Maps for Lost Lovers

is moved that the boy had noticed her, had paid enough attention to her to have identified a trait of sorts. She wants to kiss and nuzzle him but stops herself in case the whites have come up with a theory about grand mothers and grand sons too.
    “It would be a feast if I were making something special: these foods are everyday.” She has found another reason to bolster the lie Mah-Jabin has told to save her. She wants to make a humorous comment at this point: “But, yes, being a housewife is difficult. I sometimes say to myself that if I had studied medicine I would have had to take the exam just once and be respectfully called a doctor for the rest of my life, but in domestic life you have to take and pass exams every day, and even then appreciation isn’t guaranteed.” She is in the process of mentally translating all this into English to be able to tell it to Stella, when Ujala returns.
    Head drooping like an elongated sunflower, he seems as gaunt and withdrawn to Kaukab as before when she dares to take a quick peek at him, but he joins in with the tasks and even carries and lifts up the eight-year-old to the cooker to let him look into the pot in which the bitter gourds are sizzling. “What are they?” he asks the child.
    “Starfishes!” the boy exclaims on seeing the plump pointed gourds that have browned on cooking and now do look like dismembered starfishes.
    “That’s right. We are having starfish curry,” Ujala says.
    Over the next hour—while December’s darkness falls outside—the kitchen is animated as voices rise and hang in the air for short periods—a mouthful of food taken directly from the pot resulting in a bout of praise for Kaukab; the grandson spitting out a mouthful of half-chewed M&Ms like coloured gravel; Charag smiling and telling Mah-Jabin to finish the apple she has left to brown on the table (“Apples don’t grow on weeds, you know—as Mother always told us”); the threat of a tantrum from the child, followed by a counter threat of punishment from one of his parents, a fawning taking of the sides by the grandmother, the young uncle, the aunt—but these are short lived and the air becomes tense and subdued quickly: yesterday—with its verdict—is like a colossal block of ice that’s still too near, breathing chilly air on everyone’s skin. The house, as it floated through time, has arrived at an iceberg, and no one is sure whether it will ever move away from it, leaving it behind. Now and then, to relieve the silences, Kaukab says, “Allah is great!”
    When she goes upstairs to the bathroom immediately after Charag has been there to wash his face, she notices that the linoleum is warm where he had been standing just now, and she has to steady her heart with joyful fingers—her cold cold house is full of her children again. There’s warmth in unexpected places.
    Shamas comes home just as Kaukab is telling Stella about a woman in the neighbourhood both of whose identical-twin daughters became pregnant at the same time: one of them has had the baby in the seventh month, and now the news has to be kept from the other in case she too fails to carry the pregnancy to full term; luckily the still-pregnant girl lives in America so it’s easier to hide the truth. Every time Kaukab has spoken to Stella, she has surreptitiously breathed into the hollow of a hand and sniffed it to see that her breath isn’t stale, and she has missed the sarsaparilla root that is thrown into the brass or earthenware containers which hold a household’s drinking water in Sohni Dharti, to sweeten the water so that its scent will freshen the mouth when the water is drunk.
    Shamas realizes that the grandson is about the same age as Suraya’s son. He tries to drive the thought away.
    He knows he’s going to end up wandering around this town, muttering her name.
    He looks at Kaukab when she is otherwise occupied, to see what kind of a day she has had. The last few days—if not the last few months—have been devastating for her, he knows. Each day after the trial he came home and told her the details of what happened at the court, and she had been inconsolable. Last night he wondered whether he should add to that story of Chanda and Jugnu’s last few hours on earth what Kiran had told him on the bus, weave that dark thread into the already-dark tale. But he feared how Kaukab would react—she would see Kiran’s secret affair with Chanda’s brother as proof that she was a woman of loose