Maps for Lost Lovers

notebook with the things she overheard, words whose meaning she didn’t know, proverbs jumbled up, sayings mistakenly glued to other sayings:
    The grass is always green with envy on the other side. Love is in the air but is blind as a bat. Blood is thicker than water through thick and thin. It will be a cold day in Hell when Hell freezes over. A friend indeed is a friend, indeed. Heaven is other people.
    This last she had heard and remembered correctly, Hell is other people, but she had later begun to doubt herself: surely no one—no people, no civilization—would think other people were Hell. What else was there but other people?
    She never did take that language course. But when they bought a television in the 1970s—it was a Phillips because her father had owned a radio made by that company back in Pakistan so she found it a reassurance and also knew it could be trusted—she began to watch children’s programmes with her children, but each one of the three moved on eventually, leaving her and her rudimentary grasp of English behind.
    Now she stands up and moves towards the telephone. Dialling carefully, she waits for the call to connect but then hangs up after the first ring, her courage failing. A minute later she dials again and, bravely, keeps herself from walking away. She lets it ring. The answering machine at the other end has a message in Ujala’s voice. He has refused to speak to her personally for years now, but she rings his number every few days to hear his voice, always afraid lest the boy himself pick up the phone and proceed to say something unpleasant to her, something abusive, telling her she is heartless, is partly or wholly responsible for the deaths of Jugnu and Chanda, having been outraged when they set up home together.
    Overcome by fear, she hangs up for the second time.
    Yes, she had objected to Chanda moving in with Jugnu, but she is not heartless and hadn’t disapproved of their love. When she heard the rumour about the pair, she remembers being secretly relieved that Jugnu had chosen a Muslim this time, all his previous women having been white. Jugnu was in his late forties, and Kaukab knew he must marry this girl and settle down. But then they began to live together in sin and Jugnu refused to listen to her no matter how reasonably or passionately she tried to make him see the error of his ways.
    She was already anxious to see Jugnu settle down and raise a family long before Chanda appeared. Shamas—unwilling to think about such things unprompted—agreed with her whenever she insisted on raising the subject. They would then talk to Jugnu together. The last time the two of them broached the subject with him, seven years or so ago, he startled them both by replying: “Good. I have been meaning for you to meet her.” He was referring to the white woman Kaukab had seen with him in the town centre on two occasions during the last month.
    It was high summer, and on the day of the dinner Kaukab worked in the kitchen all morning. She went to sit out in the sun for a few minutes as the afternoon wore on, all the summer foliage giving a sea-tinge to the light in Dasht-e-Tanhaii as though a green scarf had been draped over the sun. That was when Charag came home on an unexpected visit: Charag—the son whom she had sent away to university in London to get an education—had come to inform her that he had a girlfriend who was not only white but also pregnant. The news stunned and repulsed Kaukab, and she held Jugnu responsible for her misfortune. Once, on seeing a diagram of a moth’s innards in one of Jugnu’s magazines, Kaukab had wondered how there could be room in so small a creature to house so many mechanisms, and that summer seven years ago, her own despair was immense although she was tiny: she accused Jugnu of leading her children astray. After Jugnu, her mind, flooded with bitterness and sorrow, had turned on Shamas because Shamas himself had confused the children with his Godless ideas, undermining her authority and devaluing her behaviour as though it was just neurotic and foolish—Jugnu only finished the job Shamas started years ago.
    And then she held her own father responsible for having chosen an irreligious husband for her, the father whose impeccable judgement—she had said at other times—could be counted on to remain unclouded during all circumstances, uncowed even by the most monumental of world events so that he had sent a nine-page telegram to Ayatollah