Maps for Lost Lovers

life.”
    Just before she leaves the bathroom, and as though acting on a will and independent memory of their own, the fingers of her hand open the door to the immersion heater once again, reach around the belly of the quilted water-drum and grope in the darkness there: when they find what they are seeking she too remembers it suddenly, as though a jolting electric current has passed from the object to her brain.
    The knitting needle she had dropped there nearly nine years ago, shortly after returning from Pakistan, is still there, undissolved by the passage of time and the lack of light. She sinks queasily to the edge of the bath, holding tightly against her breast the hand that had touched the slippery smooth solidness of the spike, as a mother might console and reassure a child by hugging it after it has witnessed something disturbing.
    Equipped with that knitting needle she had shut herself in here after discovering herself pregnant—the smell of rust in her nostrils and the taste of iron behind her teeth and gums seeming to grow richer every second, as though chains to bind her were being forged within her—and had realized only then that she did not know how to proceed. How exactly was it done? In the end her courage had failed her and she had sat trembling. A legal termination at a clinic was an impossibility: her only source of money was her parents and they would not have allowed her to have an abortion, and would have used the pregnancy to renew their efforts to make her return to her husband.
    In the end she had induced a miscarriage by taking quinine tablets for a fortnight, something a young mother of eight in Sohni Dharti had said she found effective whenever she needed to give her body a respite, her husband refusing to see reason and claiming the use of contraceptives would lead to the unborn children pointing to him on Judgement Day and saying to Allah, “That man is the one who did not allow us to be born and swell the numbers of the faithful!,” with the result that once the woman had given birth in the January and December of the same year.
    With surprising heat in her heart, she takes the flattened and curved tube of white cardboard from her pocket and tosses it—like the crescent moon come unstuck and spiralling down—into the rubbish before leaving the bathroom.
    “Mother, what was the matter with auntie-ji?”
    Kaukab is at the sink, washing the lunch dishes, Mah-Jabin’s coffee cup, the plate that had held her own orange pieces, and the henna bowl. She doesn’t answer the question immediately—once again concealing everything regarding the Pakistanis that the children might deem objectionable. She knows Mah-Jabin will ridicule the idea of djinns.
    “Nothing. She was just a little tired.”
    Mah-Jabin had heard a few words of what the woman had said to Kaukab: the girl’s husband is demanding to know why she hasn’t conceived yet—either she is secretly taking contraceptives or she is barren. He called her a stony valley that had wasted all his seed. “She mentioned something about her daughter and her husband—”
    “Every marriage has it ups and downs,” Kaukab says abruptly, and then as abruptly: “What was in the letter?”
    “I threw it away unopened,” Mah-Jabin hears herself state flatly.
    Kaukab nods; she still holds on to the hope that Mah-Jabin will return to her husband, if he’ll take her back, that is, and if not that then perhaps another marriage could be arranged for her—which would be difficult because she is no longer a virgin, is used goods. She peers over her shoulder to meet her eye, “I forbid you to go to America.” Her hands clench into fists. “A strange country full of strangers! I’m sure your father wouldn’t approve either.”
    “How do you know I’m going to America?” Mah-Jabin is puzzled. “And well, I’ve been to a country full of my own kind of people and seen what that is like so I thought I’d try a strange country full of strangers this time.” Trapped within the cage of permitted thinking, this woman—her mother—is the most dangerous animal she’ll ever have to confront. “I’m just going to stay with some friends during the summer. Who told you about it? And may I add that I am not afraid of Father.”
    Oh your father will be angry, oh your father will be upset: Mah-Jabin had grown up hearing these sentences, Kaukab trying to obtain legitimacy for her own decisions by invoking his name. She wanted him to be angry,