Maps for Lost Lovers

sparkling patterns of bird feathers, insect wings and leaf skeletons, as though each home contains within it a magical forest, tangled with fables and myths, the glittering foliage growing pressed against the glass. Each street has become a row of books on a shelf.
    Shamas no longer feels the pain in the fingers that he wounded the other morning, scrabbling for half-penny coins in the snow on the riverbank. He no longer feels the wasp-sting soreness. The skin is mending itself fast. Under the hard scabs on his fingers, the new skin has the fine buffed sheen of mother-of-pearl. Pale pink. Jugnu—the lepidopterist— said that because there are no pink butterflies in nature, the ones that were released into the air during the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park in July 1969 were in fact white ones dipped in pink dye.
    Shamas doesn’t know what led the police detectives to name their investigation into the disappearance of Jugnu and Chanda “Operation Ivory.”
    The officers who came to the house that morning to inform him officially of the arrests said that the two men were being held separately—to highlight inconsistencies in their tales—and he has visited the police station twice since then, talking first to the Detective Chief Inspector and then to the Detective Superintendent, both of whom are in charge of the case. The Detective Superintendent said that the lack of bodies is a stumbling block but it will not prevent the team from battling on to secure a conviction. He has been told that the trial will be in December. There are numerous legal precedents in which the murderers who thought they had covered their tracks had been brought to justice. As long ago as 1884 there were cases in which the courts were prepared to bring in convictions without a corpse: that year, two seamen who had eaten cabin boys while drifting for hundreds of miles at sea in an open boat, were found guilty of murder. A more recent case concerned a wealthy woman kidnapped for ransom, and although she was never found, the police had charged two brothers with her murder. The court heard that she had probably been fed to pigs.
    Suddenly he understands why the investigation was called “Operation Ivory”: the police knew that there was every possibility of there being bones to gather up.
    Language can provide some refuge from terror, as when the words “lethal injection” are employed to refer to “poisoning”; to “send someone to the electric chair” means to “burn them alive”; and to hang is to “strangle.”
    The rumours concerning the missing couple—he must try to think of them as dead now—are many (they had turned into a pair of peacocks!), but these are the facts. Last summer, Chanda and Jugnu went to Pakistan for four weeks. It was the last week of July and they were expected back in August. Chanda—the daughter of a nearby grocery-shop owner—had moved into Jugnu’s house back in May, against her family’s wishes. They did return from Pakistan—the passports and luggage were found in the house, the documents showing that they had come back a week earlier than expected—and were murdered sometime over the next few hours or days. Neither Shamas nor Kaukab saw them arrive, nor were they aware of their presence in England—right next door.
    Inside Chanda and Jugnu’s house, there are numerous glass-topped cases containing moths and butterflies of every colour, from the dull and inconspicuous to the glossily enriched, the visual equivalent of a nightingale’s vibrant note, the long pin impaling each body reminiscent of the shaft that passes vertically through the wooden horse of a carousel.
    Button-shaped or bottle-like, truncated cones or spheres full of spines like sea urchins, or domed as though intended for the roof of the smallest mosque imaginable: sometimes the eggs of butterflies are laid on tree bark, in neat groups like vases in a potter’s courtyard, and sometimes they are positioned on the surface of a leaf, as far apart as the tastebuds are on a human tongue, or they may run around a twig like a spiral staircase. They come in as many colours as contact lenses, as disposable cigarette-lighters, and possess a similar translucence. They may be left exposed, glued to the selected base, while the females of some species cover theirs with a blanket of hairs which they free from their abdominal surface.
    And if Kaukab was puzzled one brightly hot summer morning as she came across her three children