Maps for Lost Lovers

I do have to apologize to you, perhaps even ask for forgiveness. You see, that night was the night Chanda and Jugnu are thought to have been murdered. I ran after him when I had put on my clothes but couldn’t find him anywhere. He must have been in a rage. I don’t doubt for a moment that I contributed to the anger he unleashed on Chanda and Jugnu. I am terribly sorry.” She looks at Shamas and then withdraws her gaze from him. “Please say something.”
    A bird sits on a bare tree outside, as though waiting for it to grow leaves and flowers.
    Kiran is saying, “He refused to see me all during the coming weeks. I’d stop in the streets on seeing him but he would turn back or slip into a lane. I caught up once, tried to put him in good humour with a dozen cajoleries, but he said women were nectar-coated poison, puffs of coloured dust, dancing butterflies, and pushed me away.”
    “When did you begin seeing him?”
    “I think it must’ve been around the time Chanda and Jugnu began seeing each other.”
    “And it also ended the night their story ended.”
    “The fact that they were happy while he had just been betrayed must’ve made him resent them, perhaps.”
    Daylight has faded altogether now; the road outside has become a river of car headlights heading home. The bus passes the Ali Baba carpet warehouse. Plastic fish are strung by their mouths on a sagging string above the fishing equipment shop, looking like the washing line of small mermaids.
    Chanda and Jugnu are out there somewhere.
    And Suraya.
    Perhaps she returned to Pakistan? But: an unmarried woman with a child in her womb—she’ll be arrested for the sin of fornication. No, no, she’s still here in England.
    Perhaps she aborted the child to be able to go back: her husband was about to marry another woman, and so she did all she could to be in Pakistan to disrupt and prevent the wedding—?
    He has tried to get information from Kaukab about “Perveen,” but apparently she has not been in touch since that first time. “Other women of the neighbourhood got to her, no doubt,” she said with regret. “Telling her lies about me, turning her against me. And, between my own illness and your injuries, I haven’t had time to go to her street.”
    Kiran asks, “Do you want to know how it began?”—and goes on without waiting for his answer: “I heard a knock—very gentle—on my door one night. It was about ten o’clock. I opened the door and he asked me if he could come in. I recognized him from the shop, and although I was taken aback by him asking to be let in, I brought him into the kitchen. He said he wanted to talk, but he kept his eyes on me quite blatantly as I moved about making tea, and it was only after a while that I realized he was drunk. And it must’ve been soon after that that he stood up, eyes still trained on me. We both knew what he wanted to do but neither made a move for many minutes. Things refused to come to a boil. My father asked from his bed who was at the door, and I said no one. That was his prompt. The fear that I would shout if he came near me was what had kept him from making a move but now he knew I wouldn’t. So he lunged.” Without looking at Shamas she says, “I didn’t resist.”
    “I think I understand why you didn’t go to the police to offer information or come to talk to me.”
    “It was because people would have called me names.”
    “I wouldn’t have.”
    “After Chanda and Jugnu disappeared there were rumours about Chanda’s family’s involvement. Chotta had refused to talk to me or see me after that terrible night but it was several weeks later that he came around one day and confessed to the murders. I never saw him again. I am so sorry.”
    “Are you saying you could have helped put the whole matter to rest sooner?”
    “No, no. He told me everything after the policemen from England had got their testimonies from the people in Sohni Dharti. I am sorry.”
    “I don’t know what to say. You did what you had to do to save your name, Kiran. Even he tried to preserve your good name: what happened with you that night isn’t mentioned in any of the testimonies—that that was part of the rage unleashed on Chanda and Jugnu. He didn’t tell it to anyone.”
    The bus is pulling up at their stop. They both go down the stairs and the winter’s chill hits them in the face when they get out. Each day after the trial, Shamas has gone home and told Kaukab the details of what happened at the