Maps for Lost Lovers

things before, but the white person enabled him to say them out loud. And sure enough, soon Shamas too was dancing in that direction:
    While Kaukab was in the kitchen—adding to the refilled salad bowl the radishes she’d carved into intricate twenty-petalled roses with the tip of a knife—Shamas laughed above the conversation in the pink room and, raising his voice, addressed her in Punjabi: “Kaukab, you should really come and talk to our guest: she’s just said something which I have often heard you say, ‘But, surely, the rational explanations of how the universe began are just as shaky. Every day the scientists tell us that their long-held theory about this or that matter has proved to be inaccurate.’ ” Yes, Kaukab had indeed made this observation when defending religion, and now she tried to follow Shamas’s words as he switched to English and said to the white woman, “I am still inclined to believe the scientists, because, unlike the prophets, they readily admit that they are working towards an answer, they don’t have the final and absolute answer.” Kaukab had still not recovered from this when Jugnu added (to Shamas, in Punjabi, proof yet again that the white woman’s presence was just a catalyst for the two brothers to air their blasphemies):
    “And anyway, the same procedures and the same intellectual and analytical rigour that went on to produce the car we’ve driven in this evening, the telephone we talk on, the planes we fly in, the electricity we use, are the ones that are being used to probe the universe. I trust what science says about the universe because I can see the result of scientific methods all around me. I cannot be expected to believe what an illiterate merchant-turned-opportunistic-preacher—for he was no systematic theologian— in the seventh-century Arabian desert had to say about the origin of life.”
    It took Kaukab several minutes to understand what she had just heard, and then she had to steady herself against a wall because she realized that Muhammad, peace be upon him, peace be upon him, was being referred to here.
    Praising things like electricity: the very thing that’s failed this evening, she had fumed inwardly, making you all sit in the darkness!
    Soon her children would be further encouraged towards Godlessness.
    What would she tell her father-ji? She remembered how horrified her entire family had been when her brother had wanted to marry a Sikh woman back in the 1950s, despite the fact that the Sikhs were a people of the Subcontinent, a people whose habits, language, skin colour and culture were somewhat familiar. Who was this white woman? How clean was she, for instance: did she know that a person must bathe after sexual intercourse, or remain polluted, contaminating everything one came into contact with? She had an image of Jugnu and the woman stopping by at the house next door to fornicate before coming around to dinner here: and she felt nausea. And all this had been going on with her own son too, Charag. Kaukab had touched the white woman and would have to bathe and change her clothes to be able to say her next prayers. She refilled the bowl of raita and took it to the table in the pink room, and she had just placed it next to the vase of roses when the electricity returned. The abrupt brilliance so surprised Shamas that he let drop the bottle of wine he had been holding: the liquid splashed onto the carpet and Kaukab stepped back to avoid being touched by the repulsive stuff.
    So they had been drinking wine in the darkness. Kaukab had a sudden illumination: she was hoping to get some sympathy later that evening from Jugnu and Shamas, concerning Charag’s news, but now suddenly she saw how mad that hope was—they wouldn’t see it as debauchery. She was the only one who thought there was anything wrong with the preg nancy, and for that they would silently accuse her of being inhuman, moribund, lifeless. It wouldn’t surprise her if they weren’t all secretly longing for her to die so they could start to “enjoy” their lives.
    The bottle rolled across the floor and came to a stop. There was silence and then Jugnu stood up and said, “Salt is what you need for a red wine stain—isn’t it?”
    “I wouldn’t know, never having allowed that abominable thing into my house,” Kaukab had said, trying to control her rage and disgust. “What else have you learnt from her and her people,” she wanted to ask him, “what else do you plan to