Maps for Lost Lovers

dead? Yes or no.” He has been holding a spoon and looking at it whilst speaking. His face reflected in the curved steel of the spoon like a distorted portrait reminds him of the time he saw Jugnu with his reflection on the polished silver back of a scarab beetle.
    “What do you want from me, from us?” Kaukab says, wishing to end this conversation, this battle without visible bloodshed. “Do you want your parents to say that everything they have ever done is wrong? You’d like to know what mistakes they think they’ve made in their life? Well, the biggest mistake of my life was coming to this country, a country where children are allowed to talk to their parents this way, a country where sin is commonplace. But I had to come to this country because your father was a daydreamer and got himself into trouble with the government. Once, when I said we have a child now so please think of the future— think about saving money for the child’s education, about building a house—he replied that by the time this child grows up the whole world would have become Communist, and things like education, healthcare and housing would be free.”
    Shamas is avoiding everyone’s eyes, simply because he wants this episode to be over quickly and not because he is ashamed of what he had once believed—still believes—namely: that a fairer, more just way of organizing the world has to be found.
    Ujala says: “There couldn’t have been a more dangerous union than you two: you were too busy longing for the world and the time your grandparents came from, they and their sayings and principles; and he was too busy daydreaming about the world and the time his grandchildren were to inherit. What about your responsibilities to the people who were around you here in the present? Those around her were less important to her than those that lay buried below her feet, and for him the important ones were the ones that hovered above his head—those yet to be born.”
    Mah-Jabin shakes her head at him: “I think it’s inaccurate to say that Father was daydreaming. It is a noble idea: to make sure that no one has too much until everyone has enough.”
    “Of course it is,” Ujala says, “but what did he do to achieve that end? He didn’t contribute much, if anything.”
    Shamas has accused himself of this always—he didn’t do enough, if anything.
    “Father did contribute. When he came here he got workers at his factory to join the unions; he also battled with the unions because they weren’t accepting foreigners into their ranks,” Charag says. “He’s been involved in such works all his life.”
    Kaukab is distraught: “How they all come to the rescue of their father, refusing to hear a bad word against him, and yet they abuse me openly.”
    Ujala sighs and gets up to stand at the window. There are still many things to say. He feels like a wind-up toy stuck against a tuft of carpet: standing still but full of energy. Everything is suddenly quiet. All evening a winter wind has been blowing around in the streets outside, carrying and making sounds, shaking the Hawaiian grass-skirt of the willow tree in the garden four-doors-down, hurling the frost-stiffened sycamore leaves onto the back lane where they smash like crockery, and rustling the long grasses on the hill beyond, but now all the airborne songs have died down and the twenty maples lining the side-streets are stiffly shaking the last of the wind out of themselves.
    Shamas and Stella begin to clear the table and Kaukab sits down sideways on a chair (to keep her legs free in case she is needed and has to get up): she begins her meal, the food served onto the grandson’s leftovers. Mah-Jabin sits with the nephew at the coffee table: the boy is fascinated by the rotary dial of the 25-year-old telephone, which these days is found mostly on children’s toys. This phone rings instead of chirruping, its receiver heavy the way only the receivers in public phone-boxes are these days, most modern phones being light as a grasshopper husk. Mah-Jabin realizes now that she never telephones home if she knows there would be idle or free time after the call to dwell on the conversation: she always makes sure there is an activity lined up for immediately afterwards. With the dining table clear, Charag goes into the kitchen with Mah-Jabin to bring out the gold-leaved vermicelli. There he asks Mah-Jabin what Ujala had meant by his remark about Kaukab poisoning her sons. She resists but