Maps for Lost Lovers

the idea of having a son but so far none of his wives have given him a boy.”
    It’s beginning to snow.
    “He married again not long ago.”
    Shamas looks up at the house. And there standing in the upstairs window is Suraya.
    She withdraws as soon as their eyes meet but he is sure it’s her, her eyes emitting a light stronger than the moonlight, than the falling snow. Tears? She was wearing her yellow jacket. Paisleys. The paisleys that Parvati’s footsteps formed when she hurried away from Shiva after a quarrel.
    Wasn’t there a curve to her belly—or is he mistaken?
    He turns but the boy has disappeared from his side.
    Shamas looks at the number of the house and, walking away, reads the name of the road from the sign at the corner. “Neela Pathar” Road. The snowflakes are settling on him, a thick crust of them growing on his shoulders. Does Suraya know that the man she has married has no intention of divorcing her soon, that he wants to see if she can give him a son first? Perhaps she didn’t tell him why she wanted to marry him beforehand, thinking he would refuse to marry her under those conditions. She herself has no intention of bearing a child for him—she just wants him to divorce her so that she can marry her original husband again, to be with her son again. But the man has married her solely because he wants her to have a child. He must be forcing himself on her every night, taking her violently. What is she going through?
    He hears footsteps behind him and, without stopping or glancing back, he knows that Suraya is following him through the falling snow. He should continue, continue, away from this road where someone who knows her might see them talking. He takes the turning and finds himself walking towards the lake, where the giant lies buried below the water, trapped but still alive. He looks back but she is not there—she has not been keeping pace with him. But he continues because she’ll know where to find him. At the Safeena. Their Safeena. Their Scandal Point. He’ll wait for her there. There is so much he has to tell her. The third time they met they had talked about the fact that the people from the Subcontinent love wordplay, take great delight in language. And a few hours ago he had had cause to remember that: when his grandson—who is the same age as her son—wanted a drink and asked what choice was available, he had been told there was Vimto, but he had pulled a face and said, “Vomit!” Has she been following the details of the murder trial? Did she hear the rumour that Chanda’s parents had paid a young man to go to the police and say that he and his girlfriend had bought Chanda and Jugnu’s passports from them in Pakistan and had entered Britain with them? But that he had taken the money and disappeared, never arriving at the police station? And now there is another rumour that yesterday Chanda’s parents received a package in the post containing the money they had paid him: there was a note saying he was sorry not to have found the courage to do what they had asked but he didn’t want to keep their money.
    He arrives at the bookshop and turns around. She is still not here but he knows she’s coming—even if she’s got lost, even if she is unclear about where he is, she’ll know eventually to make her way to the Safeena, the way he himself had known back at the beginning of summer that she would be here waiting for him when he left Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s performance. He stands in silence, not knowing what he would say, how he would begin, when she comes. There’s no sound except the waves caused by the heart-beat of the trapped giant, and as he waits the snow intensifies. He stretches out an arm to receive the small light snowflakes on his hand. A habit as old as his arrival in this country, he has always greeted the season’s first snow in this manner, the flakes losing their whiteness on the palm of his hand to become clear wafers of ice before melting to water— crystals of snow transformed into a monsoon raindrop.
    And now he hopes she has become pregnant by him during the summer, that her new husband—thinking he himself is the father—is leaving her in peace because of it.
    Shamas’s child is already saving her, already lessening the amount of pain in this Dasht-e-Tanhaii called the planet Earth.

THE FIRST LOVERS ON THE MOON
    As lightly as ermine moths, the snowflakes float around the boy who was to have been the counterfeit Jugnu. He moves