Maps for Lost Lovers

she was younger.
    But couldn’t it also remind him of Kaukab in another way: renewing his love and sending him back to her, repentant of his infidelity.
    She looks at the fabric indecisively. He has told her about the sometimes-vague sometimes-sharp antagonisms within his marriage to Kaukab, and she hasn’t let on that she’s more on her side than his. She sounds like an Allah-fearing woman, and Suraya has begun to wonder whether she would eventually be able to appeal directly to her, reminding her that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had had more than one wife.
    “It would look beautiful on your skin tone,” the woman behind the counter—Chanda’s mother?—says as she asks her to measure enough material for a shalwar-kameez.
    “Thank you,” she says as she takes her package and turns away, the shop suddenly noisy with children’s toy spaceguns. These are imported from the East and their bleeps and peows are much louder than the ones that are manufactured here in England, deafeningly so.
    A group of middle-aged women are already on to the life-intoxicated boys who are pulling the triggers of the spaceguns—and suddenly everything is markedly silent. Wearing wronged and martyred expressions, the boys are now brought to the relevant mother and made to stand still with threats and pinched looks.
    She smiles. She’ll tell Shamas about these boys this afternoon. She has noticed that he loves talking about his children’s childhood, the things they did and said. He won’t be drawn on the subject of them as young adults, or much on what they are doing now. It is clear to her that their growing up was a time of strain and tension for him: there must have been arguments with Kaukab about how they should be raised, so that now he prefers to think of them as young children.
    When he mentioned that his elder son, Charag, was an artist, she had wondered whether he could be the same young man she had met beside the lake back in spring, but then he said that Charag doesn’t live in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and hasn’t visited this year.
    She moves among the shelves, elated by the sights and the smells, picking up small boxes and jars, mesmerized by the pink, the blue, the red, the green, the orange, the yellow, the silver, the gold, unscrewing and sniffing the small roll-on vials of perfume, sandalwood, saffron, jasmine, rose. It’s like being a young girl again.
    She suddenly wishes she had a little daughter—to dress up, to buy beads and dolls for.
    In a state as close to bliss as she has been able to capture during the past few months, listening to the women’s voices all around her, she finds herself melting into a sweet lethargy. One of the things she misses most about being in Pakistan is the company of her women friends and acquaintances, lying on the veranda under the ceiling fans and talking about inconsequential matters, laughing, trying on bangles from the dozens arrayed on the floor between them like the Olympics logo for a planet that has more continents than Earth does, contradicting each other (and their own selves too, saying, “My Allah, do we women ever know what we want!”), shrieking at double entendres and innuendoes, and making lewd remarks about husbands (how often, and how fast, and, praise be to Allah, how slow?) and fiancés and about other men of the area too (having caught glimpses of them walking by in the street, she remembers whispering to her friends about the breathtaking beauty of the men of the family with which her in-laws had the feud; the women had agreed and then, dying with laughter, someone said she’d heard one of those handsome god-like men urinate in an alley while she was nearby, and— Allah!—the sound had startled her: “After he was gone, I couldn’t resist looking and saw that he’d made an enormous crater in the ground the way horses do”).
    Smiling, she looks around but is suddenly reminded of the fact that her mother-in-law—a woman not unlike these very ones—is scheming to destroy her life even now, the witch who had said on the phone that, “You didn’t even produce a child until you were in your late twenties, and even then after thousands of rupees’ worth of hormones and injections that we had to pay for, my poor son having to visit you in the hospital morning-noon-and-night after you had miscarriage after miscarriage.” Suraya had wanted to shout, “I wasn’t lounging about on the hospital bed just to spite you and your son, you crone. I had