Maps for Lost Lovers

beard of acne he must’ve had as an adolescent, “is it fair that you wish to deny other families the service your own family contemplated using not long ago? Why are you trying to blacken our name, asking awkward questions through your office? We are but humble slaves of our community.”
    The more the man talks the more terrible it is for Shamas. Once again, and for an instant, he thinks this isn’t really happening, that his total disbelief will presently set reality straight and make these men vanish. He looks at the talking man’s empty hands as they are balled into fists that are now being aimed at his face, his head, his ribs. The newspapers fall from his grip. The other men join in with blows of their own. When he cries out in pain, they hit him harder, on the kidneys and belly, and he does not know where to put his hands. A metal finger ring grazes his face and the pain is as though a line had been drawn on his face in sulphuric acid.
    The blows came harder and faster but then, as though he is being hit by a single person, they begin to come after measured pauses, the men deciding, calculating carefully where to hit him before doing so—they are obviously people who understand the reality of violence and inflicting pain.
    He can no longer breathe through his nose and as he lies there, the newspapers, torn or whole, scattered all around him, he feels a mouth draw close to his face and say,
    “This is just a mild warning. Next time we’ll deal with you in a Pakistani way. Watch out or I’ll crush you like this”—he makes a fist and squeezes it tighter—“and lick you off the palm of my hand.”
    “And don’t go to the police about this—unless you want people to find out about what you have spent the whole summer doing with that whore of a woman at the bookshop.”
    Another voice adds, “In that small room it must’ve been hot as a pistol that’s just been fired but, no doubt, the sweat these two worked up kept them cool.”
    “He said earlier he had to be somewhere. Maybe the dirty shameless bitch is waiting for him over there as we speak, her fat tits at the ready, the knot of her shalwar ’s drawstring loosened.”
    There is the sound of laughter. “Perhaps we should go and see.”
    “Look at him. He’s trying to growl at us. I think we are hurting his feelings by talking about her in this manner. She’s obviously so pure that angels can use her clothing as prayer mats. In fact that is why she’d take off her clothes and put them on the floor—to let the angels praise Allah on them—while he shoved his cock in her mouth or got her arsehole ready with fingers dipped in oil.”
    One of Shamas’s eyes is looking into the ground and the men vacate the second eye’s view, moving away. There is a red pricking in both his eyes, both have caught a fresh glimpse of the humiliations Suraya went through with him in order to be united with son and husband. How she must have loathed him during the hours she spent with him, he who was under the impression that she was with him out of her own choice, had yet to be told the truth about her circumstances by her!
    He lies there with an ear pressed to the ground (down there where Chanda and Jugnu are turning into clay) as though trying to listen out for something, as though he’s a traveller in a fairytale who’s heard someone call out to him while he was crossing a forest, someone buried alive by a sorcerer who will be freed and jump out of the hole when the traveller digs deep enough.
    He feels the sun creep up on him. Someone with a stick-crazy dog will come upon him soon, he reassures himself; those animals and their masters are constantly taking each other places, the dogs’ fur covered in inch-long bits of grass like wrong-coloured stitches on a garment; the dogs wrapping their leads around their owners, revolving and describing circles like a lighthouse’s beam. Or one of those figures he always sees from a distance, busy with a boat and its triangular sail at the edge of the water, their legs spread like a wishbone, ripples of breeze running across the material of the sail like the flank of a cow twitching away flies, in Pakistan.
    Shamas lies on the grass after the voices of his assailants have receded into the distance, the newspapers rustling around in the descending silence, touching his skin, a ripped-up piece dyed crimson red with blood—his, for he can taste the salt in his mouth. He cannot keep his eyes open and feels very