Maps for Lost Lovers

gives a final glance in search of the lovers but they are nowhere to be seen. When her mother discovered that she had refused to consummate the marriage with her cousin after sharing a bed for almost a week, she took the bridegroom aside and told him in a whisper,
    “Rape her tonight.”
    He goes past Kiran’s house. The sight of the young girl’s flesh—the soft brown body, bright in the sunlight, glimpsed in sections—is hard to shake off. There have been times over the past few years when he has found himself visiting Kiran and her invalid father, but each time he has known— the guilt lying heavy as lead on his thoughts—that he had set out in that direction with the initial intention of encountering and, perhaps, beginning a conversation with, the prostitute who lives next door.

SPRING

THE MADONNAS
    Mah-Jabin’s train, bringing her to Dasht-e-Tanhaii, passes through tunnel after tunnel like a needle picking up beads to thread a rosary. Their number increases as the valley draws near and the ground corrugates to resemble a tempest on land, heaving, convulsing, the troughs deeper with each turn of the rails, the peaks higher in each new view.
    And as the air caught between the stiffened waves pours into the compartment—filling it to the brim with England’s warm April—a moth the size and shape of the cursor arrow on a computer screen also enters, to loop and spiral against the window.
    She’ll be twenty-seven this year and lives and works in London, divorced from the first cousin she had gone to Pakistan to marry at sixteen, living with him in the pale-green house in Sohni Dharti. Her decision to divorce him had devastated—and enraged—her mother. The two-year marriage is strange to her as though someone is telling her a story.
    Kaukab submerges the apples one at a time in the basin of water, rubbing each with her hands to polish away a breach in the slight greasiness on the peel, and then works her way around the fruit until she meets the whistling clean beginning.
    The orb of the bunched-up tissue paper in which Mah-Jabin has brought Madonna lilies is continuing to rustle as it expands and opens complicatedly inside the bin out of which dead tulips lean like necks of drunk swans, limp. The Madonnas have replaced them in the glass vase; the shrivelling and the separation of petals that had come to the tulips in drying out has made each cup resemble a live honeysuckle blossom, in size and shape.
    “Did you get the flowers I sent you on your birthday, Mother?”
    The apples have already begun to yield their fragrance to the warmth in the room, soft and lazy—smoky autumn days. “Yes. They lasted two whole weeks.”
    She brings a knife to Mah-Jabin, seeing that she is holding an apple. “Is that how white girls are wearing their hair these days?” Outside, the sun suddenly slips out of a gash in the clouds and lights up the room like magnesium detonated.
    Mah-Jabin squints and returns the apple to its hexagonal space among the others, accepts the knife, and gestures with it at the peppers—red as birth—lying on the draining board. “I just felt like a change.” The cutting off is quite recent, and she still finds yard-long strands clinging to the clothes she hasn’t worn for a while.
    “It was nearly eighteen-years’ worth of growth.” Kaukab’s lips assume a smile, fixed, as a smiling statue would continue to smile regardless of the violence which might be done to the rest of its face or body. “Eighteen years.”
    All the more reason, Mah-Jabin thinks but doesn’t say. Calmly, the blade cuts through the pepper with a hollow sound, creating red hoops that would acquire a wax-like transparency on cooking.
    Kaukab nods to postpone the subject, for now. “I saw the peppers by chance yesterday. From Spain, I think. At this time of the year they are the size of tulips so I had to get these big ones when I saw them. A little expensive, but,”—and here she examines the girl’s face for signs of forgetting— “you know your father likes them.”
    With the back of her fingers she touches the silk Mah-Jabin has brought her—the green of the dome on Muhammad’s (peace be upon him) mausoleum in sacred Medina—for her to sew a kameez for herself, and which she has rejected because she would not be able to say her prayers in it: it is patterned with butterflies and Islam forbids pictures of living things.
    “It is a pity about this,” she says. “Perhaps I could make you a kameez