Maps for Lost Lovers

of assumption all night last night. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had forgotten their differences and rioted together and the British knew from experience that such amnesia meant only trouble for them.
    The path forked ahead and when Aarti told him that they would be taking the left branch, Deepak placed his hand on his chest—the easiest method of distinguishing between left and right was to remember that the heart was located on the left.
    As they walked past a blue house with three peepal trees in the courtyard he attempted to insert his fingers into his sister’s grip because he had ventured only so far from home previously and would be in un-explored territory beyond this point. Soon Aarti too was in alien terrain and linked hands with Deepak to receive and offer courage in a two-way transfusion.
    Now and then as they moved forward they consulted the guidebooks of stories and hearsay (without realizing that they were getting closer and closer to the pages of history).
    They arrived, but in the place where the dak bungalow was said to be situated, up a path lined with stones painted a bright green, they found nothing but the perfunctory sketch, charcoal on sky: only the framework of the building had survived yesterday’s conflagration; the walls and roof had fallen to the ground in a black heap. The outline reminded them of the drawing of the house their father had made on the floor with a piece of coal, the house he said he was building for them, the house that was wrested by their father’s family from their mother as soon as she was widowed, leaving her homeless with no alternative but the brutal charity of her sister’s husband.
    Deepak and Aarti circled the remains of the dak bungalow, Deepak attempting hard to contain his disappointment. The women with tails had been so real during the journey that he had expected footprints around himself as he walked but now the apparitions had vanished.
    Aarti saw that he was close to tears, and since she could not propose raiding the orange grove—men could be heard digging water-ditches just over the wall—she tried to distract him by constructing the dak bungalow from the clues scattered around the site. Up there had been a balcony splashed by a hibiscus vine, and down here there was a tiled veranda with a frangipani tree at its edge, the leaves the shape of a ram’s ears. Bride-red, indigo, emerald—the place glittered with fragments of stained glass. Violence unleashing violence, the fire had liberated the hundred deadly edges each pane had contained harmlessly within it when whole. In the heat breathed out by the burnt debris, the clarified butter smeared on Deepak’s skin gave off a pungent smell. He had lubricated himself before setting off on the adventure to maximize his chances of escape in case of discovery: before entering a house or a train, thieves and robbers greased themselves similarly to become as difficult to hold as fish, as melon seeds.
    Smallpox had pockmarked Deepak’s skin during infancy and as he stood in the kitchen applying the clarified butter to himself, Aarti had joked that there wouldn’t be any left for her. She had only just begun to grease her arm when they were discovered by their uncle. The beating woke the two women from their nap but their appeals for moderation were ignored. Instead he imprisoned the two sisters in the back room by trapping their long plaits in a trunk lid, locking it, and pocketing the key, a smile of vengeful delight on his face on seeing both these women in torment as they sat tethered on the floor, one of them dark, the other pale— the first he was married to, the other he had wanted to marry but had been deemed unworthy of because only a wealthy man was good enough for such a pale-rinded beauty, but now that the rich man had died he was burdened with having to clothe, feed and shelter her and her children— that bitch daughter whom he intended to hand over to the first toothless man to ask for her hand in marriage, the poorer the better, no matter that she was as pale as her mother who dreamed of educating her bastard son when it was clear to everyone that the only education that street-loving loafer was ever likely to acquire was the skills of a pickpocket.
    He dragged the children across the courtyard and shut them out of the house while the voices of the two women continued to plead for clemency from back there because it was dangerous for the children to be out on the streets today.
    Their fear