Maps for Lost Lovers

Chakor, because he seemed fascinated by the moon, and chakor was the moonbird, the bird that was said to subsist on moonbeams, flying ever higher on moonlit nights until exhausted, dropping onto roofs and courtyards of houses at dawn, close to death. A chakor is to the moon what the moth is to the flame.
    “You are appropriately named,” his future wife would say, when he met her at the shrine in 1922. “My name is Mahtaab. The moon.”
    Shamas moves to the pink room and opens the album containing the photographs of his father and mother. They were great lovers, even in old age, Chakor smiling good-humouredly and saying to Shamas and his elder brother, “Come on, bring your wives here and make them stand next to my woman: let’s see if she isn’t the most beautiful of the three despite being the eldest.”
    Mahtaab’s eyes shine blindingly in the grainy pictures—a light reaching the present from the distant years, the way light from long-dead stars continues to arrive on earth.
    He puts the picture album away, sliding it next to one of the butterfly books that Jugnu had given to his nephews and niece, the children quoting things from them to each other during the day.
    Having gently stroked the spine of the butterfly book for a few seconds, he returns to his seat and takes up the newspaper. He has thought about his parents all morning, due to some dream he must have had last night, and in about an hour it’ll be time for him to go to the Urdu bookshop situated at the edge of the lake, near the xylophone jetty; he spends most of his free weekend hours there.
    Kaukab comes in from the kitchen carrying a tray and takes the chair opposite. Flat, round, the size of pebbles on a doll’s beach, a small cupful of black masar seeds lies in an uncertain mound in the centre of the tray: enough for two. They are to be cleaned and then soaked for a few hours prior to cooking. These days—less out of loyalty to her own family than the fact that the grief of Chanda’s mother shames and unsettles her— Kaukab has taken to visiting the grocery shop twenty-minutes away on Laila Khalid Road. She feels shame because her brother-in-law Jugnu is partly, no, not partly, entirely, responsible for the woman’s distress.
    Chanda, the girl whose eyes changed with the seasons, was sent to Pakistan at sixteen to marry a first cousin to whom she had been promised when a baby, but the marriage had lasted only a year and her mother had been devastated by the news of the divorce. But another cousin in Pakistan took pity and agreed to marry her even though she was no longer a virgin. But he too divorced her a few months later and the girl came back to live in England, helping the family at the grocery shop all day. Then they found an illegal immigrant for her to marry: he wanted a British nationality and wasn’t concerned that she had been married twice already. But he disappeared as soon as he got legal status in England. Chanda remained married to him because there had been no divorce.
    And then one day last year she went to deliver the star anise that Jugnu—the man with the luminous hands—had asked for over the telephone, an ingredient for his butterflies’ food. She was twenty-five, he forty-eight. It was March and the sparrows were about to begin shedding the extra five-hundred feathers they had grown at the start of winter to keep warm, to return to their summer plumage of three-thousand feathers each. The apples had not yet put out their shell-white flowers. The blossom would be out in May—when she would move in with Jugnu— and both Chanda and Jugnu would be dead by the time those very flowers became fruit in the autumn, the apples that would continue to lie in a circle of bright red dots under each tree until the snows of this year’s January.
    Jugnu had said he would marry Chanda but since she had not been divorced by her previous husband, Islam forbade another marriage for several years—the number differing from sect to sect, four, five, six. All the clerics she and Jugnu consulted stated firmly that the missing husband had to be found, or they had to wait for that prolonged period for the marriage to annul itself. If the husband did not return after those years, she could consider herself divorced, and marry whomever she wished.
    All these consultations were, of course, to gain favour with Chanda’s family and with Kaukab. If only she could obtain a Muslim divorce and marry Jugnu Islamically —they could