Maps for Lost Lovers

need for explanations when it came to the Indian and Pakistani girls, most of whom were trapped helplessly in similar webs of their own.
    And then one day Kaukab mentioned in passing that so-and-so’s boy was getting married. Mah-Jabin ran upstairs before Kaukab finished speaking and bolted the door as though it could shut out that news from her life.
    The boy had not been able to get into a medical college within commuting distance and would have to move away in the autumn: the parents suspected it was a conspiracy of the white people to get Pakistani children away from their culture, to make them have sex before marriage and every day as though it were a bodily function, and to eventually make them marry white people, it being a neighbourhood curse to say may your son marry a white woman; Mah-Jabin remembers being sent into her brothers’ room by her mother to look for condoms, and addresses, photographs or phone numbers of white girls, and remembers being told about a family that was tragic because the father had cancer and the daughter had just married a white boy.
    And so—after telephone lines had burned between England and Pakistan—it had been decided that before he left for medical school the boy would marry his cousin from Pakistan; the parents had made sure he was ambitious and a high achiever—if he gained 90 percent and stood first in class then that was fine, but if 95 percent meant only a second place then it was not good enough. And they were not about to lose their prize of a boy to some white girl who most probably wouldn’t be a virgin.
    The two doctors in the surgery at the end of the road—Dr. Lockwood and Dr. Varma—who had taken an interest in the boy after learning that he was applying to medical schools and wasn’t just another young nohoper from around here, warned him of the dangers of inbreeding, but the father had gone to the surgery and reminded the Englishman that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were first cousins, and told the Hindu woman that before lecturing the Muslims on the dangers of genetic defects she might want to do something about her own gods, who had eyes in the middle of their foreheads and what about those six-armed goddesses that were more Swiss Army knives than deities.
    Shamas warned Kaukab to be careful and not lay a hand on the girl, because otherwise tomorrow the local newspaper would be carrying the headline BRITISH-BORN DAUGHTER OF PAKISTANI MUSLIM COMMUNITY LEADER BEATEN OVER MATTER OF MARRIAGE, bringing into disrepute, in one fell swoop, Islam, Pakistan, the immigrant population here in England, and his place of work, which was—in the matters of race—the officially appointed conscience of the land.
    “How will I bear it, Mother, seeing him with his arms around someone else?” They were in the bathroom and Kaukab was shaving off the hair at Mah-Jabin’s groin while she stood in the tub with her legs spread: the girl had lost all sense of herself, but the religion demanded that pubic hair must not go beyond the length of an uncooked grain of rice. “I don’t want to live here, here in this neighbourhood, this town. Let’s move away.”
    Kaukab dried the girl’s legs with a towel and looked for the box of sanitary pads: “We’ll think of something, baby.”
    The wife of Shamas’s elder brother had died recently in Sohni Dharti and the olive-green house was without a woman (a fate that may not befall even an enemy’s home); Kaukab and Shamas had felt it their responsibility to somehow come to the aid of the devastated husband and son the dead woman had left behind: they asked Mah-Jabin if she would marry her cousin and move to Pakistan; she said yes. Life for her had become wandering from one dark room to another. As she was looking into a hand-mirror one day and had turned it around—to the side that gave a magnified image—she realized that she had been looking at the magnification of her face all along: she was wasting away.
    She begged forgiveness from Allah for her charade of piety over the previous two years, and now, addressing Him in her prayers, said that she would put to rest all her doubts about His existence if He were to perform a miracle and make her his bride, see to it that she was rowed across these turbulent waters.
    But miracles came from faith, not faith from miracles.
    Kaukab had never lost faith that Allah would find a way of helping her widower brother-in-law—a man whom she loved and respected like a