Maps for Lost Lovers

imagination insists that all aspects of life be at its disposal, the language of thought richer for its appropriation of concepts such as the afterlife. And so as he looked at the carpet of blossoms he couldn’t help entertaining the thought that during the night Izraeel, the Muslim angel of death, had wrestled in the branches above with the Hindu god of death for our father’s soul. Shamas looked up and imagined the branches twisting around the two supernatural beings, the flowers detaching from twigs and forming a thick layer on the ground.
    The excessively heavy drop of blossoms was caused in fact by Mahtaab, who had lately taken to chewing the harsinghar foliage: the betel leaves, which were her lifelong addiction, and without which it was impossible for her digestive system to function, grew mainly in East Pakistan, and when their price went up at the beginning of the civil war she had reduced her intake to just a two-inch section at dawn; but now that East Pakistan was another country, the supply of betel had stopped altogether, and while a few people had given up the habit as a patriotic gesture, all over Sohni Dharti men and women were experimenting with any leaf they came across in case it resembled the betel in bitterness and flavour.
    “I am sure the government is happy at last,” Mahtaab had said, “now that it has turned us all into donkeys.”
    Both Shamas and Jugnu had smiled but their elder brother had taken exception to the comment. He had become increasingly religious in his forties and the news that his father was a Hindu had devastated him. He had accused the man of betraying them all by concealing the secret from them, prolonging the sin he was committing by living with a Muslim woman.
    As a young man he occasionally attended the mosque run by Kaukab’s father, his attendance increasing when he fell in love with Kaukab’s young aunt who lived with the cleric’s family beside the mosque. He hoped to catch a glimpse of her each time he went to pray: she was often at a high window overlooking the prayer hall—waiting to catch sight of him, surely? And through his piety he hoped to be seen in favourable light by Kaukab’s father, hoping that one day he would think him an appropriate match for his sister. When he heard that the young woman was soon to be married off to the man to whom she had been betrothed at birth, he was heart-broken and stopped going to that mosque, attending instead another one, one operated along a more strict interpretation of Islam. It was here that he would meet the people who would eventually lead him towards the austere and volatile form of the faith that was alien to his parents and brothers.
    After his father’s origins became known, he pushed aside the recommendations and gentle reassurances of Kaukab’s father, and wrote and talked to some friends and scholars he himself trusted, and the news they gave him nearly pushed him over the edge—the children of the union between Mahtaab and Chakor were all illegitimate. He smashed the furniture on the veranda and hurled the water pitcher against the wall when he heard that Chakor wanted to be cremated. He shouted that Chakor should not have produced children if he was not sure about his religious standing, that on Judgement Day he would be hauled in front of his children in chains to ask for mercy from them.
    He was against their efforts to locate Aarti. He said the cancer of the pancreas was Allah’s punishment and stood over the dying man while he coughed up blood and asked him to beg forgiveness from his wife and children and from Allah, “Only then would Allah stop the pain.” The war with the Hindus over East Pakistan was the final blow, and the defeat, when it came, traumatized him (and most of the rest of the country). He became silent, jaws working in rage as he went about the house, eyes aflame, spitting into the plate and walking away if the food was not to his liking, beating his son almost unconscious for flying a kite which he considered unIslamic, or for blowing on his whistle or dribbling a ball in the courtyard—asking a child to apologize for being a child.
    Shamas fell asleep beside Chakor’s bed one night and woke at the sound caused by the opium addict next door throwing stones at the moon. He was alone in the room and it would be several decades before he would know fully what had happened while he slept. While he was asleep Jugnu too had nodded off, waking up only at a sudden blast of