Maps for Lost Lovers

really that long ago?” From this existence of two moments, we have to steal a life.
    “Shamas, I haven’t heard whether the police have found out anything about who assaulted you.”
    “No. I didn’t see who it was, so there are no leads. None of my children had been told about it, but they found out when we met at the courts this week. I am mostly healed but they were still shocked by my condition. They gave me a headache as they asked me a hundred concerned questions. Had the police done this, Had the police done that?” They had offered to drive him home, but he didn’t want their company—afraid that a shrapnel of the truth might be extracted from him by them.
    The bus is almost full and they have to sit upstairs. Their bodies become warm soon after the journey begins while, outside, the rain intensifies, big drops that each hit the windows diagonally and break into a row of six to eight smaller drops, sticking there to the dry glass that is vibrating like a harp string.
    “Your sons reminded me of you—the way the elder stands, the younger’s way of talking. I can see them in you.”
    “The children will come home tomorrow for a few hours, much to their mother’s satisfaction. They are terribly missed by her.” His distorted reflection in the steel tubing of the seat in front reminds him of the time he saw Jugnu leaning over a scarab beetle: his face was being reflected in the insect’s polished silver back.
    “I wanted to come to the courts yesterday too,” Kiran says.
    Someone rustles a broadsheet newspaper at the back and it sounds like a peacock dancing with its tail fanned out, the feathers aquiver.
    In the seat in front of Kiran and Shamas a small boy of about eight or nine (the same age as Suraya’s son, surely) is talking to an adult man, an uncle or father; he’s eating an apple, journeying bit by bit along its equator, and his talk is obviously a complaint about school, “Everyone these days is doing the sideways thumb-flick thing when they want to point to someone standing next to them, copying the new boy in class . . .” He stops to take a bite.
    A new boy in class? Shamas’s heart begins to beat faster as it occurs to him that the new boy could be Suraya’s son: could it be that she has managed to bring her son to England? Which school does this apple-eating boy attend?
    “. . . who’s called James Hamby. Everyone thinks he’s so cool . . .”
    The new boy is obviously not Suraya’s son. Just for a moment back then Shamas had had an image of himself standing outside this boy’s school to meet Suraya as she comes to pick up her son. His heart is hammering inside his breast—from now on he’ll see everywhere a possible map that’ll lead him to her. He fears he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.
    Kiran says, “I know how painful the past few days have been for you. When they set up home together, there were rumours that Chanda’s family would soon poison them both. Of course, it didn’t happen—our neighbourhood runs on gossip.”
    “Kaukab, I know, sometimes blames Jugnu and Chanda for what happened. They tried to turn their back on the world, on the world’s trouble, and found themselves stabbed in the back.”
    “Meaning: No one on the planet has yet earned the right to be that innocent?”
    Shamas nods, but his attention is drawn towards the people waiting to get on the bus, out there, now that they are approaching a stop: no, Suraya is not among them. He turns to Kiran. “Do you know this Punjabi couplet?
    Kuj Sheher de loke vi zalim san Kuj mainon maran da shauk vi si
    It’s by Munir Niazi.”
    Kiran translates the words into English, “ On the one hand, the city surrounding me was easily provoked. On the other, I was curious about ways of dying. Though, of course, it’s their curiosity about ways of living that led to Chanda and Jugnu’s death.”
    “The second verse should be, ‘On the other, I was curious about ways of living.’ Kuj mainon jeen da shauk vi si. They did not have a death wish. They had a life wish.”
    “Jugnu, with a blindfold of butterflies on his eyes,” Kiran says after a while.
    “Why weren’t they careful? Even animals know to retreat from obvious danger. For all his love of the natural world, Jugnu should have remembered that all animals retreat from fire.”
    “All, except moths.”
    The sky is getting darker. Evening is on its way, planting flags of sadness as it comes.
    Kiran says,