Maps for Lost Lovers

cohabit then, regardless of the fact that she was still legally married to someone under British law.
    Gently, Kaukab shakes the metal tray containing the heap of masar seeds until she has lined the surface evenly in a layer the thickness of one grain. Clearing an arc on this doll’s beach with the back of her fingers, she begins to look for insect damage, pieces of real stone, and millimetre fragments of chaff. She surveys the room, eyes going on brief sorties along the various surfaces and returning to the tray where something unusual is being kept in sight. She gives up at last and stretches out her hand: “One second, please.”
    Shamas lowers the newspaper and looks over its top edge that is serrated like a carnation petal, and at the flicker of her fingers he takes off his spectacles and passes them on to her.
    During the weekends they like to settle in this room whenever they can, leaving it and returning to it, each going about his or her own habits at the periphery of the other’s consciousness. The disorder of the day’s living is tidied away at night and the pink room—filled with books in five languages—is made immaculate once again as though all the slack strings of a musical instrument have been pulled tight.
    “Look what I found,” she removes the spectacles, her inspection complete. “A ravann seed. Here.” In the palm of her hand is a shiny blue bead, the outer skin flaking away to reveal the ivory within. “The packet said Product of Italy. That probably means they grow ravann in Italy. Is Italy somewhere quite close to Pakistan?”
    As she passes it to him, he holds her hand without looking at the grain. He smiles at her, trying to catch her eye, and strokes her wrist with the other hand, sending the fingers up under the sleeve.
    She is shocked by the overture, and knows she mustn’t look at him from this point onwards—but he holds her hand suggestively and tries to bring it closer to him, while she tries to pull it back decisively. There was a time when in the mornings she sometimes stood over him and twisted her wet hair into a yard-long rope, letting beads of water fall onto his face, waking him with her body scented with the dawn bath, eyes glittering with mischievousness. His “beautiful wife,” he called her, “the heroine of the story of his life.”
    But now? No, no. It’s too late in life to be rutting like animals. Kaukab had heard that to go to Shamas’s house in Sohni Dharti was to often find his parents in bed together, lying next to each other contentedly or talking, joking, the door open, in full view of the children playing out in the courtyard. Well, she was born and bred in a mosque, and that wasn’t the norm in her household.
    Shamas releases her with a soft groan, barely audible, and then they sit in silence, too ashamed, embarrassed, and distressed, the both of them.
    The blue grain is discarded into the glass that contains the other debris from the masar. “Your father-ji, may he forever rest in peace, used to love ravann, with a corn-flour chappati thick as cardboard.” She is trying to convince herself that his holding her hand just now wasn’t a request for intimacy: she’s relieved that she had managed to avoid the look in his eyes. The open rattle of seeds in her lap is given a final little shake and deciding glance before the tray is placed on the carpet. She adds a little tea to the dregs in Shamas’s cup, swirls and empties it out into the glass of masar debris, and refills the now-clean cup. No it wasn’t a sexual touch. There is a burst of sandalwood from the tray where the warm teapot has been resting. “Have the police found out who left that . . . that . . . thing outside the mosque last month?” She stirs milk into the cup and subdues the whirlpool with a little counter-circle of the spoon.
    He answers only after a while. “It’s not difficult to guess who it was but there is no proof.” An English girl had converted to Islam in December and had been given shelter in the mosque because her family was hostile towards her decision to change her faith.
    Kaukab sips her tea in silence. Unable to understand the lovers’ mysterious vanishing, she has wept over Jugnu’s absence (perhaps the reaction with which his love for the girl was met has made him take her somewhere and start a new life?) and she prays for their safety after each of the day’s five prayers (perhaps something dreadful has happened to them?) but she refuses to