Maps for Lost Lovers

branch, or an arrangement of bells. “I usually cook in the evening when your father gets home—he doesn’t like reheated food—but today we’ll cook now. I remember when I was a girl my mother used to say that when it comes to food a woman should neither end something nor begin it: meaning, she must never take the last of something in case someone else needs it, and she must never take the first helping or cook something especially for herself because it indicates an indecent lack of restraint. But these ideas are considered old- fashioned now. People are different these days.” She brings Mah-Jabin the cup the colour of a lotus bloom.
    “Mother, I think we should cook at six o’clock, but since I left without breakfast this morning, and it was such a long journey, I would like to eat something for lunch—a sandwich perhaps.” She takes the tea and catches again the scent her mother is wearing and which she had caught earlier, on arrival, in a pocket of air above the garden gate: by it she had known that her mother was outside only moments earlier, either leaving the house or returning.
    “I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind: let’s have the peppers and chappatis now.” Kaukab opens the door to the back garden, propping it in place with the lobster-buoy from Maine, and suddenly heat-veined air is being breathed into the kitchen.
    Hugging the narrow lane that is full of moist shadow and that lies between garden and slope, the blue-and-pink trickle of the stream will dry to brilliant-white stones by midsummer. It flows from right to left like Urdu.
    “You make the chappatis, Mother, and I’ll do the peppers. How shall I cook them?” She can already sense the pleasure of the flame-cored spices on her tastebuds like atoms dancing in a reactor, but her mother’s reply sears her heart:
    “Whichever way you cook them at university.”
    Kaukab stands facing the back garden, the green grass that only a month ago was the orangey-gold of the foil that orange-flavoured chocolate bars come wrapped in, listening to the stream’s mother-tongue that is constant in the house like the babble of blood in a human ear. When she arrived in England all those years ago she had thought the reason this country lacked blossom-headed parakeets, lorikeets, mynahs and bee-eaters was that its inhabitants did not plant the correct trees and vines in their gardens, did not know that acacias were needed to coax weaverbirds out of the skies, that grapevines were required for golden orioles, that rose-ringed parakeets had a penchant for mangoes and jamun. She knew that paradise flycatchers were heartbroken when coral trees were cut down and that the tiny sunbird would quarrel with a butterfly to feed on the lustrous hibiscus bloom that dwarfs them both.
    And so she had written back home to ask for seeds, and seedlings and cuttings, none of which had flourished here, leaving the hoopoes and the blue-jays and the red-vented bulbuls circling above the clouds of England for want of somewhere to perch, and later she had wondered whether this country’s soil itself hadn’t been responsible for the failures and contemplated requesting sacks of Pakistani soil which was hospitable to everything as the century-old public parks and gardens of Lahore—planned and opened during colonial times—were said to testify, containing as they did every plant from every country the British had ever ruled. This land is warmer now however, and she knows someone not far away on Benazir Bhutto Road who had raised a banana tree successfully, though it never survived the denuding it suffered when—soon after a television programme on Madrasi cooking was aired—some schoolgirls followed the recipes and decided to eat their dosa s off banana leaves for added South Indian authenticity.
    Mah-Jabin rises, stretches her body until she feels the spine pulled taut as an iron chain, goes to rinse her cup and hangs it from its empty hook. She notices that there is a dead moth like a pinch of powdered gold in one of the other cups (undiscovered by her mother because there has been no occasion to use all six for a while?), and now recalls seeing, earlier, on the curtain close to where the vase is set, the stale discoloured pollen from the Madonna lilies she had sent Kaukab for her birthday.
    Once upon a time this would have been unthinkable.
    The girl reaching puberty had been a turning point in the appearance of the house: many improvements were made to the