Maps for Lost Lovers

again. “Brother-ji, people are lost and found in so many ways . . . Your own father-ji was separated from his family members in a strange manner . . .”
    Coloured motes fill the sunlit distance between him and her.
    Shamas wonders what expression he’s wearing on his face—is he frowning, does he look angry, distressed?
    She is silent for a few moments and then, defeated, says, “Yes, it is foolish. I am terribly sorry to have troubled you, brother-ji.” On her head is a veil transparent as water and her upper body is wrapped in a yellow shawl printed with white penny-sized stars; her arms are crossed under the shawl. He is not sure if he has ever conversed with her before but he knows she has the long slender fingers of a piano player, has seen her using them to manipulate with sensitivity and graceful importance the cash register at the shop.
    “Would you like me to walk back with you?” He is not sure whether he should have made this offer: what would people think if they saw her walking beside a man not her husband at this early hour? If someone has seen them talking there is already a possibility of gossip. The breeze is coming from her direction and he realizes now that the sorrow he had sensed within him earlier was partly due to the woman’s smell— the mother smells like the daughter. All he has to do to be reminded of Chanda is to draw a breath. Once, during the brief few months that the couple lived together—in radiant ignorance of the fate that awaited them—Jugnu had tacked one of Chanda’s veils to the window to keep out insects, and Shamas had walked into a space saturated with a scent he had understood to be the scent of Chanda’s body and hair.
    She shakes her head to decline his offer to see her home. “No, thank you, brother-ji. I’m not going far.” And before walking away, she says, “But you yourself should be careful: I don’t like the thought of you going out of the house at an hour when there is no one around. As I was waiting for you earlier I felt like the only one out in a town under curfew. You must try to break this habit. Anything could happen: you should remember that this isn’t our country.”
    There is silence all around and the whole town lies wrapped in dreaming. He must continue with his own journey. He straightens as though shifting a yoke. The exchange of words could not have taken more than two minutes but it had felt longer: shocking or stressful events and incidents are said to concentrate consciousness to a single point and that slows down the time. Dying, over within seconds, supposedly takes forever.
    He’s been left shaken by the encounter, and as always in times of stress he thinks of his younger days in Lahore and Sohni Dharti, when he was writing poetry, beginning to develop political awareness. An unmarried young man’s sexual life, in those days and in a segregated country like Pakistan, began late, and so they were also the years of his sexual initiation, exploration, and gratification—in the “Diamond Market” district of prostitutes in Lahore. (During the past few years here in England, at the other end of his life, he has occasionally thought again about paying for sexual contentment, to alleviate his physical loneliness, but he hasn’t gone beyond looking at telephone numbers and addresses in the classified pages of The Afternoon. ) He was twenty-six and awaiting the publication of his first book of poems. The rumour in the publishing world in Lahore was that of any two rivals competing for the love and attentions of the same woman, the one who owned a copy of his book would have the upper hand. But then, in 1958, he had had to leave Pakistan for England, fleeing the military coup. The new government began hunting for Communists and he came to England a month after police raided the offices of his publisher and noted down all the names they found there before torching the place. He stayed in England until he was thirty-one, working in the mills and factories around Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
    After five years in England, he returned to Sohni Dharti in 1963 and married Kaukab, doing all he could to catch a glimpse of her after the negotiations had begun, and succeeding finally when he knocked on her window one monsoon afternoon to ask for the literary pages of the newspaper. When he learned that he was to be a father, he decided to go back to England, having failed to gain meaningful employment since his return to Pakistan. He was back in