Maps for Lost Lovers

the air bright around them, the hems of colourful silk-and-brocade robes resting on the black tiles, for the Muslim angels aren’t dressed in white like the Christian ones, nor are their wings plain white: the feathers are green, blue, red, orange, yellow. Birds of Paradise! They have diamond sprays in their chiffon turbans and their cheeks are as though dyed vermilion. Some would be reclining on the roof, others looking in the direction of this house— she is sure they could see through the walls, possessing eyes powerful enough to spot a candle flame on the moon—and a few would have taken off their wings and would be rubbing their shoulders as though for relief, as though the wings are too heavy, the flight to earth too long. She is not sure she would be able to see them because some clerics maintain that angels or the spirits of holy figures cannot be seen by women, who are inferior to men, but then she remembers that the Koran plainly states that Moses’s mother had received a divine message from Allah, a revelation, just as all the prophets had, who were all male.
    Kaukab gets out of bed, performs her ablutions, and opens her Koran.
    No, she doesn’t need a peek into the pages of the Book of Fates.
    She has this book.
    Yes, it’s not our place to say “Why?” or “How?” to Him; we can only say “Help!”

A LEAF FROM THE BOOK OF FATES
    On the last day of his life, Jugnu was awakened an hour and a half before dawn by the sounds the peacocks made as they entered his back garden.
    A man was hurrying towards the mosque because the cleric had collapsed with his left hand on his heart, and the peacocks—who were roaming the dark streets—were made to scatter in every direction by him. The peacocks were a nuisance—liable to scratch the paintwork of cars, and last week they had entered the mosque and several had snatched up rosaries, the beads dangling from their beaks as they were chased out and down the street.
    A few of the birds now entered Jugnu’s back garden for safety amid the branches of the apple trees. The birds had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight ago—no one could tell where they had escaped from. They spent most of the daylight hours in the lakeside woods and in the secluded hilly meadows around the neighbourhood, away from humans, but they came out to the streets at dawn. Their presence in the neighbourhood was disturbing to some. The faithful have always been ambivalent towards peacocks because it was this kind-hearted creature that had inadvertently let Satan into the garden of Eden. Disguised as an aged man, Satan had asked to be admitted but the door-keepers had recognized him and refused, but then the peacock—who had watched the entire incident from its perch on the boundary wall—had gone down and lifted the bedraggled old man with its feet and flown back in with him.
    Leaving Chanda asleep, Jugnu got out of bed. He approached the window and its dimly lit view of the peacocks. A pale summer moon was decomposing in the dark blue sky, which, at dawn, in an hour and a half, would be painted with a light as red as a Kandahar pomegranate. Jugnu was wearing an improvised dhoti: it was his habit, upon getting up in summer, to tie around his waist the light sheet of linen he had slept under.
    Jugnu and Chanda had arrived home from the airport after ten last night, and, exhausted from the long eight-hour flight, they were asleep in each other’s arms just over an hour later; Jugnu had often remarked that an aeroplane journey was surely worse for the body than a ride on a primitive bullock cart along rutted backwoods-village roads. As her dark-green eyes closed last night, Chanda had no inkling that she would never see Jugnu again.
    They hadn’t unpacked. And upon getting up and going downstairs on this the day of his death, Jugnu began to open the suitcases and he soon became engrossed in the notebooks in which he had recorded the information about Pakistani lepidoptera during his visit. He had witnessed a Paradise Flycatcher tear up and feed a Common Mormon to its fledglings in the Kaghan valley. After the monsoon shower in the Salt Range of the Punjab, he tracked the south-easterly drift of Blue Tigers, and he managed to observe the annual migration of the Pale Lemon White through the Khyber Pass.
    In the kitchen patterned with rows of cedars—more gift-wrapping than wallpaper—he opened one of the many small cardboard boxes that contained the butterflies he had brought