Maps for Lost Lovers

fevers, the abil ity to regularize menstrual dysfunction, and as an antidote to snake venom.
    The sun rounds the corner and begins to sail at the front of the house. She sits there, wondering if that’s who she is, if that’s what her image looks like in the mirror: a mother who feeds poisons to her son, and a mother who jumps to conclusions and holds her daughter responsible for the fact that her marriage ended disastrously? The realizations are still new and she is not sure what effect they will have on her soul after she has lived with them for an hour, a day, a month. The bitterness of the poison is as yet only testing her tongue and mouth: what will happen when it soaks into the veins?
    She hears a car pull up outside and, from the bathroom window, she looks down to see that Charag and Stella have arrived. Charag opens the back door of the car to let the eight-year-old son out. The temperature has plummeted over the past two days and Kaukab is pleased to see that the grandson is wrapped up against the December cold. The end of the woollen cap doubles in a band across his little forehead, over the ears and back along the nape of the neck, for extra warmth. When they were still married Kaukab had once seen Stella and Charag arrive for a visit—and Charag had kissed her on the lips out in the street. Kaukab had backed away. Must they display such lewdness in public? (Chanda and Jugnu at least spared her such obscene behaviour outdoors.) And right there in front of the little boy too, who would no doubt begin to chase girls as soon as he is in his teens and be sexually active by the time he is fifteen, thinking display-of-wantonness and sex-before-marriage was the norm and not grave sins! The little boy would no doubt marry a white girl and his own children would too: all trace of modesty and propriety would be bred out of them. Is this how Charag’s grandchildren would think of Charag?—“My mother and father are white, and my mother’s people are all white. I look a little dark because of one of my grandparents. He was a Paki.”
    The grandson flings his cap onto the linoleum the moment she lets the three of them in. She apologizes for the kitchen smelling of food and asks them all to take their coats into the next room. Before closing the outside door she runs her gaze in a sweep across the street to see if Mah-Jabin and Ujala are returning. She hugs the little boy and kisses his head, face and both hands.
    “What’s that?” Charag points to the crumpled letter that Kaukab only now realizes she still has in her hand.
    She quickly puts it into her cardigan pocket. “A letter from your grandfather in Pakistan. He says he is disappointed that your son—his great-grandson—didn’t begin Koranic lessons at the age of four years, four months and four days, as is prescribed for every Muslim child.”
    Stella is looking into the room next door. “Have Mah-Jabin and Ujala not arrived yet?” The dining table in there is paved with plates. The tablecloth is obviously from an Asian fabric shop, the beautiful material— patterned with movements of flower-heavy creepers—that the Asian women make their clothing out of, the colours often bright, the shapes exquisite, and which, Charag once said, had made his adolescent self look at Matisse more carefully.
    “They have gone for a walk,” Kaukab says as she strikes a match to relight the hobs. She tilts the matchstick downward so that the wood beyond the head tempts the fire into remaining alive. “Please, go into the next room and stay there. I don’t want the smell getting into your clothes.” She was hoping to take Mah-Jabin aside as soon she came back to the house—to let her know that she has found the letter, to ask her to explain the truth about her marriage in Pakistan—but it’s unlikely that she would have a chance to do that over the next few hours. And she has yet to explain to Ujala that it wasn’t her intention to harm him with the sacred salt. Those damned scientists, how they love to analyse everything! As she takes the lids off the pans one by one, she is reminded once again— having forgotten it when she read that letter upstairs—that she has to scale down the evening meal. Suddenly confused, she wishes Mah-Jabin were here to be consulted, and she calls out to Charag in the next room so that he can go out and look for his brother and sister. But he doesn’t hear her.
    Switching on the television in the next room, Charag is startled