Maps for Lost Lovers

sleepy all of a sudden, very tired, eyes heavy and unable to focus. He makes an effort to move his legs but is unable to and closes his eyes . . .
    And then with a great lunge of effort, like a hosepipe whipping into an arc of frenzy as water enters it at great pressure, he makes his body stand upright in tearing eagerness, jerking his head up away from the ground with a burst of energy: in a congestion of tender impulses, he tells himself that they are definitely on their way to harm Suraya—she who is so gentle and careful that she touches everything as though it were a part of her— and he must stop them.
    Suddenly life matters again.
    He can see the three of them walking towards the car and is surprised that he hasn’t been lying here for longer. He limps after them in enthusiastic dizziness, everything a blur and everything perfectly clear. His progress wavers because he cannot walk in a straight line. He has to alter his direction every other second to bring them to the centre of his vision. They slide in and out of view periodically, in unexpected directions and diagonals. He drops and picks up again the torn bundle of newspapers that he had obviously felt compelled to collect and bring with him, not wishing to waste them, not having any memory of the time he made the decision to gather them up from around him before setting out. Perhaps he has vomited—his breath smells—but he has no memory of that either.
    He steadies himself and moves towards them like a bubble flowing helplessly towards a drain. His heart clubbing away inside, he is not sure whether he is groaning but they do become aware of him eventually and stop and turn around.

AUTUMN

IRIS’S WINGS
    Kaukab feels herself being watched from above.
    The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that whenever a man’s earthly wife makes difficulties for him, his seventy-two houri wives—waiting for him up there in Paradise—sigh regretfully. If ever her man wishes to copulate with the earth wife and she makes excuses or shuns him, the houri wives curse her all night.
    The houris reserved for Shamas are cursing Kaukab from up there, because she has just stumbled out of the room where Shamas is lying, a month after his beating. Twenty-five of the past thirty days he has spent in hospital. He still gets delirious sometimes and has attempted to undress her just now, asking her to touch him between the legs, fondling her breasts, wanting her to show him the scattering of moles on her upper thighs that he loves. More than once over the previous weeks while she was visiting him at the hospital, he asked her—in delirium—how she feels about another baby. And several times he called out to someone or something called “Pleiades.” And twice he tried to struggle out of the hospital bed saying, “I have something urgent to attend to at Scandal Point.” The one in Shimla?
    She has of course refused him intimacy before, but each time she has pretended—yes, pretended, she admits tearfully—that it was not a sexual advance, a request for access to her body, and has therefore remained relatively free of guilt, and free of the fear of Allah’s retribution, but the recent touches and caresses have been explicit.
    Shamas is bruised everywhere on the surface and there are innumerable internal injuries, the doctors saying he is lucky to be alive, and his fae ces has been quite liquid like bird droppings since the attack that he has failed to explain to anyone, not remembering anything about it, some people in the neighbourhood saying that without doubt the perpetrators belonged to Chanda’s family, that it is their revenge for the fact that, come December, their sons are facing a life sentence because of Shamas’s brother.
    A woman from the neighbourhood—who recently has been accompanying Kaukab to the gynaecologist because Kaukab has reached that age where her womb is slipping out of her vagina and must be either surgically removed or stitched back to the inner lining of her body—said, “When I heard the news my heart was as a porcelain plate dropped from a high terrace. May these bad times be short-lived and Allah take you both into His compassion once again soon.”
    She has just given him lunch and is now bringing the tray downstairs, the plate glowing in the enclosed staircase: it is part of an old set and she knows that bone china is partly bone, and goes yellow with age due to the phosphorus in the bones. That afternoon a month ago, when he came