Maps for Lost Lovers

nothing legal that can be done; nor is it legal to disclose addresses and telephone numbers of women’s refuge centres. Do they call this man and his associates after they leave Shamas’s office in disappointment?
    The man seems not to have read Shamas’s silence as hostile. “We’ll need photographs of Mah-Jabin and Ujala, of course, and National Insurance numbers. Credit card details too prove useful. Very little force would be used, I personally guarantee that.”
    Shamas’s skin has become chilled: the man knows Mah-Jabin and Ujala’s names. “I know where my children are,” he hears himself telling the man. “Now excuse me. I really must leave.”
    “We’ll be gentle. We do what the parents say. One mother and father wanted us to bring back the girl—who had run away a week before her arranged marriage to a decent-enough cousin from Pakistan—and they said we could use as much force as we liked but were not to hit her face because that would show in the wedding photographs and video. If we had to we should hit the body—which would be covered up with the wedding gown—or we could hit the head—where the veil and the hair would hide the bruises.”
    “As I said, my children are perfectly happy and so am I.” He is trying to suppress his anger, his earlobes hot.
    “You may be happy but is your wife?” A voice comes from behind Shamas.
    He turns around and sees that two men are standing ten yards away from him, and behind them, a further ten or so sun-filled yards along, on a narrow cement path that cuts through the swathe of wild grasses and late-summer’s imperfect blossoms, is a car, three of its four doors open. Maple leaves glisten above it, those at the lower edge of the canopy moving rhythmically to and fro on their long stalks like the pendulum of a clock. All this is glimpsed in the sweep of the gaze, but Shamas’s eyes have returned to the two men because they have begun to walk towards him.
    And the man who had been talking to him takes a step nearer to him too, aggressively. The two men arrive and in turn take his right hand into their own in an enforced shake, smiling.
    He is not used to this: the people he has dealt with up until now have left their authority at the door when they entered his office. All three of these however are standing too close to him, and he is starting to tremble, experiencing a kind of vertigo and an unpleasant lightness in his feet—an awareness of being close to the edge of something.
    He wonders whether Suraya’s husband could have sent these people.
    Maintaining his composure—he does not wish to appear undignified in front of these strangers—he steps out of the cordon they seem to have made around him and begins to walk away at a controlled pace. But they, obviously unconcerned about what he may think about them, break into a little run as they try to keep up with him and he is brought to a halt as all three overtake him and block his way. It could almost be playfulness— but he is beginning to think that it is not a game but a blood sport.
    One of the two who had been waiting behind him earlier says: “Shamas-ji, you are happy with the situation but your wife came to us several months ago, a year and a half ago to be precise, to see if we could track down her son Ujala, and before that, four or five years ago, she had wanted us to see if your daughter Mah-Jabin hadn’t fallen in with bad company. She told us in passing that she was devastated when Mah-Jabin left her husband, despite the fact that like every other decent mother she had told her daughter that the house you are going to—the house of your husband and in-laws—is Heaven but you are not to desert it even if it becomes Hell, that as far as the parents are concerned a daughter dies on the day of her wedding.”
    The second of the new arrivals says, “Your wife did not want you to know about the fact that she had visited us obviously because you don’t have a mother’s heart in your breast and wouldn’t have understood. A mother misses her children when they run away so she wants them back.”
    “Some women in the neighbourhood had put your wife in touch with us—she is, of course, a very polite and pious lady. In the end, on both occasions, she didn’t want to go through with it, but we were very distressed by her plight. She said her children were the other half of her heartbeat.”
    “Now,” says the second new man, his face pitted around the mouth, scars from the