Maps for Lost Lovers

short moment, looking down at his house.
    The town lies at the base of a valley like a few spoonfuls of sugar in a bowl. At the very top are the remains of an Iron Age fort to which a tower was added to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
    “All night I have tried to lift him to put him back into bed,” Kiran says, “but I wasn’t able to.” Her hair has silvered with age but her skin is still the colour of rusting apple slices. The beads hanging from her earlobes are tiny and clear, as though she has managed to crack open a glass paper-weight like a walnut and somehow managed to pick out whole the air bubbles suspended within it. “All night I tried.”
    “You should have come for me immediately.” Encrusted with snow, the hawthorns behind his house seem to be in flower this morning.
    “Your elder boy is married now? To the white girl with the green Volkswagen Beetle?”
    “They referred to it as ‘the Aphid.’ They were married, but are now divorced.” They’ve set off again, along the road through the cherry trees towards Kiran’s house. “I can’t really remember the last time I saw the grandchild.”
    Seven years old, the little boy is “half Pakistani and half . . . er . . . er . . . er . . . human”—or so a child on his English mother’s side is reported to have described him in baffled groping innocence.
    As he walks, his foot shatters an iced-over puddle (he’s neither a child nor Jesus); the thin sheet breaks, releasing the loud sound that was lying trapped underneath, the water coming out to mix with the snow in a sapphire slush.
    Kiran’s house is one-half of a stone box set at the edge of the road, interrupting the cherry trees. It is his understanding that the woman next door is a prostitute. Kiran was a girl of thirteen back in the 1950s when Shamas had arrived from Pakistan. Her father had lost all other members of his family during the massacres that accompanied the partition of India in 1947, and so he had brought her with him when he migrated to England from India. She was a mysterious withdrawn creature: to look at her eyes was to wonder immediately what myth it was that contained a being of identical spell-binding powers, the blood stopping dead for a beat or two.
    A child in a house full of lonely migrant workers, she was the focus of everyone’s tenderness. It was a time in England when the white attitude towards the dark-skinned foreigners was just beginning to go from I don’t want to see them or work next to them to I don’t mind working next to them if I’m forced to, as long as I don’t have to speak to them, an attitude that would change again within the next ten years to I don’t mind speaking to them when I have to in the workplace, as long as I don’t have to talk to them outside the working hours, and then in another ten years to I don’t mind them socializing in the same place as me if they must, as long as I don’t have to live next to them. By then it was the 1970s and because the immigrant families had to live somewhere and were moving in next door to the whites, there were calls for a ban on immigration and the repatriation of the immigrants who were already here.
    There were violent physical attacks. At night the scented geraniums were dragged to the centres of the downstairs rooms in the hope that the breeze dense with rosehips and ripening limes would get to the sleepers upstairs ahead of the white intruders who had generated it by brushing past the foliage in the dark after breaking in. Something died in the children during those years—and then, one night, Jugnu had come, his passport swollen with the New England wildflowers he had picked at the last minute before boarding the plane, the pages damp with sap and dew—he soon filled the days and nights of his niece and two nephews with unexpected wonder.
    They have arrived at Kiran’s house and he goes in after her.
    A vase of roses has dropped a few crimson notes onto the piano keys.
    The heat in the room leaps at the sensitive parts of Shamas’s face: the brow, the eyes, and the upper cheeks—the area onto the reverse of which dreams are projected during sleep. Kiran’s father, lying where he had fallen next to the bed, acknowledges their entrance by a faint movement of the body, a movement allowed him by the elasticity of the skin; otherwise, he is pinned to the floor by his great bulk and by the weight of his illness that is greater still. Being a Sikh, he has never cut his hair