Maps for Lost Lovers

England at the beginning of 1965, and Kaukab joined him at the end of that year, wearing a long chocolate-brown coat he had sent her from here, and carrying the baby Charag in her arms.
    Shamas was working in a factory and that was when the word of his father’s past reached him. It was 1970. Shamas did not return for a visit until the following year when news came that Chakor was dying of pancreatic cancer.
    And as death drew near he became delirious, asking Mahtaab to promise she would cremate him on logs of the flame-of-the-forest tree, like a Hindu, instead of burying him in the ground like a Muslim.
    Difficulties had arisen soon after the identity became known but the letters to Shamas had hidden the news of this harassment. He would learn later that a shopkeeper whose hand had accidentally brushed against Chakor’s had immediately washed it, saying, “I wouldn’t touch a Hindu even with a meat hook.” Women began to send back the rose essence Mahtaab sold—in bottles the size and shape of a bicycle’s light-generator—claiming it was contaminated with onion. Things were made difficult for him at The First Children on the Moon until he had no alternative but to resign; the “Encyclopaedia Pakistanica” series was seen by some to be nothing more than his excuse for publishing detailed maps of Pakistani towns and cities which the Indians could use during war—a war with India being always a possibility, the most recent only five years ago, when, to distract the attention of the public who had become disaffected following that election back in 1964, the government had sent the army into Kashmir, and India had retaliated by crossing the border into Lahore.
    An Indian Hindu scholar claimed that Anarkali, Pomegranate Blossom—the servant girl with whom the Muslim prince Saleem had fallen in love, and whom Saleem’s father the Emperor Akbar had had buried alive as a result in 1599—was not a girl at all, but, in fact, a boy, a fact the Muslim historians of the Mughul era had suppressed till now: the claim was published in Pakistani newspapers and Chakor was manhandled in the street that week and told that the Hindu gods were “pretty boys,” what with their rouged cheeks and lipsticked mouths.
    The cancer of the pancreas was in the last stage when it was diagnosed, and as death drew near, Chakor’s raving became constant, wanting cremation instead of burial. Fearful that Mahtaab might act upon the words of a dying man out of his mind with pain, Kaukab had sent Shamas to Pakistan:
    “I want you to go there and see that what needs to be done is done.” She pointed to the one-year-old daughter, Mah-Jabin: “No one will marry her if your mother-ji does what he is asking. She herself never had any daughters so she doesn’t realize how important it is to remain on the good side of society. But you do have a daughter now, and must place her before everybody else. A scandal like that would do irreparable damage to her chances.”
    It was November 1971, and the West Pakistani army had been in East Pakistan since March, spreading death and destruction: the general election last December had been won by an East Pakistani leader and the West Pakistani powers had refused to allow him to form the government, sending in the soldiers to suppress the unrest that followed. These soldiers had been told that the East Pakistanis were an inferior race—short, dark, weak, and still infected with Hinduism—and junior and senior officers alike had spoken of seeking in the course of the military campaign to improve the genes of the East Pakistanis: women and girls were raped in their hundreds of thousands. On the day in December that Chakor vomited dark-brown half-digested blood, grainy like sand—the aorta had ruptured and spilled its contents into the stomach so that now his body was consuming itself—the Indian army moved into East Pakistan, and Pakistan surrendered after a two-week long war: East Pakistan was now Bangladesh—India had not only defeated Pakistan, it had helped cut it in two.
    At night Shamas would sit beside Chakor, the basket of bloody rags set by his chair leg. Sometimes the twenty-four-year-old Jugnu would be there with them, back from the Soviet Union.
    The harsinghar tree in the courtyard, which dropped its funereal white flowers at dawn, had more flowers than usual under it during those mornings, as though the branches had been disturbed during the night. Shamas was no believer, but