Maps for Lost Lovers

sequence of events after they had emerged from the cocoons. Their search for a way out of themselves finally over, the nineteen males had hatched in the blue kitchen during the night and, still damp from the chrysalis, fluttered into the adjoining drawing room where the vase Shamas had brought from Pakistan in the 1950s—as a reminder of home—was on the glass table arranged with sprays of yolk-coloured mimosa, the fine layer of dust he had picked the vase out of all those years ago continuing to cry out across the years with an agonised O for it to be put back exactly where it had been set by his mother’s hand.
    As large as a bat, with wings made of deep-paprika velvet and a necktie of white fur, a moth looped the thready globes of the mimosa, but food wasn’t what it sought as it had no mouth and was born to die; it alighted on a guava that had leaves and stalk attached to the crown as though it had been picked in a hurry, and then flew out of the strawberry-pink drawing room with its eighteen companions, arriving in the kitchen again.
    The absolute darkness was light enough for them and with passionate impatience they floated up the stairwell to the Leningrad-yellow room where Shamas slept beside Kaukab.
    Their tufted antennae questioning the air, they lingered indecisively above Kaukab—she who remembers even today the morning a butterfly had tried to lay eggs in her plait, drawn by the scent of the oil she applies to her hair—and she opened her eyes in the darkness for an instant or two, more asleep than awake, and sharply expelled air from her nostrils three times, because the Prophet had said, “If any of you wakes up at night, let him blow his nose three times. For Satan spends the night in a man’s nostrils.”
    She sank back into sleephood almost immediately and the moths moved out to the elder boy’s room, having first made sure at the open window that the summons was not coming from out there.
    The thirty-eight eyes painted on the thirty-eight red wings blinked in the darkness as the insects then fluttered into the room shared by the two younger children, and here they tried to pass through a circular opening only to discover that others were trying to emerge from it just as frantically—it was a mirror.
    A slippery spew of Indian movie magazines was at the foot of the girl’s bed.
    Through the open hatch in the ceiling of this room, the Great Peacock moths entered the attic that was embraced on the outside by the back garden’s purple beech, and in a blur of near-misses they went into the space above the adjoining house, bought newly by Jugnu, the two hatches open for his stored possessions to be zigzagged across from here to there and then handed down. A number of his belongings were still scattered about the house: these included the hatbox containing the nineteen chrysalises. It was left in the blue kitchen till tomorrow because everyone had decided to leave things as they were when night fell and they realized that they had been working without a rest for ten hours, helping Jugnu move.
    Like kites whose strings have been cut, the moths swooped down out of the attic into the room wallpapered with twisted leaves and tiny indigo berries.
    Here, the Great Peacocks ignored the sleeping Jugnu even though his hands weren’t covered by the blanket, the hands that had the ability to glow in the dark. No moth could resist being drawn to his hands, but that night the interior was noisy with another call that only they could hear— that of a female moth. It had hatched the day before and hung in the cage Jugnu had constructed by knitting copper wire around a bottle and then smashing the glass.
    The female was motionless except when it swished its wings gently to disperse the odour that had gradually flooded the two houses with the faint electricity of a yearning inexpressible any other way, undetected by the humans but pulling the nineteen males towards its source slowly at first and then hand over hand a yard at a time as they learned to distinguish truth from lie and arrived to drape the entire cage in reverberating velvet.

A BREAKFAST OF BUTTERFLY EGGS
    Walking home from work at the end of the day, with The Afternoon under one arm, Shamas hears the echoes of his own footsteps on the snow as though he is being followed.
    For almost a week now the country has been draped in daisy chains on the television weather maps. During the nights, the condensation on the windowpanes has frozen into