Maps for Lost Lovers

in the previous months for allowing their sister to cohabit with a man she wasn’t married to. Many people who saw Barra in the gathering beside the mosque would vouch for his whereabouts to the police later, not knowing if their sighting was of any value. Shahid Ali, who worked the night shift—6 p.m. to 6 a.m.—in a factory (and drew unemployment benefit too), would say that on seeing Chanda’s brother that August Friday, he had remarked to himself that no wonder what the cleric had been promised in his dream hadn’t come true, that the vision of the saintly figure had proved to be false: how could it not when the world was full of such shameless people? “ ‘We are a people so undeserving of miracles,’ I had said to myself with regret.”
    Haidar Kashmiri, who had gone to the shop earlier for the spices, saw Barra and thought that he had found a packet of star anise on a shelf somewhere and had brought it over, not having been able to locate it earlier.
    People had already begun to doubt that a holy man had appeared in the cleric’s dream.
    “But he insisted the figure in the dream was a most-honourable being,” Zubair Rizvi says, “seated in a mosque that was so beautiful that the gaze became glued wherever it landed, with flowerbeds brimming with gul and rehan, with lala and nargis, nasreen and nastreen and yasmeen. ”
    “He listed it all, down to the smallest detail,” agrees Ijaz Rahmani. “He said the air was full of birdsong, the laughter of andleeb, the uproar of the kumri, the wail of the koyal, the beckoning of kubk and daraj. ”
    Barra nodded and said, “He could have been mistaken. He was a mere mortal—”
    But he was cut off by Naveed Jamil who thought it disrespectful to allow such speculation: “I am not shameless like certain other people present here that I should not object to this kind of talk, and right outside the mosque too. There was nothing mere about that mortal. He told us several times that whilst he was praying alone in there, fairies came bearing presents, left them beside him and then hid. He never accepted any of the presents, saying, ‘Take them away, girls, daughters. A rosary in my hand, a prayer mat under my feet, a mosque-floor under the prayer mat—I don’t need anything else.’ ”
    If Barra felt insulted at being so interrupted, he didn’t give any indication; some of the younger men present outside the mosque had gone to school with him and remembered his short temper of those days. “ ‘Do that again and they’ll be tracing you in chalk!’ was what he would say when provoked as a schoolboy,” Rashid Uddin the left-handed would recall later. “But that was no more extreme than anything the rest of us said. Youth provokes you into picking fights with everything in life.”
    That hour, no one was sure whether Chanda’s brother was aware of the fact that, at the barber’s shop last week, Naveed Jamil—the man who had cut him off just now, and more or less referred to him as “shameless” to his face—had said that Barra’s wife was not a virgin on the wedding night, that she was split well before the “night of breakage.” Every gathering in this neighbourhood is full of such broken glass—a person has to pick his way carefully across resentments, allegations, slights to honour and virtue. Naveed Jamil had many years ago wanted to marry Chanda but her parents had turned him down: his lowly origins were said by many to be the chief obstacle—his father had been a hookah mender in Cheechokimalyan.
    Barra left the mosque’s vicinity and was seen walking along the road with the cherry trees. Kiran’s house was situated in that direction. He had known for some time that the Sikh woman was Chotta’s secret lover, but he hadn’t broached the subject with him. And since he had never had the occasion to talk to Kiran, he began to feel awkward as he neared the house because the nights she shared with his brother were a secret, and she’d be embarrassed to know that he was aware of them; she could also turn aggressive out of fear of exposure and accuse him of trying to tarnish a decent woman’s name. She was a Sikh, after all, and their women were known for a certain earthy spiritedness. Some people in the Muslim community were aware of the clandestine love-affair, and hoped that Chotta would do the right thing and ask Kiran to convert to Islam and marry her. They—and Chotta himself—saw nothing in common between his secret nights with a