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Maps for Lost Lovers

Maps for Lost Lovers

Titel: Maps for Lost Lovers Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Nadeem Aslam
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Meena Shafiq rang me just now to let me know,” says Kaukab.
    The news is genuinely devastating: “Who will sing about the poor, now?” he whispers in shock.
    “And about the women,” says Suraya—his whispers are audible to her.
    “And in praise of Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him?” adds Kaukab.
    Shamas looks at Suraya: “How did it happen?” He is troubled by how familiar she already is to him in the surroundings of his house. He shifts his gaze to Kaukab: “How did it happen?”
    “In a hospital, hooked up to a dialysis machine.”
    “Probably unsterilized equipment,” he thinks out loud. “The hospitals there . . .”
    Kaukab is immediately indignant: “I knew you would find some way of badmouthing Pakistan in all this.” She turns to Suraya: “See, Perveen, this was what I was talking about when I said he had turned my children against me.” She stands up, almost in tears. “I’ll go and get that photograph of Mah-Jabin’s husband. You’ll see for yourself how handsome he is, Perveen, and then you’ll agree with me that it was totally unreasonable of Mah-Jabin to leave him. I’ll let you decide.”
    Shamas enters the room the moment Kaukab goes into the staircase: “What are you doing here?”
    “I had to see you.”
    “Are you sitting here making fun of her, a foolish old woman?”
    “I don’t think she’s foolish in the least. Do you ?”
    She takes a step towards him but then they both hear Kaukab’s voice from the stairs: “I have just remembered that the photograph is actually down there, hidden in one of the books.”
    In the time it takes for Kaukab to re-enter the pink room, Suraya quickly hands him an envelope—the faint rattle tells him that it contains a small box of Koh-i-Noor pencils. He pockets it and she whispers, “Come to the Safeena at dawn tomorrow, please.” Her voice glows with emotion, a voice reeling with contrasts, at once caressing and corrosive.
    Kaukab, smiling now (she’s like a child after too much sugar), sends Shamas upstairs—“Leave us women alone”—and begins to hunt for the photograph. “Yes, indeed: while he pines away for her in Pakistan, she’s in America, her long long hair cut short like a boy, wearing jeans and skirts. Why can’t she wear our own clothes, like you, for example—the very personification of Eastern beauty—?”
    He stands on the stairs and tries to hear what Suraya is up to; but at a sound from Kaukab—“Let me fill up the bowls with more strawberries and then I’ll come and tell you all about my brother and a Sikh woman called Kiran . . .”—he withdraws upstairs. Kaukab is, on the whole, wary and quite guarded when it comes to revealing information about her family to other women, not knowing how this or that fact will be interpreted or retold, and she has been distressed by how some of the secrets have been turned into gossip in the neighbourhood; and now, Shamas understands, that she has seen this “newcomer Perveen” as someone to whom she can present her side of the family truths first, before she can learn the others’ versions.
    He can hear her through the floor: “My brother is now a widower, and when he came here for a visit last year, I kept a vigilant eye out, in case Kiran tried to entice him. Men are nothing more than children when it comes to these matters. You and I both know how wily a woman can be when she wants to.”
    No, he mustn’t assume that Suraya is here to sabotage his marriage. Perhaps she has decided after all to begin a legal battle for her son and wants his help. He’ll do all he can, write to MPs, find the best lawyers. Or perhaps she just wanted to see him for one last time, and hand him the pencils. The original Koh-i-Noors—from the factory in Bloomsbury, New Jersey—were given fourteen coats of golden-yellow lacquer, had their ends sprayed with gold paint and the lettering applied in 16-carat gold leaf, but these modern mass-produced ones are said to be no less exuberant when light plays on them. He tears open the envelope but it doesn’t contain a box of pencils. Home Pregnancy Test —says the wording on the box. He opens it and, after a few minutes of consultation with the leaflet inside, realizes that the test in his hands is positive.
    “She left as soon as you went up,” Kaukab tells him when he rushes downstairs. “Nice woman, very beautiful. I wanted to show her the lovely embroidery patterns that Charag used to draw for me when he was a boy . .

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