Maps for Lost Lovers

team’s doctor.
    Kaukab, a picture of loneliness, waiting for Shamas to come home, remembers how the Tannoy announcement at the bus station always makes her think she’s in Pakistan and a Friday sermon is being conveyed over a mosque loudspeaker, and the other women tell her that it’s happened to them too. One woman tries to hold back her tears because she’s beginning to realize that she would never be able to go back to live in her own country (she has started monthly payments for funeral arrangements at her mosque near her house), a country that’s poor because the whites stole all its wealth, beginning with the Koh-i-Noor diamond. And though the heart of every woman in the neighbourhood sinks whenever there is an unscheduled “newsflash” on TV, making them think the government is about to announce that all the Asian immigrants are to be thrown out of Britain, just like they had been expelled out of Uganda two decades ago, and though the women’s hearts sink for a moment, they plan to put up a fight and say they’ll go back with pleasure as soon as the Queen gives back our Koh-i-Noor.
    And, yes, as she waits for Shamas to come home, Kaukab can also hear the women talk about herself and Shamas, about how Shamas has insisted on remaining in this neighbourhood even though he can afford to move out to a better area. The whites were already moving out of here by the end of the 1970s, and within the decade the Hindus became the first immigrant group to move out to the rich suburbs, followed slowly over the next few years by a handful of Pakistanis. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers—all have moved out of the neighbourhood and gone to the suburbs by now, leaving behind the Pakistanis, the Bangladeshis, and a few Indians, all of whom work in restaurants, drive taxis and buses, or are unemployed.
    Only the good Shamas-brother-ji has remained—thinks a woman preparing the dinner—despite the fact that he works in an office and can no doubt move away ten times if he chooses but he is not the kind of man who believes you see through your window what you deserve because nobody deserves this rundown neighbourhood of one suicide attempt a year, twenty-nine people registered insane, and so many break-ins a month that the woman unplugs the video-recorder that had cost twoyears’ savings and brings it up to bed every night, and when she isn’t lying awake waiting for the sound of a window breaking downstairs, she is lying awake wondering where her two boys are because more and more of the burglaries are being done by the sons of the immigrants themselves, almost all of whom are unemployed.
    Next door, this woman’s neighbour wonders why her children refer to Bangladesh as “abroad” because Bangladesh isn’t abroad, England is abroad; Bangladesh is home.
    Kaukab hears them gossip about Jugnu, he whom they had all loved from the beginning, encouraging their children to seek his company because he was educated and they wanted some of his intelligence to rub off on them, Jugnu who had lived in Russia and in the United States and had gone on butterfly collecting trips to western China, India, Peru and Iran. He told the neighbourhood children that in Oklahoma he had seen the white funnel of a tornado turn red as this apple as it pulverized a nursery full of geraniums. And the children had wanted to know why he didn’t stick around to see if the tornado passed over a dye factory because they certainly would have.
    The women were pleased that the children were spending so much time with a civilized person and they stopped him in the street to tell him how happy they were that he was among them, and to chastise him gently for telling the children that there are no references to butterflies in the Bible because it might make the children curious about that book and become Christians.
    That was, of course, before he was seen with white women, long long before he began living openly in sin with that shopkeeper’s daughter, Chanda.
    They asked him to secure the shoelace that had come undone or he would trip. And only later—at home—would they smite their foreheads in regret for having made that comment about the children converting to Christianity because the confusion of faiths was exactly what had torn to pieces the life of his and Shamas-brother-ji’s father. Their father was born a Hindu and had lost his memory as a ten-year-old boy and drifted into a Muslim life, remembering his true identity only in