Maps for Lost Lovers

as her own father.
    Chanda and Jugnu were staying in Shamas’s parents’ olive-green house—and were pretending to be just friends during their stay there; and it was to that olive-green house that Kaukab made a telephone call after Charag’s departure: she could talk to the people in the house and tell them they had two sinners under their roof.
    She hasn’t revealed this fact to anyone, not even Shamas.
    Her telephone call was probably why the pair had returned to England earlier than expected: they had been asked to leave. They came back to England and . . . disappeared.
    Kaukab’s anger and distress were beginning to subside somewhat as the time drew closer for the couple’s expected return. But the day of the expected arrival passed. And then another, and another . . . When the police eventually forced their way into the house, the passports revealed that the couple had come back to England thirteen days earlier. A peacock and a peahen burst out of a room and escaped to the freedom of the street—this would eventually lead to the talk that Chanda and Jugnu had been transformed into a pair of peacocks. The corpse of another peacock was found in one of the downstairs rooms, the injuries revealing that it had been pecked to death by the other two. A dozen-strong flock of peacocks had appeared in the neighbourhood a fortnight or so previously: they had escaped from the menagerie of a stately home on the other side of the lake, and they would be rounded up eventually—the foliage falling from the trees in the coming months of autumn meaning that they would have no groves or clusters of bushes to hide in. For the time being, however, no one could tell where they were from. They roamed the streets, scratched the paintwork of the cars and attacked the cats and sparrows. How three members of the flock had managed to enter Jugnu’s house and how long they had been in there could not be determined. There were sweeps on the dust on the floors, made by the males’ tail-feathers. On a white plate on the dinner table there was a puddle of urine the pale-green colour of gripe water. The hen had laid an egg in one of the open suitcases that lay on the bed upstairs.
    Jugnu had put up a framed photograph of a peacock on one wall and for a moment it was as though the live peacock had left its reflection in a mirror in the house.
    She finishes her tea and says, “I am soaking some rice for you to eat with the masar this evening. I’ll have to make chappatis for myself because there is a little dough left over from Friday and it’ll spoil if not used today.”
    “Won’t it keep until tomorrow? The weather is cold enough,” Shamas says quietly; it could almost be a thought being passed into her head from his.
    “Perhaps you should have chappatis also. You had rice last night too and it’s bad for the bones two days in a row, especially in this cold country.” She pauses, waiting for him to dreamily say that now that he has reached the year of his retirement they would soon move back to the hot climate of Sohni Dharti, as they had planned decades ago. They have discussed the matter several times over the past few months and each time she has told him he would have to leave without her—she would remain in hated England because her children are here.
    “If only Jugnu was here, there would be no leftovers—” She stops, having got carried away with her thoughts, and looks at Shamas, but he doesn’t react. Quietly she turns to the work at hand, and sighs:
    Dear Allah, if only things had gone another way. Only the other day the matchmaker was talking about one of the young women she had suggested for Jugnu all those years ago, someone called Suraya, who has now been divorced by her drunk husband and is now looking for someone to marry temporarily. Kaukab shakes her head: she doesn’t remember who that woman was, but if only Jugnu had married her the poor woman wouldn’t be in this predicament, and he himself wouldn’t now be missing. Instead, he took up with white women. Kaukab knew that the few nights a week that he spent away from home were spent in the arms of one of his white girlfriends. Kaukab lived in fear of such contemptible and unforgivable behaviour rubbing off on her three children, but there was nothing she could do. He was discreet and she liked him for that—he was secretly colluding with her, preventing her children from seeing immoral conduct.
    Years passed and then one day a little boy stopped