Maps for Lost Lovers

dying. And beg pardon from us and your parents for all that you put us through. And don’t forget your husbands, ask forgiveness for the times you may have overlooked their concerns and comfort. The soul will leave the body easily if you repent before dying.”
    “She’s gone,” said Chotta who’d been looking for signs of life in her body. “What do we do now? I don’t want to go to jail.” He shook and opened the canister set on a shelf in the cellar, and giving it a sniff he discovered that it was motor oil, used to power The Darwin. There was another one of petrol because the Sheridan Multi-cruiser ran on an equal mixture of oil and petrol. He would say later in Pakistan that, just at that moment, he was overcome by the enormity of what had happened, the great difficulties that still lay ahead: “I felt like a spider caught in its own web.” But, as it turned out, things went their way. Barra would say, “What appeared to be an impossibly huge mountain from the distance, turned out to have paths all across it once we got closer.”
    It was just as the sun was rising above the hills that Barra left the house, to search for Jugnu, the sky turning the blood-red of anemones in the east. Chotta stayed behind in case the wounded man turned up, Chanda lying on the cellar floor, the two cans set beside her, still full. “I thought the police had arrived when I heard the door open twenty minutes later,” he would say in Pakistan. Barra would interrupt him and say, “But it was only me, coming back. I didn’t find him but while going by our shop I saw that the newspapers had been delivered, and I picked up two batches of them where they had been lying on the doorstep, and carried them to Jugnu’s house, to wrap up her body.”
    The message in the dew was already beginning to evaporate.
    They decided to leave her in the cellar until that night: they’d bring the van and carry her out to the woods by the lake.
    Chanda’s mother telephoned the newspaper delivery people when she opened the shop at just after six-thirty, to complain that they had got their order wrong, that some of the papers had not been delivered that morning. Both Chotta and Barra were back in the shop by then. Barra stayed at the counter to help his mother because his wife—who was the one who usually stood at the counter with the woman at that hour—was in hospital, recovering from the abortion.
    Chotta went to bed. They were both agitated all day, and Chotta was eager to go to Shamas’s house to deliver the bag of chappati flour Kaukab had ordered over the telephone. His mother told him it could wait till the next day when he would be making the door-to-door rounds in the van to deliver the sacks of rice, potatoes and onions, but he went anyway, despite the fact that the shop was busy with the people who had come to say the funeral prayer of the cleric-ji.
    Chotta would say in Pakistan that he had hoped Kaukab would tell him if anything was suspected, if Jugnu had turned up during the day.
    “But the woman didn’t say anything unusual, just took the delivery of the flour. She was kind and very courteous towards me because she sided with us when it came to the whole affair.” So Jugnu was still lost out there somewhere. As planned, at around one o’clock that night, they took two of their butcher knives and a cleaver, a saw, two hammers, a large box of black bin bags, a shovel and a Chinese-made Diamond Brand axe—one of the thousands imported each year and selling in hardware stores for £4.50—and went back into Jugnu’s house.
    They were in the woods until five, using the implements, digging, burning with the help of Sheridan’s fuels, dismembering and burying her changeable eyes, her hair, the flesh orchid of her womb.
    They didn’t know where Jugnu was. Two days after they disposed of Chanda’s remains, they went into the house to see if they had cleaned up everything properly, because someone at the shop said that her little son had gone into the back garden to look at the wren in the denim jacket and noticed a funny smell coming from the house.
    Kaukab too noticed that faint smell, but she thought it was probably one of Jugnu’s creatures that had died in his absence, or that the fridge full of butterfly and moth cocoons had broken down. One year he had bought a chameleon—against her protests, because it was a chameleon that had bitten through the water-skin of Hazrat Abbaas in the desert, causing him to go without