Maps for Lost Lovers

.”
    He wants to run after her but restrains himself because Kaukab would be suspicious.
    Tomorrow at dawn, at the Safeena ?
    No, he must pretend that he has to go to the mosque, to see how matters are there, and then telephone her from a street telephone-box.
    “You just can’t believe your luck that you have the chance to defame and ridicule Islam at last,” Kaukab says to him bitterly as he tells her he is on his way to the mosque, having given Suraya enough time to drive back to her house. “I feel sorry for the poor pious cleric-ji, who has to interrupt his worship and do the rounds of the police station because of that junior cleric.”
    He is suddenly filled with rage. I don’t think she’s foolish in the least. Do you?
    Kaukab meets his fierce look equally fiercely, and continues: “You want to go back in there and unearth more shameful things, no doubt. I always wanted my husband to frequent a mosque, but never thought it would be like this.”
    He closes the door, resisting the urge to bang it as loudly as he can, and steps outside. But Suraya’s telephone continues to ring interminably without answer.
    Tomorrow at dawn, at the Safeena.

YOU’LL FORGET LOVE, LIKE OTHER DISASTERS
    Shamas learns that a galaxy was stolen during the night.
    Some figures came out of the warm night. They waited behind a screen of camomile and foxglove to let a freight train cross the tracks two or three feet away from them, the dust-covered petals shaken loose by the draught and flung onto their faces. And then they crossed over into the open countryside beyond to move towards the section of motorway cordoned off for repairs, sweating freely under their clothes in that damp herbal darkness. They bent on the tarmac and, working with cheap toy flashlights, prised out the cats’ eyes embedded in the motorway lanes, reaching back and dropping each star-like bead into the rucksacks fitted onto their backs. The silent group of thieves worked undisturbed for many hours in the darkness full of the late-summer heat and in the morning the authorities discovered that more than three thousand sockets had been emptied.
    The police remain perplexed, Shamas heard on the radio as he woke up, the motive for the theft of the galaxy incomprehensible, the case one of those cases that will probably remain unsolved.
    Walking towards Scandal Point to meet Suraya, Shamas sees that the honeysuckle and the woody nightshade are displaying both flowers and berries, as though torn between the seasons. The year is about to enter its last phase.
    He tried to telephone her last night but there was no answer.
    To think of Suraya is still to bring about a chemical change in the blood, an instant physical lightness slow to ebb like the effect of an intoxicant, and there have been mornings when he has known upon waking that he has dreamt of her, even if he couldn’t recall the details.
    There is a faint citrus smell in the dawn air as though he is in a room in which an orange has recently been eaten. Soon, come autumn, the sun would be cooler and the sky would darken daily. Kaukab’s roses and jasmine—the ones “Perveen” had been pretending to admire while she loitered outside the house yesterday—will die for another year in about five or six weeks, each round rosehip with its tall crown of long hairy sepals looking as though a berry has fused with a grasshopper. Their colours would be as bright as sunlight on a bag of boiled sweets.
    He cannot contemplate a termination, but what is the alternative? They will have to talk. A child isn’t what even she wants. That was not why she was with him.
    Surely she could not have lied about the pregnancy? Perhaps she wants to hurt him—plant pain in someone —for the injustice she has suffered in recent months. Powerless, demeaned, and discarded, her spirit poisoned—she must dream of revenge and mayhem. He goes under a birch tree whose foliage will begin to yellow soon and by November will lie on the ground under the white-skinned trees like bags of potato crisps spilled by children—oh, how everything must remind her of her son! The boy is said to have—beautifully—observed on the telephone during the summer that “Little whales live in our garden hose, spouting arcs out of its punctures when it is in use.”
    He feels ashamed for entertaining the thought that she might be lying. No, everything he knows about her tells him that she’s not lying. The trees drip last night’s raindrops on him as