Maps for Lost Lovers

grew. They liked to flutter about in the high crowns and laid their eggs on poisonous lianas. The Bhutan Glories had a fragrance which even lingered for some time after they died, and Jugnu had dipped these ten live specimens in dry ice to induce deep sleep in order to study the scent-related mechanisms. Having finished, he had put away his microscope and the notebooks, leaving the butterflies to revive in their own time, and had gone upstairs.
    While he was up there, the heat from Chanda’s face had roused the Bhutan Glories.
    Failing to find her full voice, she let out a small startled cry when a “dead” Bhutan Glory gave a rustling spasm, flapped its white-striped wings and—all compressed power—lifted itself from the surface of the blue table to—extraordinarily, without losing any of its elegance, in spite of the recent somnolent state—begin dipping and swilling about through the interior, and it was followed immediately by another and then one by one the rest as though they were all threaded at regular intervals onto an invisible string, were the bowed tail of an unseen kite that swayed and undulated.
    The bag of star anise fell from her hand and the spice—an ingredient for the food of some of Jugnu’s butterflies, and for which he had telephoned the shop earlier, saying they were to send it to his house if someone was coming this way—scattered on the floor.
    “I didn’t know they were alive, that I hadn’t just dragged them out of their graves,” she explained to Jugnu as he helped her gather the wooden stars a few minutes later, all ten of the Glories scraping their wings against walls, probing the objects in the room and the ceiling above them, slowly whisking a million molecules of perfume into the air.
    Beginning in about a month, they—Chanda and Jugnu—would lie in the various rooms of this house on secret trysts, the windows curtained and the clocks daringly put away the way they are in casinos—but they wouldn’t know in enough time that they were gambling with their lives.
    They contrived to meet for sensual dalliance in other places too, in the age-old manner of lovers, Jugnu telling her about Keshav Das, the court poet of Rajah Madhkar Shah of Orchcha, who wrote in the sixteenth century of how every day in summer the cowherds gathered on the banks of the Jamna, the girls on one side, Krishna and the crowd of boys on the opposite side: the two groups dived into the water and after a while emerged once again on their own side of the river, each lover having met and entwined with the beloved under the surface, their longing satisfied for now, the disapproving world unaware that any contact had taken place.

GHOSTS
    Carrying the jar of coins, Shamas nears the lake. The sand lines on the shore emit a pale brightness like the dry smears of grainy starch left on the knife that has been used to cut potatoes. Is it here that the ghosts of Chanda and Jugnu are said to roam? The lake reeks of minerals, the deep centre of the mass rising in response to the tug of the moon, making a sudden and momentary hill of water that causes the leaves floating on the surface to roll down towards the margins, the leaves that would stick coldly to the bodies of children whenever they braved the chill and went swimming in early autumn, marking them like fawns, and which they would pluck off each other when they emerged onto the land.
    Standing here at the edge of the lake in night darkness with the long jar of coins that shine in the moon, he could be a figure out of a fairytale published in The First Children on the Moon —perhaps a fisherman who is releasing back into the water a fish that is in reality a marine princess whose grateful father would then give him a boon, bestow on him the ability to bypass reality. He walks along the water’s rim until he comes to a point where the water is deep and lowers the jar into the lake. It sinks, sending up a noise of bubbles. The water is full of large stones here—each the size a horse’s egg would be if horses could lay eggs (as the child Ujala had once described something). He turns back, crossing leapingly the little wet patches of the sand as though jumping from one square of a hopscotch grid chalked on a pavement to the next. While the moon dances on the waves, he goes past the Safeena and takes a mouthful of whisky at the xylophone jetty where lovers have carved English, Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu initials into the wood. When Kaukab was screaming at