Maps for Lost Lovers

home clutching tattered newspapers to himself, he looked as though he’d been in a room full of glass cases when an earthquake had struck, and that those cases had contained venomous snakes. His face was swollen and when she saw him there was a split-second of confusion as to his identity before she recognized him—by his clothing. He was dribbling as though an egg had just cracked in his mouth.
    Her womb—the first dress of her daughter, the first address of her sons—is a constant source of pain these days and she comes down the stairs carefully. She tells herself that she must bear up patiently, that a person is like a tealeaf: drop it into boiling water if you want to see its true colour. She reads verses from the Koran when the pain looks as though it is about to increase.
    By the white forenoon
And the brooding night!
Thy Lord has neither forsaken thee
Nor hates thee.
    Since midmorning there has been a distant buzz in the air from the grass-cutting machines at work on the meadow-like slopes behind the house. The wildflowers there are receiving their second cut of the year, and, all afternoon, a scent which is a compound of sap and shredded petals has been swirling down the hill, having a leavening effect on the atmosphere.
    She’ll make some rice pudding for Shamas this afternoon because he has asked for something sweet, and goes to check that there are pistachios in the cupboard. And maybe she should taste Shamas’s food— despite the fact that it is Ramadan and she’s fasting—to make sure that the things like spices and salts are in proportion. Allah—ever kind, ever compassionate—says that if you are a slave, a servant or a wife, and your master, employer, or husband is a strict man, you are allowed to taste the food you are cooking for him during your Ramadan fast to see that the salt and spices are according to his preference, to prevent a beating or unpleasantness. Shamas doesn’t mind, but—since he is not well— perhaps her violating the fast would fall into the category of wifely devotion and love, and be excused.
    There are no pistachios, and she wonders if she should go to the shops to get them, though Shamas’s claw managed to scratch her painfully between the legs before she escaped; as it is, nowadays it’s hard for her to even stand up sometimes.
    Kaukab hasn’t informed her children of their father’s beating because she is afraid they would believe the rumour of Chanda’s family’s involvement and do something improper or illegal. Her children are mild-mannered with the exception of Ujala, but that sight upstairs will move anyone to do something drastic. She imagines various horrible scenarios like one of her boys ending up in prison like Chanda’s brothers for having committed a violent crime.
    “O just think how that girl Chanda managed to destroy her entire family,” a woman said recently—the day Shamas got beaten up, in fact.
    That the man who was equally responsible for the ruin of the shop-owning family was dear to Kaukab did not prevent the woman from saying this out loud in front of her, because everyone knows that Kaukab had disapproved of the two sinners. Kaukab and the women had been sitting in Kaukab’s front garden—which is the sunny side of the street in the afternoons—and peeling and preparing vegetables, discussing various matters. Just then a bird had started to shriek somewhere nearby, so that Kaukab and the others had had to cover their ears; and then realizing that the bird was in the lilac tree beside the garden gate, a woman threw an enraged slipper in that direction. They were stunned when a rose-ringed parakeet—“Here in this country?”—emerged and flashed away, the slipper getting stuck in the branches, a few heart-shaped lilac leaves falling out onto the ground. The bird paused for a few moments on a telephone wire to smooth its plumes, sprang up and then disappeared into the sky. “They were said to be flying about on the edges of Dasht-e-Tanhaii but now they are spreading into town, it seems.”
    And then suddenly everyone had their mental activity arrested for a few seconds because they had seen Shamas standing at the bottom of the garden, past the lilac tree, his face and hair bloody, clutching torn newspapers to himself. The women sat as if painted in a picture, wonder settling on them in layers. There were a dozen or so flies around his blood and wounds. And then Kaukab, her tongue feeling dry down to its very root,