Maps for Lost Lovers

is to be feared lest he take offence at anything you’ve said and abuse or divorce your sister. Language reflected this matter: anyone who made himself too comfortable at another’s expense was told to mind his ways because the world wasn’t “the house of his family-in-law.” And there was deeper humiliation too: the word sala —“brother-in-law”—was a term of abuse all over the Subcontinent: to call someone sala was to say, “I fuck your sister and you can’t do anything about it!,” “You can’t stop me from trying my manhood on one of your women!” What could be more humiliating to men who had been brought up to defend their women’s honour above all else? A man’s brother-in-law was a swear-word made flesh, and, frustratingly, he had to accept it.
    Just before dawn on the day of Jugnu and Chanda’s death, Kaukab arrived at the man’s house. “You have played your part in this sin for long enough,” she told him when he came to the door in a vest, holding a shaving brush. He had to be at work by five.
    “I want you to present yourself to your wife’s parents as soon as possible and formally divorce their daughter.” She gave him the shop’s telephone number, but he said he already had it written down somewhere, although he did accept the phone number of Chanda and Jugnu’s house when Kaukab said he could call her directly if he wished. He went to get a pen and she stood there. On the opposite side of the street there was a giant advertising billboard depicting a blonde woman in a lace brassiere, and she remarked to herself that living in England was like living in one big brothel. The billboard of the woman with the lace brassiere had been daubed by some lover of Allah with the words “Fear Your Creator” in another location closer to the mosque. When he came back, she told him: “A word of two syllables, spoken three times— Talaaq, Talaaq, Talaaq — and you would have made God happy. He is compassionate and forgiving.” She left only when he promised that he would stop by at the shop after work.
    He didn’t.
    Kaukab thought she was doing the right thing by approaching him to demand he release Chanda. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said, “He who is a go-between in a fair action has equal merit with the performer and shall meet with reward in Paradise.” She was out there when Jugnu knocked.
    Chanda’s brothers, when they confessed to the murders during the visit to Pakistan, had said: “It was a matter of honour.” Everyone present had agreed. Such killings were not uncommon in Pakistan, but the killers usually killed openly and were proud of their deed. Some even presented themselves to the police afterwards and said they had done what needed to be done and were now ready for whatever punishment the law of the land thought they deserved. The law of Pakistan was almost always lenient with them and they were out of jail much sooner than those who had committed other kinds of murder. And in their streets and neighbourhoods, their act gave them a certain nobility in the eyes of those around them. Chanda’s brothers, on the other hand, had insisted they hadn’t killed her and her lover. They knew the law of this country would not view their crime indulgently. They boasted of having killed her and Jugnu— but only in Pakistan, where the laws and the religion and the customs reinforced their sense of having acted properly, legitimately, correctly. The people who learned of their crime patted their backs and said they had fulfilled their obligation, that such sons were born only to men among men and women among women. They said that he who committed the great dirty sin of sex outside marriage was nothing less than evil; it would not have surprised anyone if bats flew out of the gashes when such a person was stabbed and slain. The friends in Pakistan told them that they had acted wisely by not telling the truth to the English police:
    “They would never understand your reasons. The West is full of hypocrites, who kill our people with impunity and say it’s all a matter of principle and justice, but when we do the same thing they say our definition of ‘principle’ and ‘justice’ is flawed.”
    Here in England, the judge, batting down all talk of “code of honour and shame” would call them “cowards” and “wicked” on the day of the trial. The Afternoon would say, They were the kind of people who don’t realizethat not everything in life is to do with them. In