Maps for Lost Lovers

meet Suraya, concerned that the police had not approached him for a statement, he returned to the mosque only to discover that nothing had been done.
    He came home and called the police himself to report the assault: he had to wait for an officer to visit the house. He would make it to her just in time, he reassured himself—but when the police did arrive he couldn’t get away from their questioning and procedures.
    As the investigative process got under way, other details emerged of previous assaults on children involving the same man. A group of mothers had, two months before, confronted mosque officials, saying the man had assaulted their children, but they were told that the scandal would give Islam and Pakistan a bad name, that the man would be prevented from doing it again, that if the police got involved and shut down the mosque no one would teach their sons to stay away from the whore-like white girls, and that their own daughters would run away from home and wouldn’t want to marry their cousins from back home, that the Hindus and the Jews and the Christians would rejoice at seeing Islam being dragged through the mud. Some of the men had just laughed at the women and told them to go away and get the dinner ready for their husbands; others were even more contemptuous and told them to stop cackling like hens in the place of worship, adding that a woman should be a creature of the home and the night, and had no place outside in the world of men.
    The mosque denied any attempt to cover up the man’s activities. “This is the house of God and if anyone had known about it, it would not have been tolerated,” the cleric said to the police. “The females say they complained—but then they get excited over everything and are not very intelligent, they don’t know what they are saying.”
    There was no way for Shamas to contact Suraya and arrange to meet elsewhere. It was early evening by the time he was free: and by then it was too late. He tried to telephone her several times but there was no answer: she was either not at home or chose not to answer.
    Police were sure that the samples they took from the floor of the room in which Shamas came upon that terrible scene were the assaulter’s semen.
    He was devastated that she got his final answer in such a cruel manner, and he has been wondering whether he should try to contact her again today—just to explain his non-appearance. But, surely, a telephone call from him now would raise her hopes for the first few seconds as she hears his voice. And then he’ll have to dash them again.
    He doesn’t know what to do. He stands still, unwilling to move any muscles, almost believing himself to be a column of separate parts that would scatter at the smallest movement or vibration.
    She had said: “I had to degrade myself with you. In our religion there is no other way for me to be united with my beloved son.” She of course regretted the first thing, not the second: a system conditions people into thinking that it is never to blame, is never to be questioned. We have to beg, say the beggars, the accursed belly demands food: it is the fault of the belly, not the unjust world that doesn’t allow enough sustenance to reach the bellies of everyone through dignified means.
    He climbs down into the back lane, carefully leaping over the stream, and goes into Jugnu’s back garden. The deep blue of a peacock’s neck, a denim jacket of Jugnu’s was washed by Chanda and hung out to dry in May last year: a wren began building a nest in one of its pockets and the garment was allowed to remain on the line, Shamas taking it off only in October, removing from the pocket the small bowl constructed of one dead leaf each of maple and sycamore, one of elm, which he recognized due to its lopsided nature—one-half bigger than the other—and three leaves from the apple foliage; there were dandelion whiskers, and several consecutive layers of spiders’ web trying to separate which was like pulling apart a sheet of two-ply tissue paper or entering a well-starched shirt. There was a piece of the purple thread that Kaukab had used to sew a kameez a few months earlier. The earth around him was covered with yellow leaves being dropped by the trees, the edges of everything giving out pulses of sunlight because last night the glint-slippered frosts were abroad. Berries, like chewy pearls, were everywhere. And no one knew where Chanda and Jugnu were.
    Shamas crosses over into his own