Maps for Lost Lovers

about to close the window when the voice said: “The literary supplement is missing. Could you check that you don’t still have it in there somewhere. I’d be grateful.”
    She closed the window and bolted it shut noisily with a “Wait there, brother-ji,” more and more furious at him for neglecting to refer to her as “sister-ji,” which would have decriminalized the glimpse he had caught of her face, and in a panic because she hadn’t checked the date on the paper she had found on the table earlier and had spent the past hour practising the pattern of her kameez on it: there it lay on the floor now, today’s literary supplement, cut up into geometric shapes.
    She collected the boats and heron’s beaks from under the bed—off-cuts the ceiling fan had scattered—and stood motionlessly, holding all the pieces in her fist, wrinkling the paper further, hoping the stranger would tire and leave. But he tapped again, and she opened the casement just enough for her hand to pass through and handed him his beloved literary supplement, the pages that did not mention the name of Allah or Muhammad, prayer and peace be upon him, even once because she had checked before spreading them on the floor.
    “Here it is, brother-ji. I am sorry it is a bit creased but the iron isn’t working today,” she said, as though all he would notice would be the creases and not the chopping up. And she shuddered that a daughter of the mosque was handing over her vital statistics to a complete stranger. There were no limits to the depravity of the world and all this man had to do was to spread the whole thing out on a bed and with a bit of sense put together a cut-out of her upper body like a jigsaw.
    He received the pieces and left without another word.
    The following Thursday, oppressed by a sense of remorse about last week, she ran the hot iron over the newspaper just before it was due to be sent back, to smooth over the few creases her father had made whilst reading. Somehow she managed not to make a sound when the words I see the iron is working today appeared suddenly along the margin of the literary section. It was a schoolchild’s trick: the sentence had been inscribed with a clean bamboo pen using onion water as ink—upon drying it was invisible to the eye, but the iron scorched it a deep manila, revealing it.
    Later that year, she locked herself into the bathroom and wept when her parents informed her that her engagement had been finalized. The instant the first onion-water message had materialized she had ripped it off the newspaper, relieved that no one else had seen it, but she regretted her action during the week because the missing strip was a signal to the sender that his words had been received. Having successfully shunned the literary section for the two Thursdays that followed the first message, she had plugged in the iron on the third and was troubled as to why she felt inconsolable because no message appeared on the paper. And there would be none over the next two months, but, today, now that she was engaged to be married to another man, there was a cruelly mocking, I heard the good news. Congratulations.
    Her mother interpreted her tears as the ordinary reaction of a girl who had just been told that she would soon leave her parents’ house forever, and she was proud at having raised such a modest girl when she ran away upon being told her fiancé’s name. When the relatives of the fiancé came for a formal viewing of the girl, she offered the women her needlework to admire, the chain stitch, the satin stitch, lazy daisy, herringbone, the French stitch and the German stitch, the cross-stitch pillowcases and long smock-work caterpillars, embroidered Koranic samplers, bedspreads with borders encrusted with glass beads tiny as grains of sugar, and she poured tea for the men, speaking only once and so softly that it was difficult to make her out above the cutlery.
    She cried in secret for the man she wanted. Throughout the months of her engagement the iron revealed the literary pages to contain a love poem every Thursday which she memorized before the paper went back. She turned the lines of the poems into curlicued and tendrilled vines and then embroidered them onto her wedding-day clothes. She hoped someone in the house would notice the revealed poems on the newspaper, or ask her to explain why the arabesques on the hems and cuffs and veil-border of her dress looked like actual words—she would tell the truth,