Maps for Lost Lovers

intently licking off tiny beads from their hands and arms, she was appalled on being told that they were butterfly eggs, her eyes narrowing critically, her endurance reaching its limit when Jugnu told her, in all seriousness, that there was no cause for anxiety because he had made sure that the eggs were safe. “Some butterfly eggs do contain poisonous chemicals as protection against predators, especially those species which lay their eggs in clusters and produce brightly coloured eggs . . .” Such information was second nature to him and he often forgot that he could not assume a similar learning in others. “. . .And nor is there any need to worry that the children may jeopardize a species by eating its eggs: these came from the butterflies that scatter them during flight, the Skippers and the Browns. They had no chance of hatching any way, so don’t worry—”
    He stopped there, having noticed the look on his sister-in-law’s face.
    One of the children said: “They landed on us while we were out by the lake.”
    After that morning Kaukab tried on a few occasions to prevent the children from going out to the hills with Jugnu to collect butterflies and moths, but her wish proved a net of weak threads.
    Paper turns yellow over the years because it’s burning very slowly due to contact with the air. Stacked chronologically, the photographs of Jugnu in the various boxes in the house the police had termed “the house of death” would form a spectrum of pale browns.
    The earliest photograph, showing the gentle nineteen-year-old boy their mother always said was Allah’s way of compensating her for the daughter she had always wished for, dates from 1966, the year he arrived in Moscow to study at the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University. Learning Russian and obtaining a bachelor’s degree would take him five years; and afterwards he would return to Pakistan briefly, shortly before their father died. There followed a few months in a damp cold house in England with Shamas and Kaukab, and then he moved to the United States.
    “Who is this green woman in a sari?” Kaukab had held up the Statue of Liberty postcard he had sent from New York, a short note informing them of his safe arrival and asking about the seven-year-old nephew’s tuberculosis, with love to the baby niece—the girl who would try to contain her laughter in a decade’s time, when he had returned to England, as she asked him to explain the large moustache a photograph showed he had grown during his six years in the United States.
    On the day she spotted a bottle of whisky in one of them, Kaukab had had all the photographs sent up to the attic, away from the impressionable eyes of the three children in the house, and they would remain there until Jugnu moved out to live next door.
    On the road with the chestnut trees he hears footsteps behind him on the snow, but there’s no one there. There have been moments over the past few days when he has felt that it is he who has died and been buried— and he hears his own footsteps as though someone has come to find him and dig him out.
    Two months after Chanda and Jugnu disappeared, the police had contemplated extending their investigation to the United States but the passports of the two lovers were here in England, in the house next door to Shamas’s.
    From Tucson to the orange groves of California and then on through Oregon towards Washington, the journey Jugnu made during his first three springs in the United States with migratory beekeepers took him two whole months, stopping along the way to let the bees pollinate the crops. As he drove, the truck hummed with the three-million bees in the back and he reeked of banana oil long into each year. He painted radium dials in a clock factory one winter and it was there that a spillage had left his hands with the ability to glow in the dark, making them irresistible to moths.
    He had briefly married an American woman whose trade it was to marry illegal immigrants and divorce them after they had been granted legal status. He never knew how lonely he was during those six years until the news of his mother’s death reached him in Boston where he was working on a doctorate. The following year he flew to England.
    It was 1978, and the cry in Britain was that immigrants should be sent back to the countries they had come from: Just look in the telephone directory:there are thousands of them here now. He was thirty-one; and the children whose spirits