Maps for Lost Lovers

scrubbing herself.
    He stands at the window, and the sight of his face—reflected ghostlike on the glass pane—fills him with disgust: she must have loathed him secretly, at what she had to do to regain entry into her real life. How the feel of these hands must have repulsed her! In her eyes he was a beast letting loose his lusts on her flesh. Licking those orchid-sap stains from her breast and thighs. He hates himself for acting like an animal, a bull rejoicing in the cow. Clouding the glass with his breath, he makes himself disappear.
    Before she left, she asked to be forgiven for her husband threatening him with violence over the telephone last night; and she said she forgave him for deceiving her earlier this afternoon. But he cannot silence the accusations inside himself the way it is said that deer are troubled by the musk that springs from their own bodies, that sometimes, driven insane, they begin to describe circles around themselves, start to run madly in the deserts and the forests in the hope that they may locate the origins of that encircling perfume, that they may discover the reasons why it clings and seems to chase them.
    There is dandelion fluff caught in a spider’s web, out there, looking as though the arachnid had taken off a fur stole and hung it in one corner of its dwelling (as little Ujala said once; or was it something he’d read in The First Children on the Moon —he is aware that a part of his consciousness is influenced by his father’s magazine, looking at the world as though it is a bright toy). A lapwing sounds from somewhere around the lake—. . . bewitched . . . bewitched . . . The high bindweed has folded its flowers to prevent the rain from diluting their perfume and nectar. Now and then giving a lazy flutter to its brilliant cerise wings, the Cinnabar is still there: the wind has changed direction and the creature is now being lashed by water drops; he goes out and brings it in, placing it on a shelf beside a book with a bluebell-coloured jacket, reminding him also of the blooms of a Pakistani jacaranda tree. The colour of her veil.
    There is nothing he can do to help her.
    There on the opposite shore of the lake, in the dense trees, is where the ghosts of the two murdered lovers are said to wander, calling out to him, aglow, giving out a light without heat like fireflies. Pale eyes change colour soon after death—Caucasian pupils appear a greenish-brown—and he wonders what colour Chanda’s eyes became after her murder, she whose eyes used to change with the seasons. Her ghost’s belly is said to be brighter than the rest of her, an indication that it contains a luminous child, the child that died with her.
    Time makes memories of everything. Would he forget Suraya, her memory coming to him only occasionally? But he doesn’t think he has enough time to be able to forget her, because many decades are needed for such processes, and he is too old now. This one will go with him to the grave.

AT SCANDAL POINT
    Beside the Safeena stands a leafless tree resembling an antler, as though a deer buried there is beginning to emerge free of the earth’s grip, and it is there that Suraya awaits Shamas’s arrival. She shakes order into the garlands printed on her clothing, the August sun blazing around her. How hot it burns. A summer breeze comes in from the lake’s surface, from the sharp slopes of tight purple heather and patches of willow herbs with bright pink light clinging to them.
    The agreed hour has come and gone. So his answer is no? But even now there is a vague hope that perhaps he’ll come here eventually— having changed his answer to yes after all. She tries to hold back her tears when she realizes how absurd the thought is. And now, as the drops of sweat slide down her body, activating the nerve-endings, there is a surge of anger: how dare he reject someone as intelligent, beautiful and desirable as her, how dare he not come! And she recriminates herself for her temper—Satan the Stoned-One is aware of her pride and vanity and takes full advantage whenever he can. Yes, you need to be confident and self-possessed in life, but only a little. There are limits you shouldn’t go beyond. There are some substances that are regarded as medicines up to ten drops, but are included in the list of poisons on the eleventh.
    Her quick temper is a trait she seems to have passed on to her little son. “Why did you go to that house anyway,” he said last night on the phone.