Maps for Lost Lovers

he goes. In a few weeks it would be like being surrounded by wounds—the red leaves of autumn. The light is already mellower, each ray only half full: the summer was a time of things in light, while autumn is light on things. Kaukab was preoccupied with thoughts of “Perveen” all yesterday evening: “She said she lived on Habib Jalib Street . . .” (She doesn’t—the house she inherited from her mother is on Ustad Allah Bux Road.) “Shamas, she was as beautiful as your mother, may she rest in peace, but she seemed Allah-fearing with it, not that I mean to speak ill of the dead . . . She is a widow, her husband was a poet she said . . . I wonder, Shamas, if her parents or older relatives worked with us in the factories back in the ’50s . . .”
    Coming home from work two days ago, walking slowly through the town centre, Shamas noticed that the photographer to whom all the Asian immigrants used to go to have their portraits done, back in the late 1950s, and the 1960s and 1970s, is selling his shop. He must have thousands of negatives, chronicling the migrants’ early years in this town, he had remarked to himself in passing; and now—as he walks towards Scandal Point to meet Suraya—it comes to him that the town government should buy the negatives from the photographer for its archives. Today is Saturday, and so first thing Monday morning he’ll see what has to be done to set the process in motion, and later today he should visit the photographer in town to tell him not to dispose of the negatives until he hears from him next week. The negatives are far too important to end up at a landfill site.
    Suraya. He remembers something Kaukab has often accused him of in the past: that he retreats from the problems around him by thinking about his work. And now he wonders if he’s trying to drive Suraya from his thoughts—yet another disowning and banishing of her. No, the thought of the negatives came to him just now out of its own accord— that’s all.
    He edges away from a small Japanese knotweed tree of whose pale cream flowers—looking as though dusted with custard powder—he had tried to discover the smell of a few years ago, and found himself taking in a lungful of decay, suppuration, the shock throwing him back on his heels where he had reached up with his neck stretched like that of a hanged man’s. Perfumes come from plants; it’s animals who produce disagreeable odours, humans included. Musk, honey, milk—these are as much an exception in the animal world as those tropical plants said to produce blossoms smelling of festering flesh or this Japanese knotweed around whose shimmering flowers he had cupped both hands that day, the way a young man kisses his first girl. He’ll never now kiss her mouth again while his penis is engorged and sticky at the tip like a bull’s muzzle, or lie with her head on his chest while from somewhere nearby comes the summer noise of a bee that’s got stuck inside a snapdragon flower, a panicked wing-thrash, as it tries to back out. According to her, what she did with him was a “sin,” and she, according to her, will have to bear the “stigma” of that sin “till Judgement Day and after.” She’ll view the pregnancy as the beginning of her punishment.
    There must be a way that the baby in her womb can be saved. He will not—cannot—marry her, but perhaps she could have the baby and live here in England while they begin a custody battle to get her boy away from that wife beater.
    Will he have to tell Kaukab eventually?
    He has been into the town centre to pick up the Saturday papers and is now walking towards Scandal Point and Safeena, hugging to himself the heavy news of all the world.
    He arrives at Scandal Point, but there’s no one there. He waits for a few minutes and then sets off in the direction where she usually parks her car. The lake is striped Kashmir-blue where it reflects the dawn sky, and here and there on a higher wave a patch of red is burning from the east because the sun is rising—red as the beast blood that was poured into the mosque at the beginning of the year. The glitter is uncomfortable on the eye, and heat seems to come off it whenever the head is aligned with it at its brightest.
    More details of the unconscionable crime he witnessed at the mosque involving the little child—no older than Suraya’s son, surely—have been emerging. It turns out that the junior cleric has been to prison for assaults on children at a mosque