Maps for Lost Lovers

the back door, tried it but found it locked, and it was when he turned around that he saw the message Jugnu had left for Chanda in the dew on the grass: The Vision—they shone a clear green in the sea of dark diamonds.
    He went up the slope, knowing a way over the hill that would get him to the path that led to The Vision quicker than the roads and streets Jugnu would be taking. He had to hide beside the path for ten minutes before he saw Jugnu walking towards him in the distance.
    He brought him to the ground with two blows of his fist, but when he pulled the gun out he discovered that he couldn’t decide where to shoot: the gun was pointed one moment at Jugnu’s face, the next at his heart, the next at his groin. Jugnu had recovered somewhat and, rolling over, was soon on all fours, trying to get up. He was hit several times in quick succession at the base of the skull with the gun’s handle, and the blows stopped only when Chanda’s brother realized that his hands were wet with blood. The blood was phosphorescent, glowing the way Jugnu’s hands did.
    Chotta was so taken aback by this fact that it was a while before he realized that Jugnu was no longer moving. He didn’t know what to do about the corpse, and dragged it into the bushes. Leaving it and the gun there, under the foliage, he rubbed the bright liquid off his hands with some soil. He needed to talk to his brother and ran towards the neighbourhood.
    As he neared the shop, Shafkat Ali, who was coming from the direction of the mosque, saw him and shouted to him that cleric-ji had just died. “Only the very fortunate people die on a Friday: it’s not for the likes of us sinners,” Shafkat Ali said; and in addition to that he casually told him that his brother Barra was in the gathering outside the mosque.
    When the two brothers arrived at the narrow birch-lined path and went into the bushes, Jugnu’s body was not where it had been left. The elder brother could smell alcohol on Chotta’s breath.
    “The thought came to me that there was no corpse, that it was just a drunkard’s hallucination,” he would say later, during his confession in Pakistan. “But then we found the gun. It was covered with blood—though it wasn’t luminous: I thought that that was the alcohol talking. But then I saw that the grass was dotted with bright spots of light here and there.” That too wasn’t shining blood: the bright flickerings were in fact the fireflies about whose presence in Dasht-e-Tanhaii there had always been much speculation, many sightings.
    It was obvious that Jugnu hadn’t died: he had recovered and had wandered off somewhere. The two brothers thrashed through the August leaves, flowers, and branches as they followed the drips of real blood. Barra went over the places Chotta had already searched, knowing he was drunk, saying, “In your condition you couldn’t find a mosque in Pakistan, or prayer in the Koran.”
    They saw movement in the distance, in a thick patch of wildflowers— one of those little places of extreme beauty that Dasht-e-Tanhaii hugs to itself—and when they approached it, their nerves taut, they found two teenagers making love. The lovers ran away into the foliage, gathering clothes, shoes, underwear, stopping now and then to pick up a dropped belonging, protectively shielding each other’s naked flesh, turning around each other like two leaves brought together by autumn wind.
    It was twenty minutes past five o’clock—twenty minutes till dawn— when they realized that the trail of blood led back to the lovers’ house. Jugnu had taken the shortcut over the hill—the very shortcut that Chotta had taken earlier—and gone back home, to Chanda.
    As the brothers went up towards the crest of the hill, they passed several peacocks that were displaying their tails, the huge fans shimmering in the pale darkness.
    The two men climbed down the other side where the sycamores and the hawthorns were and when they arrived in Jugnu and Chanda’s back garden the message in dew was still there, the drops each carrying a piercingly bright highlight. The door was open. They went in tentatively and heard footsteps coming down the staircase.
    “Where is he?” Chotta asked Chanda when she came down.
    “He’s upstairs,” she replied quietly after the initial shock.
    She had awakened shortly after Jugnu left for The Vision and, coming downstairs, she had opened the back door to fill her lungs with the early air of a summer-dawn. She