Maps for Lost Lovers

should go.” Stella is wearing a skirt, her legs visible below the knees, and Kaukab doesn’t want anyone in the neighbourhood to see the exposed skin and comment on it: when they were still married, she had asked Charag to tell Stella to not dress in that immodest garment—at least during her visits to this neighbourhood— but nothing happened. She hadn’t expected Stella to begin wearing the shalwar-kameez and the head veil (though nothing would have pleased her more; many white women do abandon their old way of dressing upon marrying Muslim men) but she didn’t wish to see female flesh on display.
    Charag gets up and goes out to the car, returning with a small brown-paper-wrapped square fastened with a cord. “It’s a surprise, Mother. Open it.”
    Kaukab unknots the thread, remembering the first time she had made a knot in something in Stella’s presence: she had suddenly gone numb, wondering if there was a Western way of tying a knot—more sophisticated, better. Perhaps the way she tied knots was an ignorant way of tying a knot?
    “I bought all the photographs and negatives from a photographer in town the last time I was here. They are from the ’50s, ’60s and the early ’70s, of Pakistani and Indian immigrants,” Charag says. “I met this woman at the lake who planted the idea in my head that perhaps I should try to incorporate into my art the lives of the people I grew up amongst— examine and explore them.”
    “And going through a box, he found this,” Stella smiles. “Extraordinary.”
    It is a photograph of the family—Charag and Mah-Jabin, as children, sitting cross-legged on the ornate rug on the studio floor; Shamas standing and looking impossibly young; Kaukab, seated on a reproduction chair, pregnant with Ujala, the stomach swelled out like a bulb, like the middle of a vase. Kaukab smiles as she holds up the framed picture for everyone to see.

    “I remember making this shirt for you, Charag.” Kaukab smiles. “You complained the collar was too stiff. The fabric was crisp as a new bank-note.”
    “It was completely by chance that I went in, to rummage around but then the photographer said he would be going out of business later in the year. Look at Mah-Jabin’s two plaits! How pregnant were you then, Mother?”
    “Don’t be vulgar,” Kaukab frowns. “Later Mah-Jabin would demand I make only one plait, saying, ‘On the way to school the two brothers walk either side of me and each flicks one of them whenever he feels like it.’ With one plait she managed to cut the difficulty in half.”
    Shamas can scarcely believe what has occurred. When the photograph is passed to him he, instead of looking at it, asks Charag, “Where are the others? Are they in a safe place?”
    Kaukab’s bright glance appeals to Stella against the impossibility of men. “Who cares about the others? Look at the one in your hand. ”
    “No, no, they are an important document,” Charag says. “They are safe, Father. I might want to do a series of paintings based on them.”
    “I wanted the town to buy them, but as long as the people in them are celebrated somehow and not allowed to be forgotten it doesn’t matter who has them.” He places his hand on Charag’s shoulder. So the pictures have been saved!
    Charag wonders whether his father has so far been indifferent to his paintings because he thinks that his work does not contribute anything to society. Shamas had never encouraged him to become a painter, despite seeing examples of his talent around the house since childhood, despite the fact that his India-ink drawing regularly accompanied Jugnu’s Nature Notes in The Afternoon; and Shamas had disapproved when he did become a painter. Had Shamas—who had known politically committed artists in Pakistan—thought that the artists in England were engaged in a comparatively trivial activity?
    Shamas looks at Charag, a bird in his chest pipping proudly: My son . . . My son . . . He hasn’t known how to read Charag’s paintings in the past— they seem too personal to the boy to hold any interest for Shamas—but now, now that he has mentioned that he might do something with the photographs of immigrants, Shamas knows he is maturing as an artist, becoming aware of his responsibilities as an artist.
    Which to hold dearer: my love for you, or the sorrows of others in the world?
    They say the intoxication is greater when two kinds of wine are mixed.
    Good artists know that society is worth