Maps for Lost Lovers

aware of sounds from downstairs. The winter nights are deceptive, he reminds himself: although it is dark it must be nearly dawn—Kaukab has no doubt gone downstairs to say the first prayer of the coming day. But then he notices that it’s 3 a.m. Too early for the dawn prayer. Even though it is not uncommon for one of them to get up in the middle of the night to go downstairs and rattle the aspirin bottle, he decides to go downstairs to take a look nevertheless. At the bottom of the black staircase there is an envelope-thin slit of light from the door to the kitchen, and on the very last step there is a miscalculation by him—he thinks there are no more steps left—and his foot falls through the ten or so inches of air to land with a thump on the floor, a feeling not too dissimilar to mistaking an empty stapler for a full one and punching it with force. It seems she hasn’t heard the noise and doesn’t react when he enters. She remains motionless but says quietly of the pan on the cooker: “I am waiting for it to cool. It’s still too hot to drink.”
    “Milk?” And when he moves towards it she comes at him from behind and pushes him sideways, his right hipbone hits the wood of the dresser and he jack-knifes with pain. His hand had been about to close on the handle of the pan and the pan tilts off the hob: a transparent sheet of stretched water emerges, and within this long waterfall a thousand one-pence coins clattering to the linoleum.
    A circle of steam expands towards the four walls from the spilled water. She scrambles for the pennies on all fours. “Get away from me.” She tries to shake his hand off her shoulder now that he has staggered forward. “I am going to drink this water.” She turns around and a lioness’s paw scratches his face because he tries to drag her away. “You brought me here. To this accursed country. You made me lose my children.”
    He is terrified. Someone in Sohni Dharti had committed suicide by drinking the water in which a handful of coins had been boiled, the relatives mistaking his broken footsteps for alcohol and putting him to bed so he could sleep it off.
    She looks wildly at him: “I hold you responsible for the fact that my children hate me.” She catapults forward but his arms are ready to grip her from behind, keeping her a yard or so away from the coins overlapping like fish scales. There is no longer any danger because all the water has been spilled, but a revulsion in him must prevent her from touching the coins, a fear of death-contamination—and she seems to want a contact with them for corresponding reasons.
    “Yes, I hold you responsible. Have you read what that beast nephew of yours did to my daughter, my better-than-flowers daughter?” She loosens his grip from around her waist and gets up, the tail of her kameez and the top of the shalwar soaked in the poisonous water. “I want you to know that Mah-Jabin’s chances in life were ruined by you, her father. You didn’t want to move to a better neighbourhood, and no decent family was ever going to come to ask for the hand of a girl living in this third-class neighbourhood of people who are mill labourers or work at The Jewel in the Crown and The Star of Punjab. You have to think of these things when you have daughters. I asked you to put aside your principles when there was talk of an O.B.E., just for the girl’s sake, just so there would be at least something attractive about her to other people, your photograph in the Urdu newspaper for all to see, but you said no, said you neither seek honour among men nor kingship over them. I swear on the Koran I didn’t want any of these things for myself but for the children. I wanted Charag to become a doctor so people would say Mah-Jabin is a doctor’s sister, but that dream of mine failed too. And how am I going to find another man for her now, now that her brother’s picture is in the newspapers but for disgusting immoral wicked reasons. I can only hope no one sees that magazine. How will I face the decent God-fearing people of this neighbourhood if the news of that debased picture ever gets out? How I hate you for allowing Satan to plant his seeds in my stomach.”
    Shamas knows that she’s referring to the belief that Satan shares the sexual intercourse of a husband if he has omitted to read appropriate Koranic verses before penetration. And the penalty is great if the husband has not read specific verses at the precise moment of ejaculation: