky ways. Colours and prints go in and out like the seasons in this part of the shop. Two scissors hang from strings like a pair of dead birds, upside-down, drained of blood. Rolls of cloth—each forty-five inches tall—lean against the counter, the loose edges of the materials trailing, like a queue of very thin and very tolerant women wearing saris.
    The sister-in-law goes to the stairs and shouts up that it’s time for the girls to have their lunch and get ready for the Koranic lesson at the mosque. “And don’t forget you have been asked to bring £1 each for the fund for the Bosnian refugees.” She returns to the counter, coming past the two waist-high freezers for packets of frozen foodstuffs, topped with Perspex roofs that slide open like the glass coffins of fairytales. Her parents-in-law have told her about the scheme to send a fake Chanda and Jugnu to the police in order to have the charges against Chanda’s brothers dropped—and she is fully on board. When her father-in-law told her about his idea, the afternoon he and his wife returned from the visit to the prison, he mentioned that not long ago he had met a young man at the mosque who was going around looking for his brother, a boy with a strand of gold growing amid the hair on his head. “The last message the family got from the missing boy with the gold hair was from here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, so this is where he is searching. If only I could bump into that young