Maps for Lost Lovers

behind and passed out after being hit on the head with something heavy. You are just defending Jugnu, reflexively, as always, that’s all.”
    He can’t tell her the truth. Helplessly, he watches her leave—not knowing what he can do to alleviate her suffering. He closes his eyes. Out of the fog of the painkillers her words about the photographic negatives now come to him but he is not certain what she was referring to.
    He does however remember everything that happened that morning and hasn’t told it to anyone lest his attackers reveal the truth of his affair with Suraya to Kaukab. It’ll destroy her.
    And he hasn’t wanted the children to know about it because they might come to visit and ask intelligent questions about the events of that morning—why, when, how? Someone might catch him out.
    But even if he wanted to tell someone about what happened, he is not sure he would be able to find a voice in which to do it. The very minor fracture in his trachea is beginning to heal but he’s having trouble speaking. He is not entirely mute but there have been bouts when he couldn’t put a sentence together without stuttering or stammering.
    As soon as he is well enough to walk (the doctors say it could take several weeks), he’ll go to Suraya’s house. He has failed to show up twice for a meeting with her. What happened to her that morning? Did his assailants make it to the Safeena while she was still there? He feels nausea.
    What has Suraya done about their baby? He hopes, for her sake, that she isn’t pregnant after all, that the pregnancy test was inaccurate. His liaison with her has complicated her life needlessly.
    Chinks between the blankets are letting cold air in. He can hear Kaukab moving about downstairs, it being a small house, so little that all the doors slide into walls: Kaukab, mixing up English expressions, had said once, “There is not enough room in here to swing a door.” He can’t remember what he had been thinking about before falling asleep but now he does: Suraya had said she would welcome death, and now he’s afraid that she might try to kill herself—perhaps she already has. Suddenly he is convinced she has committed suicide; and he wonders whether he himself hadn’t died by the lakeside that morning. The two ghosts that are said to be roaming the woods near the lake—surely they are he and Suraya, their baby glowing inside her womb, his hands burning, giving out light, from the newspapers he’s carrying, the searing pain of the world? No, no, he must stay lucid: he must get up immediately and try to obtain all The Afternoon s for the days he’s been bedridden—to see if a suicide has been reported. He must get up immediately. He tries to fight the drugs and stay awake but, like a doll that must shut its eyes whenever it is horizontal, he cannot help but sleep. Yes, yes, he tells himself as he drifts off: he’ll find her the way Shiva had found Parvati when she had walked away from him after a quarrel: he’ll follow her footprints on the ground, a row of paisleys—like the ones on her jacket.
    Kaukab looks out to see if she can find someone on their way to the shop, to ask them to get a packet of pistachios for her. All ears, Adam’s apple, and brittle vanity, a teenager goes by but he is going in the opposite direction; he is smoking and she resists the urge to tell him like a good aunt that he should be fasting.
    Kaukab shakes her head to drive away the smell of food from her head, the smell of Shamas’s lunch—it has mostly evaporated but the tip of its long tail is trapped under the lid of the enamel pan in which the leftovers lie. An Eid card has arrived from her father in Pakistan, full of pop-up doves in flight and minutely detailed palm fronds and jasmine garlands: it is impossible to open without risking a rip to the various tines and frills that stick to each other like eyelashes after sleep.
    She goes to the window and looks out and sees a newspaper photographer taking a picture of the vicar outside the church; it is typical that the white people are treating their holy man as though he is ridiculous for having stood up against the moral vacuum of this obscene and degraded country. For once she would like to go from her house to, say, the post office without being confronted by the decay of Western culture.
    Jesus Christ must be spinning in his grave.
    Why is she stranded at a point in life where just about everything has stopped making sense? She begins to