Maps for Lost Lovers

. . I hope this food isn’t spoiled . . . So do you think the hair looks strange? Really? But it doesn’t make much difference at my age: a red harness is not very becoming on an old mare.”
    “I’ll put the dye on it properly for you after lunch.” Mah-Jabin plays with her own hair: there haven’t been enough days since for her to have discovered all the possibilities of the new cut. “I’d like to put henna on mine to get rid of its complete darkness, though it’s so black that I wonder if it would take the colour. And, by the way, I bet Father doesn’t think you are an old mare.”
    “Hush, you wretched girl!” Kaukab blushes. “Sometimes I wonder if you are mine.” She leaves the cooker and rummages in a cupboard: “I think . . . Yes, I have a packet of henna here.” The little sachet lands on the table before Mah-Jabin. “No, wait, there are two. Here, take this one as well. We’ll do each other’s heads this afternoon. And squeeze half a lemon into the henna: that will bleach the hair a little and then the henna will show.”
    Mah-Jabin mixes the henna in a bowl. Like four cut-off spectral hands the transparent cellophane gloves that came with the two henna sachets have floated to the floor to lie invisibly on the linoleum arabesques.
    “Only one chappati for me, Mother. Your chappatis are heavier than mine: I can usually eat two of mine.” Mah-Jabin had begun to be tutored into making chappatis at about twelve years old, the boys complaining and laughing in brotherly amusement at her efforts, feigning sickness as she removed one misshapen disc after another from the baking-iron, once or twice reducing her to tears, the elder calling her Salvador Dalí, but Kaukab was firm that a girl’s family must endure the earlier efforts so that the husband and in-laws can enjoy the skilled creations in the future.
    Having broken three handfuls of dough from the mass in a enamel basin, Kaukab now presses one back. “Your father always says how lovely and light your chappatis are, the way they puff up on the iron. And he’s been saying it a lot recently because I’m still not used to this new baking-iron—the handle came off the last one—and my chappatis have been mediocre at best as a result. I remember when I came to England I had a baking-iron in the luggage: your father had written especially, since they were not available here then. Men used to make chappatis on an upside-down frying pan—”
    “Yes I know, you’ve told us. But I think there is a thing called a ‘griddle’ in Britain that resembles Pakistani baking-irons, and of course the Mexican tortillas are cooked on—”
    “If we’d had you to guide us during those early years we would have done things differently, and I apologize if I repeat something I’ve already told you but I don’t lead a life as varied as yours.” It wouldn’t tip the scales on a pin, the amount by which a comment has to fall short from the ideal in the listener’s head for it to be regarded an affront, an offence—a crime. “If I tell you something every day it’s because I relive it every day. Every day—wishing I could rewrite the past—I relive the day I came to this country where I have known nothing but pain.” Immediately after taking it off the iron, Kaukab polishes the chappati with a pat of butter that melts and is propelled forward on the hot surface like a snail secreting the lubricating slickness to move on as it goes.
    There is a curve of pale-yellow crust—the remnant of a previous meal—on one of the plates Mah-Jabin takes out of the cupboard, on the china so intensely pigmented it seems to stain the air with each movement like a beetroot leaking colour: once it would have been Kaukab who noticed such a flaw in a chore assigned to the girl.
    Her mother is getting old.
    They sit together, eating side by side, Kaukab letting out a sigh of pleasure and touching Mah-Jabin every now and then. The girl bites off buttered chappati segments and jabs at the limp, endlessly compliant ampersands of the pepper-rings soaked with sunflower oil, the fork marking the sauce like bird-imprints on sepia mud.
    “I wonder what that girl was doing on Omar Khayyám Road,” Kaukab says. “Did you talk to her? Was she with someone—that Hindu boy, perhaps?”
    Mah-Jabin has been fearing this question. She is unable to control the roughness of her reaction: “Oh Christ, what difference does it make who she was with?”
    “You had been quiet for