Maps for Lost Lovers

chilled air. The door to the courtyard was open—the pale light indicated that dawn was near—and the harsinghar was shedding its petals. Jugnu looked at his father’s bed and found it empty. Shamas was asleep on the mat on the floor. Going out into the courtyard, Jugnu saw that the front door was open and there was a bloody rag in the street, just outside the threshold. He went and picked it up—the blood was wet. Soon he found himself walking towards the ruin of the Hindu temple, following the trail of blood drops. The building had fallen into disrepair since 1947, when the Hindus of Sohni Dharti had left for India.
    He went from room to ruined room, shouting his father’s name. He thought he heard sounds but they were the birds waking up. The smell of the smoke had intensified and he ran towards it but it was too late: his father had doused himself in kerosene and set himself on fire. Knowing himself to be near death, out of his mind with the excruciating pain, he had decided to cremate himself.
    The charred face, the lack of gleaming moisture on the teeth, the marriage ring melting and fusing with the finger the way meat sticks to the grill during roasting: Jugnu would try over the years not to think about these things, try not to put them in their sequential place in the story of the next two hours in the temple.
    And he—like Shamas—would try not to think of the fact that someone in the night went into the cemetery and dug up the corpse no matter how deep they buried it; it happened three times.
    Jugnu beat the flames out with the loi he had wrapped around himself before leaving the house and then he covered the burnt man with it, he who was producing growl-like low sounds at the back of his throat, and was in too fragile a state to be lifted. A crow swooped down from a low branch above Jugnu and picked up a glistening red piece of meat from the dusty floor. Just after the bird took off—disappearing through a gash in the wall—Jugnu recognized what it was: Chakor had cut out his tongue before setting fire to himself lest the pain cause him to call out for help.
    He is returning home through the empty town centre, having been to the newsagent and collected the bundle of newspaper.
    He climbs down to the riverbank, to listen to the river. The leaves of the rowan trees resemble the tamarinds’. Even if found, Aarti would not have been able to attend her brother’s funeral—it would have been too soon after the war with the Hindus for her to be granted a visa.
    Drowned grass-blades whip like tails of sperm in the shallow edges and it is on reaching a secluded curve where the bubbles are like a tumbling spillage of glass beads that he looks up to find the two lovers staring fixedly at him, and the unexpectedness of it is as though a syringe of adrenaline has been emptied into his body.
    It is obvious that they saw him before he saw them: they’ve flown apart and are already somewhat composed but their faces retain traces of the look they must’ve borne only moments earlier— show me where and I’ll taste you there. The boy’s back arched, he has almost refastened the buttons of his fly, and the girl is shrugging her shoulder back into the kameez that had been undone at the back—or had it magically come undone at his touch?—and peeled to expose a breast.
    They must have taken great care to select a secluded enough place for this rendezvous, and no doubt the condom he would have unrolled onto himself sometime soon had they remained undisturbed is patterned with battle-fatigue camouflage.
    “Hello, Shamas-uncle-ji,” the boy—twenty-odd, a Hindu—says with a smile. “It is Shamas-uncle-ji, yes?”
    Shamas knows him vaguely from the neighbourhood. Knowing no English on the first day of nursery school, having spoken nothing but his parents’ Hindi up until then, he had demanded to know whether his mother was being called a liar by the teacher who insisted that this fruit was an “apple” and not a saib as he had been taught to call it till then.
    A smiler, he stands there now, the shirt straining at the wide shoulders. The force of puberty had struck from within the plates of his face with differing intensity in different places: the nose has become disproportionately longer; the cheekbones are flat, remaining where they were in childhood; the chin and jaw are more angular.
    “Let me get my lid”: he nods backwards where his baseball cap lies on a boulder. It is a pretext: he wishes in