Maps for Lost Lovers

from Pakistan.
    One box—which held several Common Guava Blues that had been caught in the guava orchards of Malir and Landhai, just outside Karachi—would be found on the kitchen shelf when the police forced their way into the house thirteen days later—because the couple had returned earlier than they had planned, no one would miss them till then.
    As there was no food in the house, Jugnu boiled some water and drank a cup of black coffee while he waited for the first sign of life in the house next door so he could go and borrow bread, milk and eggs from Kaukab. He went outside and hesitantly approached the denim jacket that had been hanging on the line since spring because a wren had built a nest in one of its pockets. He noted that the bird family seemed to have thrived in his absence.
    Going past the lily tangle of the garden next door, he dug up an onion from Kaukab’s small herb patch for an omelette, his hands glowing in the gloom-rich corner. He didn’t know that he was being watched.
    All but two of the peacocks had dispersed by now, and they were sitting near Jugnu, also watching him. But they too had vanished by the time he came out of the house for the second time (the suitcases lay in the kitchen like gutted carcasses) to knock quietly on Kaukab’s door because a light was now on in there.
    There was no answer.
    On the small patch of grass in front of the back door there was dew, and Jugnu, using his hands as a brush, wiped the words The Vision onto it. The words were a clear green amongst the silver-grey-green beads. It was a message for Chanda: Jugnu had decided to walk to the farm of that name where fresh bread was sold at this hour. He’d buy other provisions for breakfast from there too.
    The farm was a mile away, beyond the lake and its xylophone jetty. The family that owned it also bred orchids in a glasshouse presided over by a lightning-shattered elm. Since long before Jugnu knew them, they had been trying to breed a flower resembling the one to be found at the centre of a gold-and-ruby Fabergé egg. The dazzling heirloom had travelled through the decades and each new generation of those tenacious yellow-haired giants seemed obsessed with creating a living copy of the jewelled sculpture. “But that flower is the work of the imagination,” Jugnu had once said to them with a smile. “It’s like trying to live a life described in a beautiful poem or a perfect novel.” They came to the neighbourhood of Asian immigrants every year to invite children to take part in the annual “worm-charming” competition held on the farm. There could be up to fifty-million earthworms beneath an acre of land; and each team of children was allocated one of the tablecloth-sized squares in a field. The ground was beaten with sticks, pounded with fists, stamped on, until the vibration brought the worms to the surface. There were prizes for the most earthworms collected (the record had been standing at 763 per-square for several years), for the longest earthworm, and the heaviest. But the mothers in the immigrant neighbourhood were always apprehensive about letting their children take part because the field where the competition was held was next to the cemetery and they did not want their children to handle anything that could have fed on corpses.
    Jugnu took his keys and came out of his back garden. The barber’s son—having driven his taxi all night—was just pulling up outside his parents’ home when Jugnu emerged into the street. The old man sat in the car next to the son, who, as testified by the black-and-white photograph that hung in the barbershop, looked exactly like his father when he was young.
    Jugnu stopped because his way was blocked by the car door opened on the pavement side. And with a greeting and a smile, he reached in and relieved the old barber of the box he had been holding on his lap. There was a scraping of claws inside when the box tilted in his hand. A strong smell of bird-droppings and feathers came from the box which told Jugnu that on his way home from his night’s work the son had collected the father from an all-night quail fight. Some members of the older generation indulged in this passion which was illegal in England but wasn’t prohibited back in the Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi towns and villages they came from. Most young men, born here in England, were uninterested in the activity, but there were younger men at these fights here in England: they were the