Maps for Lost Lovers

to shake hands with him) and, stunned and repentant at her thoughts, feeling Allah’s spit land on her soul because she was so evil-minded, feeling so small in her own eyes that she would have had to fight to subdue a beetle, she had told herself that she must try to accept the world’s realities; it was almost time for the couple’s expected return to England. By complete chance she ran into Chanda’s third husband in the street and told him he had to release her by divorcing her: “Immediately contact her parents to tell them that that is what you plan to do. Allah will never forgive you if you don’t. If not out of the fear of Allah, then do it out of gratitude towards the girl who made you a British citizen.”
    Chanda and Jugnu could now get married!
    She propped open the back door with the lobster buoy from Maine to keep an eye on the activity in Jugnu’s back garden: the front door of his house was always locked because The Darwin filled up his front garden. The boat’s actual price was £3,000 but he had bought it, a battered wreck, for £650 in 1985, and then spent the following few years renovating it with the help of the three children. It lived at the front like a huge clothes iron and so the back door was how everyone always entered the house.
    As the days passed without the couple appearing, she telephoned Pakistan and was told that they had left a week earlier than planned. She asked a boy in the street to climb the purple beech in the back garden to look into the upstairs bedroom. She then dragged a ladder and put it to the upstairs windows at the front. Were they in England or still in Pakistan? Perhaps they had left the house in Sohni Dharti and gone butterfly collecting around Pakistan? The boy she had sent up the ladder shouted down that he could see open suitcases through one of the windows.
    And then Kaukab suddenly knew what had happened: the couple had returned from Pakistan and gone straight to Chanda’s family’s shop to ask for their forgiveness. The decadent and corrupt West had made them forget piety and restraint, but the countless examples in Pakistan had brought home to them the importance and beauty of a life decorously lived according to His rules and injunctions, Pakistan being a country of the pious and the devout, a place where boundaries are respected. She rushed to the shop, absolutely sure that Chanda and Jugnu had gone there in repentance and—Oh, the miracles of Allah!—Chanda’s parents had in turn told them that the girl’s third husband had been on the telephone recently to say he was ready to divorce her. But when she got to the shop Chanda’s brother told her bluntly:
    “Stop bothering us with all that, auntie-ji. As far as we are concerned, that little whore died the day she moved in with him.”
    She returned, shocked by the vehemence. All the way there she had been thinking that the family would have forgiven the couple, that the parents would have remembered that everyone loved someone before marriage, love being a phenomenon as old and sacred as Adam and Eve. Women joked amongst themselves: “Why do you think a bride cries on her wedding day? It’s for the love that this marriage is putting an end to for all eternity. Men may think a woman has no past—‘you were born and then I married you’—but men are fools.”
    The size of a matchbox, the old piece of cooked fish in the fridge is stiff with the cold and ought to be thrown away but Kaukab wraps it in a slice of bread and eats it, bending forward at the second bite because she has neglected to check for bones. It’s like a metal hook in her throat. She coughs and splutters, gasping for air, and manages to swallow, her throat raw. She takes a glass of water and sits down to steady her nerves, the danger passed, her mind returning to what she was thinking about earlier.
    Love.
    Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love. And, said the True Faith, it did not even begin with humans and animals: even the trees were in love. The very stones sang of love. Allah Himself was a being in love with His own creations.
    In their youth Chanda’s parents themselves must have loved someone other than the person they were married to now, for Kaukab certainly had, she who was the daughter of a cleric . . .
    But it seems that the danger from the fishbone has not passed: she leans forward and watches in horror as a small wrinkled kerchief of blood issues from her