Maps for Lost Lovers

mouth and spreads on the table before her.
    Before she has had time to realize what is happening, Shamas has called for a taxi to take her to the hospital, another small pool of blood on the stairs as she goes up to the bathroom, feeling faint.
    Suspicious at first, she lets Shamas hold her hand in the taxi as she presses the bloody tissue-paper to her lips with the other.
    She is examined and X-rayed and it turns out to be only a minor injury. “Nothing to worry about,” says the white doctor. “Date of birth?” he asks her, flipping through the forms before him.
    Shamas looks at her to be reminded of it, and she whispers it. It hurts her to speak.
    “On your birthday you should have had trouble with swallowing cake not fish,” the man laughs good-naturedly.
    “It’s your birthday?” Shamas asks quietly.
    “You didn’t know?” The doctor looks at him, amused.
    “I didn’t remember myself,” she interjects. She scrutinizes Shamas’s face. Surely, he is more embarrassed about what the white man is thinking of him than upset that he’d forgotten the date, that she would be hurt by it. But then she drives the wicked thought away.
    Back home through the snow-covered roads and streets, she wants him out of the house so she can ring Ujala’s voice, but he is reluctant to leave her and go to the bookshop as had been his plan. She pretends she is in less pain than she really is. There is also the fear in her that he might become amorous again, this time in repentance for having forgotten the day, as though she cares in the least about frivolities like birthdays.
    The trip to the hospital had taken more than an hour but it had passed blankly for her: there’s nothing for her out there in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, to notice or be interested in. Everything is here in this house. Every beloved absence is present here.
    An oasis—albeit a haunted one—in the middle of the Desert of Loneliness.
    Out there, there was nothing but humiliation: she’s hot with shame at what the white doctor would now think of Pakistanis, of Muslims—they are like animals, not even remembering or celebrating birthdays. Dumb cattle.
    She convinces Shamas to go at last and watches from the window as he walks away between the twenty maples, her husband—who, all those years ago, very nearly wasn’t her husband. Kaukab hadn’t seen a man up close without there being the gauze of her burqa between him and her since the age of twelve—she had been made to wear it because it was well known that certain men marked out beautiful girl-children and then waited for years for them to grow up. Her vigilant mother lifted the stamp of every letter that came into the house to make sure no clandestine message was being passed. And then on a certain monsoon Thursday when she was in her twenties, and sitting in the back room working on the articles that would one day soon become part of her dowry, for her parents had begun the preliminary negotiations for her marriage, she heard a short tap on the window. She put aside the fabric she was cutting up into a kameez and went to open it, expecting it to be the little boy she had seen through the same window wandering through the street earlier and sent to the shop at the corner with a swatch of fabric the size of a teabag to buy a spool of thread “matching exactly that colour, or I’ll send you back to exchange it. And show me your pocket so I can make sure there’s no hole in it, otherwise you’ll lose my money and come back with a long face.”
    Only after he left had she regretted not having told him to get an adult—preferably a woman—to match the thread with the cloth.
    She opened the window and recoiled, barely managing to hide behind the casement leaf because there was a grown man standing on the other side.
    She was shaking. She heard his voice but it was many seconds before she made out his words: “The newspaper. Can I have our newspaper back?” It must be the son of the family from whom her father borrowed the newspaper each morning, she understood, and felt terror at the thought that someone might have seen her opening the window to him: a woman’s life was ruined as easily as that. People might not believe that she was innocent.
    And then suddenly she felt anger at him: how dare he knock on a window during the daytime when there was every possibility that he might catch the daughters of the house unawares.
    “The newspaper was sent back at eleven o’clock, brother-ji.”
    She was