Maps for Lost Lovers

interiors which until then had been seen only as temporary accommodation in a country never thought of as home—the period in England was the equivalent of earthly suffering, the return one day to Pakistan entry into Paradise.
    The growing daughter’s irritation at her economized surroundings had made the mother agree to the transformation of the home, and she followed the girl into shops she would not have entered on her own, watched her ask the white assistants if this thing came in that colour and whether that other thing was available in a smaller size but with snap-fasteners instead of these tasselled ties like the one in this picture that I clipped from a magazine. She watched dumbfounded as the girl spoke English sentences at the rate she herself spoke English words, as she said let’s get rid of the tablecloth because I want to be able to “enjoy” the grain of the wood.
    Mah-Jabin remembers Kaukab’s disappointment at the two “over-dependent” neighbourhood girls, one of whom had told her mother in great distress that her husband wanted to “do it from the back,” and the other who told her mother that her husband wanted to “discharge in my mouth,” and she remembers also her saying that the first fifteen to twenty years of marriage belong to the man but the rest to the woman because she can turn her children against their father by telling them of all his injustices and cruelties while they are growing up, patience being the key to happiness: and so Mah-Jabin has never revealed the truth about her marriage to Kaukab, to the extent that there are times she herself believes that her husband—the cousin she had gone to Pakistan to marry at sixteen and lived with for two years in the pale-green house in Sohni Dharti—was in desperate love with her, that he asks the trees of the forest where she has gone. In these fantasies he does not grab her by the throat— in a grip as strong as a tree root—to call her a “wanton shameless English whore” for secretly touching herself towards climax after he himself had finished, rolled over and begun to fall asleep, having wiped himself on the nearest fistful of fabric in the darkness dark as the grave.
    She knows the truth that her daughter had suffered would cause Kaukab more pain than the lie that she had selfishly and scandalously abandoned someone loving. How Kaukab would react to the truth would be a proof of her love, that she is being spared it is proof of Mah-Jabin’s.
    “You should rest,” Kaukab says. “Leave everything to me.” And within ten minutes the work-top is littered with broken onion skins—crisp fractured bowls of conch-pink tissue—and resembles a song thrush’s “workshop,” as Jugnu had referred to a flint ledge in a chalk meadow where a thrush had been smashing open snails. Pinching her eyes against the fuming sulphur, Kaukab cuts the onion into crescents and drops them into hot oil where they disappear under a rugby scrum of bubbles, lets them sputter until they begin to lose firmness and the tips turn a pale red and yellowish-brown—the shapes and colours of the decorative tendrils on Venetian glass ornaments. Kaukab points to the butterfly-patterned silk: “Mah-Jabin, put that into the next room, in case a drop from all this sputtering oil falls on it. I’ve just remembered that some days ago I saw a girl wearing a kameez made out of this very fabric. It was the girl from Faiz Street who had wanted to marry a Hindu boy but was made to see sense and married to a first cousin. Of course that didn’t work out because she didn’t get on with him—she was very young then and still influenced by the ideas she must’ve picked up from school and her teachers and friends, from life in general in this country, but she agreed to be married off a second time and is perfectly happy now.”
    “I saw her earlier, just near Omar Khayyám Road,” Mah-Jabin says, withholding the fact that she was with her Hindu lover. And she wonders at the ease with which she has slipped into thinking of the roads and streets of this town by the names the immigrants of her parents’ generation had given them, the names she grew up hearing.
    Kaukab is at the cooker with her back towards her, and the turned-away body in that corner of the kitchen produces a surge of homely familiarity in the girl: her mother standing over a pot, expressing her fears about what she is cooking, or attempting to tighten the loose screw on a panhandle with the