Maps for Lost Lovers

push you away with my hand. ”
    “Please don’t come near me, Mother. And you would love me to go back to Pakistan to my husband, wouldn’t you, back to my ‘earthly god’? Or find me someone new like they did for poor Chanda. How many times had she been married before she met Uncle Jugnu? Twice? Three times? Yes, if it doesn’t work once, try again, because you are bound to hit the target eventually, as long as it’s you who decides what to do: if the bitch decides to take matters into her own hands and finds someone herself then raise the fucking knives and cut her to pieces.”
    “Not everyone has the freedom to walk away from a way of life,” Kaukab says quietly. “The fact that you have managed to do it easily has made you arrogant and heartless.”
    “It was not easy! It is still a torment. What hurts me is that you could have given me that freedom instead of delivering me into the same kind of life that you were delivered into. I want to go back into the past and tell that young girl who was me—and whom I love—what not to do, but no one can return to the past. But it was easier for you because I was there right next to you: if you loved me you would have prevented me from doing certain things—”
    “I did not have the freedom to give you that freedom, don’t you see?” Kaukab is pained and broken at the realization that someone as close to you as one of your children can make so many mistaken assumptions when they take it upon themselves to evaluate your life.
    “Don’t lie. You would have done it if you wanted to. You still want me married because you still believe a woman must have a husband. Please, don’t come near me, I said.”
    But Kaukab walks by her and begins to pluck the rosary beads off the floor.
    “Yes, I do want you to go back, because in the eyes of Allah you are still married to him. You may have divorced him under British law, but haven’t done so in a Muslim court. My religion is not the British legal system, it’s Islam.” Snatches of sentences are coming to her from the past few timeless minutes like waves returning to a shore and she deals with them as they come. “When I said a woman’s troubles are over within twenty years of marriage because now her grown-up children will defend her against the father and in-laws, I didn’t mean you have to connive and tell your children certain things deliberately. You need someone to talk to, to tell your troubles to, and her children are the people closest to a woman. You don’t connive to bring about that situation, it happens of its own accord.” She is on her haunches, weeping, as she lifts the beads off the linoleum like picking shells off a beach. “And what is this talk about me taking a knife to you: do you really think I could harm you?” There is a sense of consolation to the activity her fingers are engaged in, almost as though contact is being made with the dead: as a child she had seen her mother and grandmothers, and the other women in the house, similarly bent over the myriad daily tasks of the day, and sometimes—but not today, not now— the feeling is close to celebration, a remembrance and a praising of those now dead and absent but still living in her mind, unsung elsewhere and otherwise. Gone so thoroughly it is as though she had dreamed them.
    Mah-Jabin moves towards the stairs, on the floor coated with dried-up or drying henna that she had shaken loose when she hit herself, and from the powdered layer under her feet it is as though she is in a room in Pakistan after a dust storm has just passed through. “Don’t worry.” She pauses by the bottom step. “It’s not the first beating I’ve taken from you. Your husband beats you and you beat your children in return.”
    “I cannot understand why you constantly pluck this one string. I wish to Allah I had never told you about him hitting me and I’ve told you a thousand times since that it only happened that one time and that I didn’t speak to him for many months afterwards. He begged for my forgiveness and when that didn’t work, he even moved out for nearly three years.” Kaukab comes to the stairs, obstructing the flow of light into the well, and watches the girl’s ascending back. “Have you never made a mistake? Remember if you ever go back in time, make sure you choose to fall in love with the right person at fourteen, so that when he marries someone else two years later you wouldn’t have to ask your parents to arrange a