Maps for Lost Lovers

pass on to my children?”
    Jugnu remained where he was but Shamas got up to retrieve the bottle, despite Kaukab glaring at him. The white woman leaned over and tried to place a hand on Kaukab’s arm, but she shrank away: “Don’t touch me, please. May Allah forgive me, but I don’t know where you’ve been.” She remained standing where she was, now about to break down and cry, now ready to sweep everything from the table onto the floor and begin shouting, but had then turned around to go back into the kitchen: “I’ll get the dahl. I completely forgot to serve it.” She lifted the lid off the dahl and tested a grain of it between her fingers to see that it had cooked to perfection; it had, and so she picked up the ladle and looked for something to serve the dahl in.
    Shamas came and stood behind her. “I thought they would enjoy wine with dinner.”
    Aha! Kaukab nodded. “Enjoy” — just another word for the works of Satan the Stoned-One!
    “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
    “You yourself seem to be enjoying yourself a good deal too this evening,” Kaukab said, doling out the dahl, her back towards Shamas. “Conversing away, using big words to show off to the white woman.”
    “Showing off? How old do you think I am?” He had sighed, and on hearing Kaukab’s sobs had approached her. “What do you want me to say to you?”
    “Nothing. I want you to listen to me.”
    “I will. Why won’t you let me help you with the food? Go and sit down.” And when she pushed him away he added: “Please don’t throw a tantrum.”
    “Who is the one treating the other as a child now? I am not throwing a tantrum: I am angry. Take me seriously.”
    “What are you doing? For God’s sake!”
    Kaukab had arranged four shoes on a tray and was pouring dahl into them as though they were plates.
    Shamas was unable to stop her as she slipped from his repulsive wine-contaminated grasp and carried the tray into the pink room and placed it on the table before Jugnu and his white woman with a loud bang— dharam!
    Kaukab rings Ujala’s number and stays on the line until the answering machine has played the two sentences spoken by him, and then she quickly replaces the receiver. Just then the doorbell rings.
    “Jugnu?” Kaukab whispers to herself and then rushes across the room on legs trembling with excitement to let him in. Ujala? Charag and his littleson? Mah-Jabin?, but it’s a neighbourhood woman, the matchmaker, come to ask Kaukab if she has a veil that would go with the mustard-coloured shalwar-kameez she’s brought with her.
    “I’ll need to borrow it just for one day, Kaukab. Moths chewed out holes the size of digestive biscuits from my own mustard-coloured veil and I haven’t been able to find the replacement of the exact shade,” she explains.
    “I think I do have a veil of that colour upstairs. Its edges are crocheted, though—that won’t be a problem, will it? A row of little five-petalled flowers. Quite discreet.”
    Standing at the bottom of the stairs, the matchmaker talks while Kaukab goes up to her bedroom, taking the mustard kameez with her. Of course the woman wants to talk about the arrest of Chanda’s shopkeeper brothers.
    From the stairs, Kaukab says, “They are saying, sister-ji, that the police got the breakthrough completely by chance. They had spent hundreds of hours investigating the case but the main clue came not in England, but in the Pakistani village where Chanda’s parents are from. A white Detective Sergeant from here in Dasht-e-Tanhaii had flown to that village to make enquiries into a suspected fraud case—a case totally unrelated to the lovers’ alleged murder, I say ‘alleged’ because I don’t believe Jugnu and Chanda are dead—and there he happened to hear a chance remark: apparently Chanda’s brothers had confessed everything to their relatives in the village. The Detective Sergeant flew to England and informed his colleagues who then went to Pakistan to collect witnesses. Sister-ji, the white police are interested in us Pakistanis only when there is a chance to prove that we are savages who slaughter our sons and daughters, brothers and sisters.”
    The matchmaker narrows her eyes: “Imagine, they flew all the way to Pakistan just to be able to brand us Pakistanis murderers, at £465 a ticket, £510 if they minded the overnight stop at Qatar and went direct.”
    Kaukab brings her the veil. “I know Chanda’s brothers are innocent because those who