Maps for Lost Lovers

he began to revive immediately upon arrival were thirteen, eight and four. “The droppings of a moose look and smell the same as deer droppings,” he told them, “and if you try you’ll find that they taste the same too.”
    Perhaps the most recent photograph in the bundle which was consigned to the attic is the one that shows the three children sitting cross-legged beside a beached minke whale, its pink corduroy belly resting on the wet packed sand, the reflection of the setting sun stretching like a golden path from the sea’s edge to the horizon, the sky above them a combustion of emerald feathers that were, perhaps, the tattered outer-edges of the thunderstorm that happened to be raging here in this inland valley town that afternoon. As evening passed and night descended, Shamas and Kaukab had looked out of the rain-lashed windows of their house with rising panic:
    Lightning strikes without caring whose nest it burns: Shamas and Kaukab were terrified that the four of them would not make it home in time before the pubs shut and the streets were full of drunk white people.
    On the road through the cherry trees, Shamas enters a sphere of street-light like a day and emerges from it as though into night, again and again. He turns into the sloping side-street between the church and the mosque. Verses from the Bible translated into Urdu, especially those extolling the virtues of Christ as saviour, are regularly pinned to the noticeboard in the churchyard and they are torn down in the middle of the night just as regularly.
    From the incline between the church and the mosque, Shamas sees the faint shimmer of heat haze clinging to the roofs of all but one of the houses in his street—Jugnu’s. The Darwin —Jugnu’s Sheridan Multi-Cruiser speedboat—is still there in his front garden, covered by a faded tarpaulin.
    As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe. There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla Hill as in Dhaka. Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had re-christened everything they saw before them. They had come from across the Subcontinent, lived together ten to a room, and the name that one of them happened to give to a street or landmark was taken up by the others, regardless of where they themselves were from. But over the decades, as more and more people came, the various nationalities of the Subcontinent have changed the names according to the specific country they themselves are from—Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan. Only one name has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
    The Wilderness of Solitude.
    The Desert of Loneliness.

IN DARKNESS
    Kaukab looks out of the window and watches a little boy climb the sloping side-street lined with the twenty maples. The six-year-old is on his way to the mosque and his grandmother has just telephoned Kaukab from three streets away: “Keep an eye on him, sister-ji. He won’t let me walk him to the mosque anymore. He is becoming independent and wants to go alone. I am telephoning everyone I know along his path because you have to be careful—every day you hear about depraved white men doing unspeakable things to little children.” And the woman rang off with a sigh: “We should never have come to this deplorable country, sister-ji, this nest of devilry from where God has been exiled. No, not exiled—denied and slain. It’s even worse.”
    Kaukab remains at the window after the boy has disappeared from sight, and then she blots her eyes with her veil. It has been seven years and a month since she and Shamas heard from their youngest child, her beloved son Ujala. She lifts a small framed photograph from the shelf and looks at him, his hair falling on his shoulders, the body beginning to stretch in adolescence, his mouth grinning, and she recalls that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had said that Allah had revealed Himself to him in the beautiful guise of a long-haired fourteen-year-old boy. She presses the picture to her breast. He was always recalcitrant—everything she did seemed to disgust him—and he left home as soon as he could. The daughter Mah-Jabin calls every month or so and visits once or twice a year. Charag, the eldest child, the painter, came during summer last year, and hasn’t telephoned or visited since. He is divorced from the white