Maps for Lost Lovers

she mustn’t be seen in the company of this young woman— she could prove suitable and their plan won’t work if someone has witnessed them together. Luckily they are alone in the shop. “Help yourself.” She points to the strawberries. “It’s my duty to help you.”
    “Me and a man from Pakistan came and said to the people at the port in Dover that we were lovers and that our families wanted to kill us, because I had disgraced them by falling in love with him. We said we wanted asylum. They let us stay while our application was being processed. I ran away from the holding centre and have ended up here.”
    “What about your lover?” Chanda’s sister-in-law’s heart is beating fast—she might not want to go back to Pakistan without him.
    The girl shakes her head. “Sister-ji! He wasn’t my lover. I am a good Muslim. No matter what kind of predicament Allah has placed me in, I’ll never compromise my honour. He was nothing to me: Love was a fiction the agent in Pakistan told us to tell the English authorities. He is still in the holding centre probably. I told him I was leaving—I left Pakistan to make money, not languish in a locked building. Here in England, I’ll be able to make in ten years what it would have taken me forty years to make over there.”
    Chanda’s sister nods. “Where are you living at the moment?”
    The girls points out the tower through the glass window, the other hand playing with the locket around her neck.
    Chanda’s sister-in-law turns around but, on seeing that a customer is approaching the shop, quickly tells the girl to go to the fruit section. A whirlwind of plaits and scarves and balloons with Freedom for Kashmir printed on them, her daughters come down from upstairs, ready for the mosque.
    She serves the customers, keeping an eye on the girl with the locket, and when the shop is empty again after five minutes she goes over to her, beside the basket of strawberries, a hairy leaf sticking out of the brilliant baubles here and there.
    “You should not have left your country,” she says to the girl, who raises her eyes briefly at her, chewing the corner of her mouth, but doesn’t say anything. “Don’t you miss it?”
    The girl stops what she’s doing, all life gone from her hands which she rests on the fruit, and then decides to speak her mind. “I shouldn’t have left?” she says angrily. “You lot who have legal status in a rich country don’t know how lucky you are!”
    Chanda’s sister-in-law is taken aback. “I am sorry, I just wondered whether you wanted to go back after making some money.”
    But the girl doesn’t seem to be listening. She looks at Chanda’s sister-in-law with fury. “You don’t understand what things are like back there for most of us.” One balloon had slipped from the hands of the little girls and is floating against the ceiling above them, slowly drifting. She gives it a contemptuous glance. “Freedom for Kashmir, indeed. Pakistan can’t afford to feed the people it already has within its borders, and yet it wants more people, a bigger territory. The same goes for India of course.”
    “Someone was just handing those balloons out on the street,” says Chanda’s sister-in-law, trying to placate her. “And I didn’t mean to offend you by what I said.” She knows she must give the impression of agreeing with the girl’s opinions. “Every other day there is news of a group of illegal immigrants meeting a disastrous end.Those bastard prime ministers and presidents and generals—both Indian and Pakistani—they should see what people have to go through to reach a place where they can earn a decent living. They should ask those people whether they want freedom in Kashmir or a chance to live with safety and with food in our bellies in their own country.”
    No longer enraged, the girl says quietly, “They should’ve seen how the group I was with came to this country, how we ran through snow, were fired on, across border after border after border, abused, slapped.”
    Chanda’s sister-in-law takes the bag the girl has been filling and begins to add heaps of red strawberries into it. “You hear about such things every day—people wading through filthy sewers and flooded rivers, leaving dead or dying people behind on mountainsides to be picked at by crows and vultures.” She leans closer: “Now listen, you are a Pakistani and so am I. It’s my duty to help you. If you need anything . . .”
    But the girl is