Maps for Lost Lovers

short, they were not grown-ups. They thought the world revolved around them. A distinguished Pakistani commentator on the Asian radio too would be forthright: “Some immigrants think that just because they belong to a minority they are nice people, that they should be forgiven everything just because they are oppressed.” As for the murderers themselves, after the verdict had been announced they would begin to shout in the court the litanies, including words like “racism” and “prejudice.” The judge’s remarks would be deemed to have “insulted our culture and our religion.” They’d said England was a country of “prostitutes and homosexuals.” Being led away, the younger, Chotta, would shout: “It’s a kangaroo court!”
    “Come with me, over by the lake,” said the younger brother, pale as death, scattering peacocks as he came running, on the last day of Jugnu and Chanda’s life. “I think he’s dead.”
    The two brothers hadn’t seen each other since late the previous day in the town centre when Chotta had by chance run into Barra who was returning from a visit to his wife at the abortion clinic. She had had the pregnancy terminated as soon as the tests revealed that the embryo was female. The couple already had five daughters and they did not want a sixth one. The woman often worried how they would ever find suitable matches for the five girls when they grew up because no one would want to marry someone whose aunt had set up home with someone out of wedlock.
    When they met in the town centre, Chotta had been alarmed by the tired and distressed look Barra wore. When he commented on it, Barra replied: “I decided to walk home instead of getting on the bus, to clear my head a little.” But the truth soon came out as the brothers walked along the street: “I am ruined. The doctors now say they made a mistake: it was a boy she was carrying, not a girl.”
    The news devastated Chotta too. And Barra went on speaking quietly to himself with tears brimming in his eyes: “They killed my son, they killed my son.” There had been a mix-up at the laboratory, and now it was too late. “The security guards were summoned when I began to shout. It was only they who stopped me from punching the doctor.”
    Chotta offered to drive the elder brother home from the town centre but was turned down because the family van that week was full of the stink of meat. “I’d feel nauseous,” Barra said. “In that case,” said Chotta, “get into a taxi.” He accompanied him to the taxi office and that was where they were told that their sister and her lover were back in England. Although they were given the information casually and in passing, they had both wondered whether there was a malicious intent: this was a taxi firm run by Bangladeshis, and they were a treacherous and wicked people, having broken away from Pakistan to found their own country, the treachery and betrayal of their race going back even further to the time in the eighteenth century when, just before the battle of Plassey, Mir Jafar, the commander-in-chief of Saraj-ud-daullah, had signed a secret pact with the Englishman Robert Clive, and ensured him a victory over the good Siraj, a victory that marked the beginning of the British Raj in India and the beginning of the end of the Muslim rule. Yes, every time there was news of a cyclone devastating Bangladesh, killing hundreds—sometimes thousands—of people in one fell swoop, the brothers at the shop would hear several of their Pakistani customers mutter under their breath that it was Allah visiting his vengeance on the damned Bangladeshis for first helping to put an end to Muslim rule in India, and then, in 1971, breaking away from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
    At the taxi office, on being given the news about Chanda, the brothers had protested that a male stranger should not have uttered their sister’s name with such familiarity: “No one can talk to a man about his women-folk.” It was a fleeting glimpse of the nightmare: the brothers knew the kind of crude talk that went on among the gathering of young men in such places—they too had been participants in many—and they had suspected for a while that their sister’s character and virtue—because of what she had done—was probably discussed in demeaning and suggestive terms behind their backs.
    “We have to do something about her,” the elder said to the younger as he got into the taxi to go home.
    Chotta had come into