Maps for Lost Lovers

morals, that her family had been right in the 1950s when they refused to let her marry her brother; perhaps she would accuse Kiran of lying about her brother’s secret visit to Dasht-e-Tanhaii—? But, he must admit, he had also envisaged the opposite reaction: that she would insist Shamas not reveal to anyone the details of Kiran’s love affair with Chanda’s brother or the night she spent with her own brother: “People would gossip and point fingers at the poor woman. You have no idea how easy it is to ruin a woman’s life.” Now, as he steals glances at her, he wonders which of the two Kaukabs is the real one.
    She seems contented, her children around her.
    The pots sing on the fire. Dipped in beaten egg, the shami kebabs drip like a cow’s mouth from a drinking pail and they are noisy when lowered into the oil which crackles like cellophane. Everyone except Kaukab and Mah-Jabin sits down and eats from the yellow plates arranged on the table in the next room. In the kitchen, Mah-Jabin asks Kaukab to join the others too—seeing as she has been on her feet all day and also has the pain in her abdomen to consider—but Kaukab bats down the suggestion, and then Mah-Jabin tells her that she will come to Dasht-e-Tanhaii to be with her when she has to go to the hospital for the operation in January, that she has arranged leave at her work. Kaukab tells her to lower her voice— “There are men within earshot, and this is women’s business.”
    The mother and daughter, with a Lakshmi-like abundance of arms and hands, have filled all the plates and, while the kebabs are taken steaming to the table in batches by Mah-Jabin, every other minute a new chappati is ready from Kaukab’s hands. Growing as it does from two whorls at the crown of her head instead of the usual one, Stella’s hair is often unruly, and with a touch of his finger Charag removes the irritation of an escaped strand from across her cheek, an action he—at one time—would perform with his tongue, kissing her face afterwards.
    Kaukab asks Mah-Jabin to go join the others when the initial servings are over and the meal enters a more relaxed phase, the food unfolding warmth in the eaters’ bodies.
    Shamas unspools the thread from around the grandson’s “starfish leg.”
    The spicy cauliflower goes into Stella’s mouth and comes out through her eyes as water.
    Tiny beetroot stars—that Kaukab had punched out of the beetroot slices with a cutter—are lined up in a growing necklace where they are being discarded towards the edge of Ujala’s salad.
    There are white specks associated with calcium-deficiency on Stella’s fingernails, and Kaukab is privately taken aback when she notices them for the first time as she takes a chappati to the table: she is ashamed whenever these marks appear on her own nails, yet another proof for the white people that the Pakistanis are unhealthy people, disease-riddled, filthy bearers of epidemics like the smallpox they brought with them to England in the 1960s. Ever since Charag and Stella arrived she has been worried that she has forgotten to brush her teeth in time for their arrival, to get rid of any bad odour before the white girl came.
    Stella tells them all about the fair she had taken the child to not long ago. Eating from cellophane bags stuffed like pillows with candyfloss, they went into the tent where a Sleeping Beauty lay on a satin-draped bier. The body was a wax statue and, as proof that the princess was dead to the world, the impresario pierced it through the gown with a long pearl-headed hat pin. To approach the sleeping body was to become a child that had awakened from a nightmare and gone into the parents’ room for comfort, or, Stella thought, a thief that had broken into a house with its occupant asleep unawares.
    Kaukab says the princess should have had a few scented geraniums scattered about the palace corridors so that the intruders brushing against them would wake her up.
    Surrounded by hair as long as a wild horse’s mane, the face on the bier belonged to the woman who was hiding underneath the wax body— and they saw her drunk when the fair closed, staggering about the cobbled square, weeping with her wig in her hand and shouting abuse at passersby.
    Halfway through the meal, Charag reminds Stella that there is a gift for Kaukab and Shamas in their car, and when Stella gets up to go to the car, Kaukab asks her to remain seated: “It’s too cold outside—cold as outer space. Charag