Maps for Lost Lovers

the house on hot mornings, to let in the sun and the trickling song of the stream which runs beside the narrow lane there; the stream that is more stones than water as the summer advances but a great catcher of pollen nevertheless, the stones white as chalk in the sun, black underwater. During autumn the speed of the water is so great that you fear your foot would be instantly sliced off at the ankle if you stepped into it.
    Outside, as he walks behind Kiran in that below-zero monsoon, there are gentle skirmishes between the falling snowflakes now that the wind has risen a little.
    Two sets of Kiran’s footprints lie before him as he follows her to her house. Each perfect cylinder punched into the deep snow has at its base a thin sheet of packed ice through which the dry leaves of the field maples can be seen as though sealed behind glass. They are as intricate as the gold jewellery from the Subcontinent—treasures buried under the snow till a rainy day.
    Planted between two field maples on the slope, the telephone pole has had several of its wires broken during the night, and, encased in thick cylinders of ice, they lie snapped like candles in the snow. The chilled air is as keen as a needle on the skin and the incline is forcing him to take a hummingbird’s 300 breaths per minute. A frozen buried clump of grass breaks under his weight and the cracking sound is the sound that Kaukab produces when she halves and quarters cinnamon sticks in the kitchen.
    “I lay next to him on the floor all night, distracting him with talk,” Kiran says over her shoulder. “But when he began to grow despondent I set out for you. He said, ‘I want to leave this life. My bags are packed, but the world won’t let me go: it fears the report I’ll present to Him on my arrival.’ ”
    Shamas wants to say something in response but a snowflake enters his mouth and he almost chokes.
    Kiran is now ahead of him by a few determined yards. His own progress is decisive but full of inaccurate moves.
    Kiran never saw her lover again—until perhaps last year when, now a widower, he visited England; Kaukab was apprehensive that the one-time lovers shouldn’t encounter each other, and, as far as Shamas knows, she succeeded in keeping them apart, but—he is quite sure—Kiran must have caught glimpses of him.
    The street rises. On one side is the hundred-year-old Parish Church of St. Eustace, nestling in a wedge cut into the hill, circled by lindens and yews. Missing for as long as he can remember, the tail of the weathervane had turned up two months ago when the lake was dragged unsuccessfully for the bodies of Jugnu and Chanda. And on the other side of the street is the mosque. The crescent faces the cross squarely across the narrow side-street.
    Pakistan is a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land, its history a book full of sad stories, and life is a trial if not a punishment for most of the people born there: millions of its sons and daughters have managed to find footholds all around the globe in their search for livelihood and a semblance of dignity. Roaming the planet looking for solace, they’ve settled in small towns that make them feel smaller still, and in cities that have tall buildings and even taller loneliness. And so the cleric at this mosque could receive a telephone call from, say, Norway, from a person who was from the same village as him in Pakistan, asking him whether it was permitted for him to take an occasional small glass of whisky or vodka to keep his blood warm, given that Norway was an extremely cold country; the cleric told him to desist from his sinful practice, thundering down the line and telling him that Allah was perfectly aware of the climate of Norway when He forbade humans from drinking alcohol; why, the cleric had asked, couldn’t he simply carry a basket of burning maple leaves under his overcoat the way the good Muslims of freezing Kashmir do to keep themselves warm?
    A telephone call could also come in the middle of the night from Australia, a despondent father asking the cleric to fly immediately to Sydney all-expenses-paid and exorcise the djinns that had taken possession of his teenaged daughter soon after an end was put to her love for a white schoolmate and she was married to a cousin brought hurriedly over from Pakistan.
    Having reached the summit of the street, Kiran is looking down the slope waiting for him to catch up. He arrives and they stand side by side, motionless for a