Maps for Lost Lovers

was not misplaced. There were disturbances across the province as the news of the Amritsar killing spread farther and farther. All the urban centres in the Gujranwala district were on fire—Ramnagar, Sangla, Wazirabad, Akalgarh, Hafizabad, Sheikhupura, Chuharkana, and the rebellion had also spread north along the railway line into Gujarat and west into Lyallpur.
    Requests for help from Gujranwala had left the governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, in a predicament: he could not send large numbers of troops without severely depleting the garrisons in Amritsar and Lahore where the army was already overstretched. He turned to the Royal Air Force who made available three First World War BE2c biplanes, each armed with a Lewis machinegun and carrying ten twenty-pound bombs.
    They were under the command of Captain D. H. M. Carberry who had flown the reconnaissance mission over Amritsar for General Dyer on Sunday, pinpointing Jallianwallah Garden as the location where a public meeting of natives was taking place. This afternoon, Tuesday, his instructions were that he was not to bomb Gujranwala “unless necessary,” but that any crowds in the open were to be bombed, and that any gatherings near the local villages were to be dispersed if they were heading towards town.
    Aarti and Deepak—and the men working in the orange grove on the other side of the wall—heard the drone of the biplane engine and the tension singing in the strut-wires before they saw the machine itself, gliding steadily at an altitude of three-hundred feet, the wind of oxygen in its propeller igniting a few hidden embers in the sooty rubble around the children.
    It was a vie jaaj, a ship-of-the-air, Deepak understood immediately.
    He had heard about these flying vessels from his Muslim and Sikh friends whose fathers had gone to fight the War in France for the King.
    It grew in size as it approached them and began to diminish once it had gone over them. The four flat projections—two on either side of the body—were the ship-of-the-air’s horizontal sails, the crisscross of wires the sails’ rigging. He wished it would drop anchor so he could examine it carefully but it had gone as quickly as it had come.
    A species prone to turbulence at the merest provocation, the crows were filling the air with their noisy uproar.
    Drops of sweat slid down Aarti’s arm and moved across the one stolen stripe of clarified butter, above the wrist, in the same curvilinear lines they described on the untreated areas but faster this time, like a cobra leaving coarse ground to swim across a river.
    The shadow of the returning biplane poured itself down the dak bungalow’s boundary wall and advanced like a sheet of unstoppable black water undulating along the ground’s gentle rise and fall.
    It had lost height and made Aarti feel she had grown taller in its absence.
    Perhaps, she thought, the metal bird was about to flex two gracefully-aligned legs like a stork and alight on the dhrake tree which was now suddenly on fire.
    A red lily grew out of her arm.
    The sharp images blurred like a carousel gaining speed and suddenly she was so tired she had to sit down against the wall she found herself against and close her eyes.
    Uprooted, lifted high onto the contours of expanding air, Deepak saw the ground rushing under him and smelled oranges being cut open before he forgot everything, the last sensation being the flesh-eating heat of his hair on fire against his scalp.
    The bomb, like a foot stamped into a rain puddle, had emptied his mind of all its contents.
    Shamas looks out at the snow lying on the street outside, hearing Kaukab at work in the kitchen.
    In most minds, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the governor of Punjab at the time, carried the ultimate responsibility for the Jallianwallah Garden Massacre of 1919. He was shot dead in London in March 1940 by Udam Singh, who had been wounded in the Massacre as a child; he was hanged in Pentonville for the murder.
    But one of the stories that began with the RAF’s bombing of Gujranwala two days after the Jallianwallah Massacre would take considerably more than twenty-one years to find an ending of sorts, an ending equally brutal.
    The child Deepak, having drifted through the provinces for a year, fetched up at the shrine to a Muslim saint where in the courtyards in the evenings the drum-skins would be beaten with such devotion that friction often rose to dangerous levels and set the hands on fire. He was given the name