Maps for Lost Lovers

sewn for herself: “The rag in the drawer, a shade less blue than navy. Yes, I did say to myself when I was buying it that my Mah-Jabin would ooh and aah over this colour. Four pounds per yard. I still haven’t stitched the hem of the new kameez.” And, when Mah-Jabin tells her with a smile that she would be unable to help her in that task as she could never achieve those tiny invisible stitches, Kaukab asks her if she remembers the time she had sat with a new kameez on her lap—working on the hem all day—and discovered at the end that she had stitched it onto the one she was wearing! “I don’t remember doing it but I can believe I did it,” replies the girl. “There. Finished. My turn now. No, hold on. There. Finished now. ”
    She spreads the blue cloth across Kaukab’s knees and sits on the floor with her hair in her mother’s lap.
    The hair does not fill the lap anymore and Kaukab misses the weight; she draws the comb of her fingers along the length and when it ends suddenly—shockingly, as in the dream in which the dreamer stumbles off a kerb—her fingers groping the empty air are an illustration of what is now missing from her life, what was once so palpably there—so palpably here.
    She begins to say something but remains silent, simply runs her fingers through what remains of the black locks just for the slippery slipping pleasure of it, how it slides off her fingers, the softest sensation in the world to her, and, once absent, impossible to summon at will.
    “Are you comfortable propped up like a rag doll on the floor? Let me know and you can sit on the chair and I’ll stand up.” Kaukab works the wet henna into Mah-Jabin’s hair, scoop by scoop of fingers. “Well, tell me anytime you get tired and I’ll stand up. In Pakistan we used to squat in the toilet and when I came here I thought I’d never get used to the Western toilets. But now, after all these years, those others seem impossible: how did we manage to squat like that every day?”
    “The body gets used to things.”
    “Even if the mind doesn’t.”
    She packs the entire bowl of henna into the girl’s hair, patting it on until the head appears as though coated with a fragrant mixture of mud and moss, tangy as tamarind, sweet as brown sugar; and the pulverised dark green leaf, through each pore and microscopic crack that the drying and the powdering had opened up, begins to release its red sap, diluted by water and made sticky by the lemon.
    Kaukab holds the blue cloth firmly at the girl’s shoulders and slides her chair back across the floor so that the cloth is pulled off the lap and rests like a little sailor cape at the girl’s back, a barrier between the henna and the fabric of the girl’s shirt. She takes the front-door key, attached—for want of pockets on her kameez —with a safety pin to her veil, and gives the pin to her to secure the blue cloth at the front.
    The back of the house has been moving out of the sunlight at a snail’s pace over the previous hours, and now—now that the sun has vaulted over the roof—it is in total shade, the sodium-yellow warmth directed at the front.
    Mah-Jabin makes herself coffee, Kaukab peels an orange and places the segments curved like leaping dolphins onto a plate, and they both go outside to sit on the front step where the breeze turns the lilacs’ pages in the little garden, the shadows beginning to stretch like chewing gum.
    Light is gone from the back to appear here as rain soaks into the earth and flows away underground to emerge elsewhere as a spring.
    The girl sits diagonally on the step, instinctively turned a little away from the house that joins theirs on the right, to keep it out of sight: Jugnu’s house. But it is there nevertheless, she cannot ignore its presence: the soul has many eyes, is capable of seeing in every direction.
    The woman next door on the left has taken advantage of the sunny afternoon and put out a rug to air that releases swinging plumes of fenugreek odour. “She must put fenugreek in everything,” Kaukab says; she is consuming her orange in the Pakistani manner, dipping the blunt-nosed segments in salt first. “The smell penetrates. In Pakistan it gave no trouble because the houses there were—are—big and airy and nothing lingers. But here the rooms are small and closed up, and the smell refuses to shift.”
    “That’s not the least of it: if I remember correctly from the few times you used fenugreek the damned thing gets into