Maps for Lost Lovers

the alarm would be raised, precipitating a crisis that would bring her engagement to an end.
    On the day the wedding clothes were ready, sparkling so much they made people think sequins were collected free of charge from beaches and that beads were cheaper than lentils, she became resigned to her fate.
    And the day before the wedding, sitting under the cage of the Japanese nightingales that her future mother-in-law had brought for her on the occasion of the formal viewing—the droppings of the birds contained lime and were to be rubbed onto her skin to enhance her complexion, the birds as though feathered tubes of beauty-cream, automatically dispensing measured amounts three times a day—she clicked open the small locket containing the photograph of her fiancé that her mother had passed wordlessly into her hands months ago, and, as she would tell her own daughter Mah-Jabin many years later, red with laughter, it was like opening the casements of the window all over again and getting caught unawares because her fiancé and the handsome stranger were the same person, my Allah, it was him all along!
    She is about to telephone Ujala’s voice, but the doorbell rings: she opens the door, her heart thumping, swallowing hard against the searing pain in her throat, and finds a white man on the doorstep. He holds a bouquet of Madonna lilies, their whiteness undiminished even against the falling snow, the sight of them bringing a smile to her face. Glory be to Allah who has created beauty for the eyes of His servants.
    The “thank you” she murmurs to the flower-deliveryman is her third exchange with a white person this year; there were five last year; none the year before, if she remembers correctly; three the year before that; . . . She places the Madonna lilies on the draining board. Three pithy stems, each with a sparrow-foot-like division at the top bearing the hollow coffinshaped buds and the already-open heavy blooms, white as the flesh of a newly-split coconut. She reads the card—a birthday greeting. It seems her daughter was the only one in the family to have remembered it. Tears well up in her eyes—someone loves her.
    The gold in her earlobes and nostril is chilled from the blast of snowy air that the opening of the door had exposed it to.
    Each containing a miniature image of the lilies, the small pieces of mir ror stitched along the front of her kameez feel as though they are discs of ice.
    Passingly, she wishes some neighbourhood woman would drop by so she could show off the flowers to her with pride: “My daughter sent me these for my birthday. I am always telling her not to waste money on me, but she loves me—as you can see.”
    Holding the glass vase under the tap she fills it with water. The bubbles seethe and lift themselves into a jostling heap and then subside.
    Carefully using one of the flowered stems she stirs an aspirin tablet into the water and she counts the flowers because an arrangement must always have an odd number of blooms. Her Koran is full of lilies dried flat as cutouts, the colour of tea-stains. She thins some of the leaves where they would crowd together at the vase’s rim; peeled off with the leaves, the thin strips of green skin contract slowly and neatly come to rest in perfect spirals like the tin coils inside a wound-up toy taken apart by children. Why hadn’t the boys also remembered her birthday? She wipes her tears: her life is over and yet there is still so much of it left to live. She briefly rinses each lily stem before it takes its diagonal place inside the vase and the rope of water frays whenever it scrapes against the edge of a leaf, the fluttering splashes reminiscent of a bird in a pool of rain.
    Their scent is strongest at night, and since there is a hedge plant back in Sohni Dharti whose buds, like the Madonna lilies, not only open in the evening’s whispers but also release a perfume as hazy as them, Kaukab’s affection for the lilies has increased over the years.
    Compared with England, Pakistan is a poor and humble country but she aches for it, because to be thirsty is to crave a glass of simple water and no amount of rich buttermilk will do.
    She carries the nodding Madonnas to the table and places them next to a bowl full of apples whose skins are covered in yellow and red brush-strokes like the plumage of tropical parrots.
    She stands in the blue kitchen, gently swaying: Shamas will be at the bookshop all afternoon and she wonders what she herself