Maps for Lost Lovers

the world. The feuds of the world.
    And now, suddenly, in a gesture of intimacy Shamas is not prepared for, Poorab-ji gently places his arm around his shoulder:
    “This morning I saw a mass of snow that had slid off a roof and was lying in a heap on the ground, and from the distance I thought it was Chanda and Jugnu’s bodies. You cannot know how sorry I am, but at least now we know the truth about what happened to them.”
    “The truth?” The steel trap around his heart springs shut.
    “You don’t know yet, Shamas-ji?” Poorab-ji’s face over the next few instants is a mirror reflecting his own confusion and dread. “Am I to be the first one to tell you? The police obviously haven’t informed you.”
    Shamas looks down and his feet appear far away. “The telephone lines are down.” He has a specific desire to stretch out on the white snow.
    Poorab-ji is talking fast: it appears that the police have arrested both of Chanda’s brothers, charging them with the double-murder of their sister and Jugnu.
    The almost five months since the lovers disappeared have been months of a contained mourning for Shamas—but now the grief can come out. He is not a believer, so he knows that the universe is without saviours: the surface of the earth is a great shroud whose dead will not be resurrected.
    The quails injured in the secret fights organized by some Pakistani and Indian immigrants of the neighbourhood are regularly brought to Poorab-ji, who, threatening to expose the illegal activity each time he receives the damaged birds, nurses them back to health, the turmeric powder on their wounds making them appear as though they have thrashed through clumps of Madonna and Easter lilies, the mango-coloured dust-fine pollen of the flowers coming off on the feathers.
    “I have two cock birds in there, and when it began to snow at two o’clock last night I left the house to come here to see that they were warm enough . . . I passed the family’s home . . . There were policemen all around . . .”
    Official confirmation of disaster has made Shamas nauseous.
    The mind rejects the idea and the body joins in so that the stomach goes into convulsions as though it too has been administered a poisonous substance that must be vomited out. His flesh is armoured in plates of searing heat and the hands burn through the snow like branding irons. There is nothing much in the stomach to be expelled since he has had no breakfast, but the body insists on going through the spasms of gagging, each gruesome surge a prolonged slowed-down hiccup. We’ll drink from your veins. When Chanda had moved in with Jugnu next door—leaving behind the home she shared with her family above the grocery shop they owned—the brothers had threatened revenge to preserve their honour. We’ll make you lick our injuries. They had broken in and put out a cigarette in their bed.
    But after the disappearance they had denied any knowledge.
    Shamas now finds himself on all fours, looking for something, shifting fistfuls of snow so that the area around the wooden hut is grooved and churned a pale lilac-blue, as though by the jabs of an aimless rake. The wind stirs a yellow feather stuck in the whiteness, a wisp of filaments—as bright as something to be found in a bazaar—that had belonged to the bird which had died with a diamond in its beak. Each melting icicle drills a hole in the snow the size of a half-penny piece, a coin now discontinued and missed so badly by Shamas in this moment of madness that it now represents all that has gone away never to return, his mind convincing itself that to be able to locate just one of those copper discs small enough to fit in a doll’s purse would solve every difficulty in life. The skin peels away from his fingers in strips of accordioned rice-paper as his hands dig the ground in their urgent search for a worthless bit of metal that has suddenly become the price of sanity.
    “I should never have let him out of my sight,” he hears himself say; these were the words of Kiran when she returned dazed from Pakistan all those years ago, having been turned away from Karachi airport. “I should never have let him out of my sight,” he repeats.
    Poorab-ji convinces him to be still and he closes his eyes in order to conquer his turmoil and, drained, leans his head against the temple wall, unaccountably thinking about the night that Great Peacock moths had hatched in the blue-walled kitchen, letting himself imagine the likely