Maps for Lost Lovers

customers to sit in, its tall ornately moulded back bringing to mind the frame of a mirror.
    “When he left me in England all those years ago,” Kiran says, “he said he’d be back in twenty-five days. When we re-met, he said if he were a religious man, he’d believe that God had turned those twenty-five days to twenty-five years as a punishment for not saying ‘God willing’ after telling me about his return. I told him that as far as I was concerned, he didn’t go even after he’d gone.”
    “I never understood why you hadn’t married anyone else.”
    “There were other possibilities. I’d get frightened of the loneliness of old age, and the members of the Sikh community would try to match me up with people. Some good, some not. But.” She waves her hand in resignation. “There was even a white man I had gone to school with and had been terribly in love with as a girl. I was the only Asian in my school, and I used to wonder why no one had ever asked me out on a date. I approached that boy to see if he’d go out with me but he said no. And when I asked him to explain, he said, ‘Well, you are a darkie!’ The word ‘Paki’ wasn’t invented until the 1970s, otherwise he would have used that.
    When he said that to me, I suddenly realized, ‘Of course I am a darkie.’ And because I loved him I didn’t want him to be called a darkie-lover, and decided to stay away from him. He said, ‘It’s a pity you are a darkie, because if you were white you’d be really pretty.’ And then some years after we left school we ran into each other . . . but nothing serious happened. The Sikh friends and acquaintances still try sometimes—they mean well, I suppose—but these days it’s mostly widowers and illegal immigrants.”
    He wonders how long Kaukab’s brother had stayed with her last year and asks her.
    She is silent and then says, “He was still here around the time Chanda and Jugnu died—late summer.”
    “Do you still write to each other?”
    She gives no answer.
    He sees a tear slide down out of her eye and, appalled at his insensitivity at asking her so many intimate questions, he says, “I am terribly sorry.” And this after she has shown him the great kindness of coming to the trial.
    “I have been crying for a while: the tears’ve caught up with me only now.”
    She doesn’t say anything further and Shamas looks away, out where the rain and the ice-clusters have stopped falling, and a day-moon is shining in the winter sky.
    Kiran, composed now, sighs and paraphrases what she said earlier, “I met him on five occasions around Dasht-e-Tanhaii, and a sixth time in my house. That was the last time. I kept his presence in England from my father, and—during that sixth meeting, when he came to the house—I also tried to hide the fact that he was in there. He came very late at night and I took him upstairs . . .”
    “You don’t have to tell me any of this, Kiran. I know it must be painful.”
    “You are too kind. But please let me talk. I was upstairs with him. We poured all our longing into those moments. When we made love, it was as though we were trying to kill each other. And then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs but it was too late . . .”
    “Your father managed to climb the stairs?”
    Kiran places a hand on her breast. “I know I have let you think I came to hear the verdict today as an act of friendship towards you.”
    “Didn’t you?”
    “I was there because of Chanda’s younger brother—Chotta. I thought you knew about me and him. We tried to keep our relationship a secret, but some people in the neighbourhood found out. I’ve always wondered if you were one of them.”
    “And he walked in on you while you and . . .”
    “I had given Chotta a set of house keys. He saw us and went away shouting abuse, pulling off and shattering all those mirrors I have hanging in the staircase. A thousand broken mirrors: there was an eternity’s worth of bad luck in his wake. It all awoke my father. I had to tell him everything. I resisted at first, saying, ‘I cannot tell you what I have done.’ But he retorted, ‘A good person cannot do what others may not know.’ I am sorry, Shamas.”
    “You don’t have to apologise, Kiran. Who am I to deny you the comforts of a companion?”
    She buries her head in his shoulder.
    He places a hand on her head. “Did you love Chotta?”
    “I’ve cried for him, which is the same thing, isn’t it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “And