Maps for Lost Lovers

visitor is puzzled while Kaukab—breath pulled in in disapproval—gives Mah-Jabin a look of reproof for interrupting and trying to enlighten a grown-up. “In Portsmouth, Virginia. They stopped her as she walked towards the shops, and even though she explained she was wearing Islamic dress they asked her to uncover her face: when she refused they handcuffed and searched her while she screamed ‘Stop touching me, stop touching me.’ An unmarried girl: anything could have happened.”
    Yes: the girl could’ve damaged her hymen in the scuffle, Mah-Jabin thinks, with contempt. She had not been allowed to see a gynaecologist when she had hormonal problems at twelve, not even a female one; the neighbourhood is full of teenaged girls who are doughy and have chins coarse as cactus, bristly like their brothers.
    But it is the tears that fill the visitor’s eyes in sudden overflowing fullness that are occupying Kaukab: she quickly tells Mah-Jabin to go indoors and look at the post that has been waiting for her in her absence, upstairs in her room. The girl stands up, baffled, notices that the woman is on the verge of weeping, and edges open the door to enter the house quietly.
    The woman takes the place vacated by her and Kaukab places her arm around her. “Kaukab, it has been such a terrible morning . . . I feel I can tell you everything, you are like a sister to me . . . My daughter refuses to behave properly with her husband . . .” She presses her veil to her eyes with both hands and begins to cry silently, freely.
    Kaukab looks up at Mah-Jabin who has not moved an inch from the open door behind the two women, motionless with incomprehension.
    The woman says from behind the veil, her voice weak, “Go in and look at your letters, beautiful, and leave me alone with your mother for a while. Go on . . . Did you know I am always telling Kaukab how beautiful her daughter is? People tell stories about faces such as yours . . . Go now . . . Has she gone? This morning I went to see the cleric-ji at the mosque and he says that in all probability my girl has been possessed by the djinns, that’s why she’s behaving erratically . . .”
    Mah-Jabin withdraws, lest a comment from her now cause both women to turn on her. Djinns!
    The Madonna lilies have been giving off fragrance as candles give out light, filling the house into which Mah-Jabin steps. She drifts upstairs. The two pieces of post are in the drawer directly below: a poll card for the general election; and a letter that bears a stamp portraying a tree ablaze with festive pink-white blossoms in the distance and in the foreground a sprig containing a ruffled orchid-like flower and a leaf resembling the imprint of a camel’s foot: it is Bauhinia variegata, the wording informs along a vertical margin, and horizontally that the stamp is one of a series depicting the MEDICINAL PLANTS OF PAKISTAN. Mah-Jabin lowers herself onto a chair, having recognized the hand that had written out the address. Her husband has never attempted to communicate directly with her before and she wonders what is contained within the letter that bears the pretty flower of the tree that is valued for, amongst other things, its effectiveness against malarial fevers, the ability to regularize menstrual dysfunction, and as an antidote to snake poison.
    She won’t unseal the letter, as though it is a way of keeping his mouth shut. Touching her head to see if the henna is still wet, she discovers that the preparation has lost almost all of its moisture—clinging to her hair but crumbling like green sand on contact, having deposited the gluey dark-red sap onto the filaments. In the bathroom she becomes curious and opens the letter, but cannot bring herself to read it. She opens the narrow angular cupboard in the corner that houses the immersion heater swaddled in insulating pillows of shiny silver nylon. “Hello, spaceman.” She switches it on and, just before closing the hatch of the rocket, tosses the crumpled letter and envelope in—toxic waste to be dumped into some distant black hole.
    She taps out a tube from the box of tampons in her toilet bag and, later, throws the empty tube into the wicker basket but picks it up again, pressing it into a flat strip and putting it in her pocket to dispose of later, away from where Kaukab may come across it, she who had warned the twelve-year-old virgin against using these kind of napkins that have to be inserted into the body lest she be “ruined for