Maps for Lost Lovers

turmeric, salt, and red chilli powder, shaking her head at how that whole affair with Jugnu’s white woman turned out. After the dinner that night, Jugnu didn’t come around to Shamas and Kaukab for about two weeks, though they both heard through the walls the sounds of arguments between him and the white woman, and Kaukab once saw the white woman emerge from the house in tears. Several weeks of silence followed, and she knew Jugnu had broken relations with the woman, but he still refused to come see Kaukab; she gathered all the information from Shamas. Ujala had recently moved out of the house (forever—she would realize as the years passed), after yet another argument with Kaukab, so Kaukab only had Shamas as her source of information about Jugnu. And it was Shamas who told her one day that Jugnu and the white woman were back together again, and it was Shamas again—his face drained of blood, his voice full of panic—who told her a few days later that Jugnu was in hospital with glucose drips attached to his arms and painkillers being injected into his bloodstream every few hours.
    “That diseased woman, this diseased, vice-ridden and lecherous race!” Kaukab hissed as she sat by Jugnu’s bedside at the infirmary. Apparently the woman had decided to go on a short holiday after breaking up with Jugnu and had one night drunkenly slept with someone who had given her a disease, a prostitute’s vileness which she had unknowingly passed on to Jugnu when she returned to England and got back together with him. The disease was found in Jugnu’s manhood but also in his throat, and Kaukab tried to control her nausea when she realized how it must’ve got there. Such accursed practices, such godlessness! That disease was surely Allah’s wrath and punishment for such behaviour.
    Jugnu had to stay in hospital for eight days and Kaukab nursed him back to health when he came home, bedding down on the floor next to him at night in case he needed something. She could do nothing about Jugnu’s insistence that the news of his ailment be kept from Ujala: the boy hadn’t visited the house even once since he moved out, and a small part of Kaukab—may Allah forgive her!—had been secretly pleased that Jugnu was so severely ill; surely that would bring the boy home to his beloved uncle immediately. But she had to respect Jugnu’s wishes in the end, and told him that the first thing he had to do after his recovery was to locate and bring back Ujala.
    And she told him squarely that she didn’t believe him when he said that the white woman had picked up the disease in Tunisia. “She’s lying,” she said firmly. “Tunisia is a Muslim country. She must’ve gone on holiday somewhere else, a country populated by the whites or non-Muslims. She’s trying to malign our faith.”
    She attempted to keep any neighbourhood women from entering the house during Jugnu’s convalescence, lest a careless word by someone in the house led to the disclosure of the true nature of Jugnu’s affliction.
    The neighbourhood women. Kaukab stands at the kitchen window now and looks out, and she can hear them all around the neighbourhood, this neighbourhood that is noisy: it manages to make a crunching sound when it eats a banana and its birds bicker like inter-racial couples. Speaking up is a necessity because the neighbourhood is deaf after thirty years of factory work, and it stirs its tea for minutes on end as though there are pebbles at the bottom of the cup instead of grains of sugar. But the neighbourhood is also quiet: it hoards its secrets, unwilling to let on the pain in its breast. Shame, guilt, honour and fear are like padlocks hanging from mouths. No one makes a sound in case it draws attention. No one speaks. No one breathes. The place is bumpy with buried secrets and problems swept under the carpets.
    Kaukab hears the women. One is cursing the inventor of the wheel and ruing the day she came to England, this loathsome country that has stolen her daughter from her, the disobedient girl who doesn’t want to go to Pakistan for a visit because males and females are segregated there, “Everything’s divided into His and Hers as if anyone needed a reminder of what a great big toilet that country really is, Mother; no wonder you get the shits the moment you land.”
    The women are dreamers. No, their sons certainly can’t grow up to become footballers for Manchester United. If they are that interested in the team, they can become the