Maps for Lost Lovers

“It’s all your own fault.” Shocked by the authority with which he accused her, she suspected that her mother-in-law had started filling the boy’s head against her. He must hear things around the house and streets all the time too. Had he said something as objectionable and insolent as that to her while she was in Pakistan, she would have slapped him, hard, knocking all the brazenness out of him. When he grows up will he torment her with his accusations, ever wilder, ever more obscene? She shudders. She fumes at his grandmother, and her husband, he who had dared to hit her, beat her. Three days ago, she had found herself fantasizing for a few moments about how delicious it would be to taunt her husband, to torment him, torture him, by giving him all the details of her lovemaking with Shamas, telling him he was a better lover than him. But—she had mused—surely that would jeopardize my getting back together with my son. But then she had come to her senses: My Allah, Suraya, you love your husband and are a worshipper of Allah — where have such thoughts come from!
    She hears a sound nearby and looks up, her heart full of hope, but it’s only the wind brushing past the reeds.
    She’s dizzy from the sun. The thought suddenly panics her that Shamas has been waylaid by some friends of her husband’s. My Allah, he’s lying in a ditch somewhere, dead to the world.
    Her hands tremble, the Koh-i-Noor pencils rattling slightly in their box.
    No, no, Shamas is not lying somewhere, dead or dying —she reassures herself, with no cause for this optimism but the compassion of Allah.
    But now, once again, there’s anger: what if he hasn’t come to any harm but has rather become afraid that he might be beaten up by her husband’s friends, and has not come to see her out of cowardice?
    The anger at him is such that it makes her want to go to his house immediately. But, suddenly restored to sanity now, she knows that she must resist the impulse—any confrontation would endanger her chances of being accepted by Kaukab. Over the past four days she has found herself circling his house at odd hours, but every time she has remained clearheaded enough to withdraw. Once she caught a glimpse of the woman who must be Kaukab.
    She recognized the roses and the jasmine in Kaukab’s front garden: they were added to the bath water in which was washed the corpse of the girl beaten to death by the exorcist.
    Another sound and Suraya tells herself not to look up and have her hopes smashed again— he’s not coming, Suraya, but you are a strong and resourceful woman: with Allah’s help you will cope with anything: You don’t need Shamas —but her resolve fails within seconds . . .

LEOPOLD BLOOM AND THE KOH-I-NOOR
    Semen was found on the mosque floor late last evening.
    It’s almost a year since Chanda and Jugnu disappeared. This time last year they were in Pakistan. Shamas looks down at his own and the missing couple’s house, from the slope at the back, at the base of which the narrow lane and the stream are. Here the ground rises to form an angled backdrop of sycamores and hawthorns that throw shadows through every back window at sunrise, the earth here deep with zigzagging twigs, green and scarlet berries, mouldy winged samara and rain-rusted leaves lying under the trees like The Moral: at the bottom of a fable. The scent of hawthorns in bloom in May is as thick inside the house as out, the air drowsily astir in summer with the weightless seeds of the poodle-tail dandelion clocks.
    Yesterday morning—a few hours before his meeting with Suraya—he went into the mosque to consult the cleric about Muslim divorce laws, to see if there was any possible way out for Suraya other than having to marry someone and obtain a divorce from him. The cleric wasn’t in the building, though children were chanting their lessons. Shamas thought he might be upstairs and was moving towards the stairs when he heard a child’s cry from behind a closed door. “Uncle, I don’t want to.” He went into the room and saw one of the junior clerics, a bachelor in his fifties, with his erect penis in a child’s mouth.
    Shamas shouted out and grabbed the man. Soon every official of the mosque was in the room and Shamas was told respectfully to go home, that the matter would be handled by the mosque. He left, insisting the man should be handed to the authorities, but by early afternoon, as the time approached for him to travel to Scandal Point to