Maps for Lost Lovers

her children. There are searing convulsions in her belly like the “three-day pain” a woman suffers after giving birth, the womb going mad looking for the baby it had contained until recently.
    She wishes she had the Book of Fates for a few minutes so she could flick through the golden text, looking for happiness, while moths hit the windowpanes of the house loudly, to get at the light emanating from Allah’s ink. If only the angels would accidentally let fall the Book and it would land in her garden encircled by a brief nimbus of pure gold brightness. As it dropped through the dark air it would attract the attention of moths from the warmer corners of the universe, and they would follow its journey as though they were being sucked into a vortex. They would be hovering above the Book as it lay in her garden, those otherworldly moths, in an excited dance like sparks above a fire, the wings thinly haired like the back of a man’s hands. She would go down and pick it up, waving the insects aside with her free hand, maddening them with the smell of spices that still clings to her from earlier today. The Book would be very cold from its journey through outer space, and she would quickly step back into the house with it, clutching the secrets of her destiny to her body. And when she opened the pages the luminous words inside would light up her face—she’d feel the pressure of the light resting on her skin, as she looks for happiness.
    She’ll find the page where the family had gone to have that photograph taken (as Allah willed and the angels wrote down with quills plucked from their wings).
    Turn a few pages, and here she is six years ago, looking out at the young man who had been Ujala’s school friend—her boy-doll of a son Ujala— going by the house. Ujala had once swapped a coat with him for a pair of shoes the way young people do sometimes. And she had noticed with a pang that the coat was too small for the boy who wore it now, and she was reminded of how much Ujala too must’ve grown in the years she hasn’t seen a new photograph of him. At that age boys get bigger and taller at such a rate that they outgrow their clothes during the time it takes to buy them at the shops and to unpack them at home.
    Moving forward, she’ll look for the day last year that Chanda and Jugnu are supposed to have died—just to prove to herself that the courts had made a mistake, that Allah is compassionate and merciful. But what if it’s all true? What did Allah have in mind by having the two lovers killed? She remembers a couplet of the Mughul poet Ghalib: My destiny’s script — due to the carelessness of its writer — is covered all over with smudges of spilled ink: these dark spots are the black nights I spend away from my beloved.
    No, no, she mustn’t complain even for a half moment about the amount of unhappiness He has written in the Book for her: she must remember that Hazrat Rabia—may Allah hold that esteemed daughter of the dawn of Islam in His light till Eternity—had once confided to a friend that the amount of happiness in her life was beginning to trouble her: “I wonder if Allah is angry with me for some reason. Why hasn’t He sent any tribulations my way for a while so that I may please him by triumphing over them or bearing their burden without losing faith in Him.”
    And suddenly now she is afraid: how could she have entertained those thoughts about the Book of Fates? No human is ever to set eyes on it. Such flagrant disobedience! No, no, if the Book ever fell to earth, she would bring it in and then wait for the angels to come looking for it. She’d know they have arrived because the noise of the moths outside the window would lessen—their light would attract some of the moths away from her house. Would they look a little like the ones she has always imagined? During the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, some of the bombs that the Indian jets had dropped on Pakistan had not exploded upon landing, and several clerics had said that they had personally seen angels appear and intercept the bombs in midair and carry them in their arms to gently place them on the Allah-beloved soil of Pakistan. Would they match the angels’ descriptions Kaukab had read in the newspapers at the time? An iridescent cloud, up there in the sky, would retain a precise cut-out where one of the angels had flown through it. They’ll settle on the mosque roof, no doubt, as they wait for her to bring them the Book,