Maps for Lost Lovers

your sweat and urine after you’ve eaten it.”
    “Be quiet!”
    “Sorry,” Mah-Jabin laughs, for the first time in weeks, and touches her mother’s knee with her own. The laughter dissolves in the sunlight, while, like a music-box left open beside her, the coffee steams in the dry air.
    A voice bursts through like a ball landing in the little garden: “Mother and daughter are enjoying the sunlight, I see. And the daughter-empress wants to lighten the colour of her hair, does she?”
    Mah-Jabin looks up: a vaguely remembered neighbourhood woman is struggling with the rusted screeching latch of the garden gate. Kaukab explains how to circumvent the eccentricities of the catch and the woman—acting on the advice—gains entry to advance towards them under the jewelled nets of the lilac branches.
    Mah-Jabin—fearing that the woman has come to collect material for gossip—wishes to retreat inside, but the woman flags her down: “I won’t take a seat, beautiful. I’ve just stopped by to remind your mother that Ateeka—the wife of Zafar-who-has-a-clothes-stall-in-Thursday-market and not the left-handed Zafar—is flying to Pakistan on Monday, so if there are any presents that have to be sent back home there is still room in the luggage.”
    Kaukab tells her that earlier the taxi-driver-Mahmood’s wife had called her out to the garden gate in passing and given her the same message; Mah-Jabin can envisage the woman going along the street, one of the many who begin doing the rounds in late morning, all involved in that organized crime called arranged marriages.
    Mah-Jabin dips a finger in the hot coffee until it begins to burn, pulling out just in time, as though she were teasing a pet bird, withdrawing the fingertip from the bars of the cage before the inevitable inflamed peck.
    She looks at the roses to distract herself, the petals wrinkled like elastic-marks on skin, the blown heads lying in whole clumps under the bushes like bright droppings of fantastic creatures.
    The grass is rising like knives, the green the colour of the butterfly fabric, and now Mah-Jabin remembers that this woman is the mother of the girl she’d seen earlier with her Hindu lover on Omar Khayyám Road. Mah-Jabin examines her with interest now.
    The visitor slips a foot out of her shoe and rests the dry cracked sole on the bottom rung of the fence dividing this garden from the next. She has not stopped speaking since she came: “Of course Ateeka’s boys are growing up and eat everything they can lay their hands on, so all the fancy food and the biscuits and cakes intended for the visitors who are coming to the house to see off their mother must be hidden away. She thought that the built-in space under the settee in the kitchen—where she stores her linen and pillow-cases—was an ideal hiding place. And what do you think happened? This: the guests came last night and settled on that very settee! Now the kettle is whistling and steaming, the milk has boiled and got cold and been boiled again, the cups and plates are at the ready, but how to get at those pastries, from Marks and Spencer no less? She says she just sat and looked at the guests’ faces, getting up now and then and pretending to give the cutlery and crockery one last wipe with the dish cloth. ‘I’m sure they thought I was the cleanest woman on Allah’s earth,’ she told me just now. ‘Either that or the most forgetful and the most crazy.’ It must have been a spectacle to behold, Kaukab.”
    Mah-Jabin finds herself gripped by helpless laughter; all three are shaking with noisy delight, touching wrists to the rims of their eyes.
    “I am telling you the truth, Kaukab. If it isn’t true you can change my name to Liar.”
    Kaukab soaks up on a tissue paper the line of red liquid that has broken onto Mah-Jabin’s forehead.
    “Kaukab, what brand henna is it, Lotus- or Elephant-?” the woman asks, but does not wait for the reply, continuing distractedly: “These last few days have been very hard on Ateeka, though, because her sister in America was fondled and handcuffed by police for wearing her head-to-toe veil. It would soon be a hanging offence to be a Muslim anywhere in the world, it seems. The police officers—”
    “Whereabouts in America, auntie-ji? Wearing masks in public is illegal in some states over there,” Mah-Jabin explains. “The officers could’ve mistaken her face-veil for the hood of a Ku Klux Klan member.”
    “What? A who member?” the