Maps for Lost Lovers
she needed him to be angry. She had cast him in the role of the head of the household and he had to act accordingly: there were times when he came in to inform the young teenagers that something they had asked from their mother earlier—the permission for an after-hours school disco, for example—was an impossibility, and it was obvious from the look on his face that he personally had no problem with what the children wanted. Sometimes Mah-Jabin wonders whether her mother knows Shamas at all. Shamas wouldn’t object to her visiting America, she knows. And she says these things out loud now.
Kaukab smarts at the words. “How your tongue has lengthened in the past few years. Is this what they taught you at university, to talk like this, your precious university far away in London that you had to attend because you wanted an education? If education was what you wanted you would have gone to a university within commuting distance and lived at home like decent girls all over these streets. Freedom is what you wanted, not education; the freedom to do obscene things with white boys and lead a sin-smeared life.”
Mah-Jabin’s head not only hums like a wasp’s nest but also feels as weightless as those oblongs of chewed-up paper glued together with spit. “I knew it was not the distance that worried you; you had after all sent me a thousand miles away at sixteen.”
“We did what you asked us to do.” Kaukab moves closer and stares at her as though pinning a dangerous animal to the ground with a lance.
“I was sixteen: in every other matter I was considered a child by you but why was that decision of mine taken to be that of an adult? Another parent would have given me time to think but you were thrilled that I wanted to go and live in your beloved country,” Mah-Jabin screams. “And I was afraid as the time approached for us to leave, but I knew I couldn’t have said no at that stage.”
“No you couldn’t. These things are not child’s play. We had given our word, the wedding arrangements were ready over there, and, yes, I would’ve tied you up and taken you there had it come to that. And what’s wrong with Pakistan? Many girls from here are sent back to marry and live there, and they are happy there. Only the other month, the matchmaker told me of a woman from here who has been divorced by her Pakistani husband by mistake, and she’s still eager to go back and live with him there. That’s what a good and dignified woman is like.” She pauses for a moment and repeats her question: “What’s wrong with Pakistan? I grew up there—”
“And look what happened to you, you fool!”
The hard open palm of Kaukab’s hand lunges at Mah-Jabin and in striking her face takes away her breath. This is something Kaukab has longed to do whenever she has thought about the girl in her absence and really isn’t a response to what she has just said: she simply happened to be within reach as the need overtook Kaukab and the moment chose itself.
The force of the impact knocks Mah-Jabin off the chair, while Kaukab’s rosary—looped double at the back of the chair—snaps and the beads clatter to the floor. Kaukab’s hand alights and grips the girl’s soggy gritty hair like a claw and slams the head many times against the wall with all her strength, the red stain of henna growing richer and larger on the wall, Mah-Jabin crooking her elbow against the side of the head until Kaukab finally lets go and moves to the sink at the other side of the kitchen, washing the redness—sticky as blood—off her hands, her back turned towards the girl.
Mah-Jabin opens her eyes and slides herself upright against the wall, the pull causing the safety-pin at her throat to open up and the point to enter the soft hollow between her collarbones.
Sometimes the right question can be as difficult to come by as the right answer. Yes: Mah-Jabin has spent the last nine years, and most of the two years of her marriage before that, looking for the question that has come to her only just now. She remembers that Kaukab, on catching Jessye Norman on television once—singing a lyric Kaukab did not know the significance to, in a language she did not know—had risen to her feet slowly as though in homage to the grandeur of the heart-breakingly beautiful goddess standing proud as a mountain against the Paris sky, and afterwards had managed to articulate only a few words:
“I love people who accomplish great things.”
The sentence had
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