Maps for Lost Lovers

by the loud burst of noise that comes out: the volume is turned too high. He decides not to ask Kaukab whether his father’s hearing is deteriorating: he had asked once but Kaukab had denied it and seemed to consider the inquiry impertinent. A son may not notice his father’s inadequacies. Tonight he will contrive to show Shamas how to access the subtitles on the remote control: white, green, yellow, red—each person speaking a differently coloured sentence.
    A black-and-white Tarzan movie is found for the little boy and Stella sits with him in front of it with the assurance that he’ll like it. “What does he turn into?” he asks after a while and he loses interest immediately when he is told that the character doesn’t turn into anything, isn’t transformed into a monster or otherworldly creature, that he remains a human being. But then he looks up, points to Tarzan and says, “He speaks like Grandma Kaukab!”
    The three of them go back into the kitchen just as Kaukab is opening the door to Mah-Jabin.
    “Ujala is still at the lake,” she announces, and, holding Kaukab’s eye, makes the smallest possible movement of the head to convey reassurance, “He’ll be back in a moment, Mother. We walked all the way to the Safeena. ”
    With her arms around her little nephew, Mah-Jabin buries her lips into the soft skin of his neck. How old would her child have been now had she not lost it?
    Stella tells her she has the beginning of a cold: “There was a spectacular storm scene in the play I went to not long ago. Wind machine, real water for rain.”
    Mah-Jabin smiles and lowers the boy onto the floor and turns brightly to Kaukab. “Let’s get the food ready. Fasten your tastebuds, Charag and Stella. No doubt, you two haven’t been asked to help with the preparations because Mother is too polite . . .” Stella is assigned the task to locate the cellophane bag of crushed summer mint from the ice-compartment and add them to a bowl of yoghurt. The beaten pulp is frozen solid in the cellophane like a creaking chunk of tundra with prehistoric algae in it, and there is no adult way of breaking it apart: it has to be done clumsily the way a child would do it.
    Leaning into Mah-Jabin at the first opportunity, Kaukab tries to tell her that she knows the truth about her marriage but all she can say is, “Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t know what was going on?”
    Mah-Jabin knits her brows and puckers her lips into a silent Shhh, and whispers back, “It’s OK. We’ll talk later. I think he knows you thought it was just ordinary salt.”
    “I am not talking about Ujala,” Kaukab says, and wonders if she would know how to broach the subject of her marriage with Mah-Jabin later. “But, for the record I didn’t know anything about that too.” Her eyes are red.
    From her coat pocket, Mah-Jabin takes out a pack of tamarind pulp: “I thought we could add it to the chutney, Mother. I stopped by at a shop on my way back.”
    Kaukab is immediately concerned. “You went into a shop?” She knows the women of the neighbourhood know the girl is divorced, and is sure they would have made comments about her to each other—comments about her character, about her Western dress and cut-off hair.
    “Yes. Chanda’s parents’ shop is closed. I went to the one in the next street.” She unwraps the tamarind. “A woman came in while I was there, a wealthy-looking, well-dressed woman. She must’ve heard that somewhere around here two brothers had killed their sister, and, not knowing that I was the niece of the dead man, she began berating the two murderers. She said, ‘People like that are ruining the name of Pakistan abroad.’ She was visiting from Pakistan, staying with her relatives in the suburbs who had brought her to our neighbourhood for amusement—if their suppressed smiles were anything to go by whenever a woman entered the shop with bright village-like embroidery on her kameez —to show her how the poor Pakistanis lived here in England, the factory workers, the bus drivers, the waiters. She couldn’t hide her contempt for us. Apparently she had been called a ‘darkie bitch’ by a white man in the town centre during her first week here and was resentful. She said, ‘The man who called me that name was filthy and stinking. And he would not have called me that name if it had not been for the people in this area, who have so demeaned Pakistan’s image in foreign countries. Imagine! He thought