Maps for Lost Lovers

woman he was not married to and Chanda setting up home with Jugnu. “I am a sinner,” Chotta had said in the past, regarding his fondness for alcohol, “but I am not an apostate. I know I am sinning. That’s the difference.”
    As things turned out, Barra didn’t have to knock on Kiran’s door. A dark-blue wave of peacocks ran towards him from behind with their dot-of-oil-on-water’s-surface tail feathers in disarray. He stopped and turned around. The birds were being scattered by Chotta, who was running towards him, out of breath. He arrived, pale as death, and grabbed him by the upper arm.
    “Come with me, over by the lake,” he said. “I think he’s dead.”
    When Jugnu knocked on Kaukab’s back door—soon after being awoken by the peacocks, a few hours before he died—she was not in the house, though the light was on.
    She had got up, unable to sleep, and gone out—to see the man Chanda was married to. She had run into him the previous week and asked him to do the decent thing and divorce Chanda “so she can marry my brother-in-law.” The man was aloof and said he would see what he could do when Chanda returned to England. She asked him where he lived so she could send Shamas to talk to him.
    He worked in a factory and left for work at an early hour and Kaukab, lying awake all night, thought in the dark about Charag and the news about his vasectomy.
    The previous week, coming home from the town centre with a few things from Marks and Spencer, Kaukab had seen a woman from the neighbourhood walking towards her, and recognizing her as the woman who had once bristled upon seeing her with a Marks and Spencer carrier bag, telling her that as a Muslim she shouldn’t buy anything from that shop owned by Jews, Kaukab had stopped on the bridge above the river to conceal the bag with the St. Michael logo in her coat. When the woman neared, Kaukab realized it wasn’t the same woman, but she saw that the man standing on the bridge not far away from her was Chanda’s third husband. Naturally, she changed colour when she saw him. She approached him and introduced herself. “ You have forced her into that sinful situation,” she told him. She reminded him of how much Allah hated the unjust, and she demanded to know his address. He seemed taken aback by the force of her will and told her where he lived when she asked him.
    He had been living in England illegally already for three years when he married Chanda. He had arrived in Britain on a three-month visa as part of a television crew from Lahore, ostensibly to film a drama serial for a television production company, but had then “disappeared.” In reality there was no serial: the actors, the crew, the photographers were all young men and women who had paid thousands of rupees to the people who ran this and other similar immigration scams. He washed dishes in a restaurant but Chanda’s parents had agreed to the match because they were desperate to see their twice-divorced daughter married again and settled. “Life weighs as much as a mountain,” Chanda’s mother had said, “so how will she be able to bear the burden of it on her own?” The father had agreed: “Even a tree dries up if it’s on its own.” They knew they had to trust Allah and not despair because to be the parent of a girl had been a trial since time immemorial. Chanda’s mother would quote the Pakistani poet Hasan Abdi:
    The walls carry the scent of humans—
Had others been imprisoned in this dungeon before me?
    They both kissed the marriage certificate. They envisioned a happy future at last for their girl but it was like trying to project a film onto a spider’s web, because it was obvious from the start that the man had married her simply to gain British citizenship. Chanda’s brothers and parents were courteous—even respectful—towards him, and he too acknowledged and returned their kindness during the year or so it took for his nationality to be finalized. But after that he changed, saying they should buy him a car, that the shop should be signed over to him, or he would divorce Chanda. Chotta hit him one day over an insult and he disappeared soon afterwards, having emptied the cash register of everything it contained.
    Chanda’s brothers had accepted the contempt he had repeatedly shown them during the previous weeks. They had been brought up to believe that a man must respect his brother-in-law because he has taken the burden of your sister off your hands, that he