Maps for Lost Lovers

of this, but you probably don’t wear Pakistani clothes these days.” The words are spoken with the back turned; the listener is being tested, to see if she can guess what expression of the face accompanies the words, as a lover would suddenly close both eyes and demand to know what colour they are: the right answer would be a proof of love.
    Mah-Jabin was allowed to wear “Western” clothes to school but only if they mirrored shalwar-kameez in cut and style: the shirts had to be long-tailed and had to remain untucked whenever she wore trousers. Aswirl with pleats like the ghagra s of Pakistani desert women, and because it was floor-length, a skirt had been allowed her once, though skirts on the whole were forbidden because they were an easy-access garment. When someone they met at a wedding ceremony was considered “skimpily dressed” by Kaukab, Mah-Jabin had said, “She was wearing a sari! Six and a half yards of fabric.” “The number of yards in itself is immaterial when it comes to modesty,” had been Kaukab’s response. And so she intercepted the secret codes and signals before they could be transmitted and understood. She saw it all as cats’ eyes see in the dark. Despite the fact that Mah-Jabin said she had lost the receipt, she was made to return to the shops a blue sweater that had a broad paler stripe running from armpit to armpit, calling attention to the chest.
    Mah-Jabin—chalk-green suede trainers at one end and an uncovered head at the other, black trousers gently fluted at the ankles, and a dazzling purple-collared shirt made out of a marigold sari fabric—brings the plateful of pepper rings flecked with ivory seeds to Kaukab. “I once cooked myself a meal of what my friends at university were about to throw away—the stalks of the peppers, the seeded heart. They were astonished, but you’ve taught me well.” She is afraid of sounding casual about her new familiarities, anxious not to hurt Kaukab by presenting herself to her in any capacity other than a daughter, her daughter. There is so much outside the house that may not be brought into the house, and the mother is quick to construe any voicing of opinion or expression of independent thought by the girl as a direct challenge to her authority.
    After almost twenty years of doing without, Kaukab had found a friend when Mah-Jabin reached puberty. “My Allah,” she would say, biting the corner of her veil to stopper her laughter, “I didn’t tell even my mother or mother-in-law half the things you’ve coaxed out of me, you wretch. How can you ask me what was the first thing your father said to me on our wedding night? Have some shame.” They could discuss and dissect anything with ease once Kaukab’s feeble protests against her impropriety had died down.
    Mah-Jabin would ask questions about Grandfather Chakor: she wondered why it was not considered strange by the other Muslims at the shrine that the little boy in their midst was uncircumcised, as he must have been because he was born a Hindu. Kaukab explained that during those early days of the century, when disease and infection were rampant, it wasn’t uncommon to find a Muslim boy of that age with his foreskin intact because he was deemed too weak from the smallpox he had caught last year and the typhoid of the year before, and then the cholera the following year would cause yet another postponement: “They circumcised him at that shrine he found himself in, and that was that. In Sohni Dharti there was a twelve -year-old in my time whose mother had eight other children and therefore had never had the time: afterwards he walked around with a hole in the front of his shorts like an elephant in a balaclava, and what am I doing talking to you—and that too of such matters!—when I should be doing something about the bottom of the washing basket where the less-urgent bits and pieces have been lying undisturbed for weeks like an invitation to centipedes and silverfish.”
    Once, during a disagreement, Mah-Jabin had shouted, “And don’t come running to me the next time those sons of yours upset you or Father says something you consider contrary to Islam”: these three had been within earshot and Kaukab’s eyes had boiled over with tears at the shock and humiliation of the betrayal.
    The kettle shrieks like a squeaky toy caught underfoot, and Kaukab takes two cups from the six hanging at regular intervals from the hooks at the edge of the shelf, like ripe pears on a