Maps for Lost Lovers

isn’t sure why he has come.
    He was the elder son and, throughout his boyhood, was always accompanied by the sense that the family’s betterment lay on his shoulders. Nothing was ever made verbal but this expectation had been inhaled by him with each breath he had taken during those early years. His parents wanted to return to Pakistan: he would become a doctor and go back with them—this was understood by him. They—all of them—would be free of England when he finished his studies. He was troubled by the guilt of truancy every time he did something he enjoyed, every time he picked up his drawing pad. His art teacher came to the house one day when he was fourteen, to plead with the parents to let him continue with the subject. She had secured a place for three of the paintings in the little art gallery above the public library in the town centre, and his photograph had appeared in The Afternoon. The art teacher’s letters had been ignored at home—the mischievous attempts of the whites to lead the boy astray, said Kaukab, an attempt to prevent the Pakistanis from getting ahead in life, encouraging them to waste time on childish things instead of working towards a position of influence. When the teacher came to the house Charag had felt humiliated, screaming at her inside his head to go away, wondering whether the parents thought he had asked her to come, that he had betrayed them somehow.
    He had to concentrate on sciences, spending his time in the laboratories where the microscopes slept like hawks under their dust covers. The science teachers advised him to simplify the diagrams that accompanied his essays, concerned that it would become a habit and he would lose valuable time during exams. But the diagrams were the only sketching he could do without furtiveness and guilt at home.
    Everyone at home was, of course, aware of his talent. Kaukab sometimes brought him a bar of perfumed soap so he could sketch the vignette indented at its centre for her to embroider it in rows on her own or Mah-Jabin’s kameez s . And she asked him to convert the vines and geometric designs from the borders of the paper kitchen-towels so that they could be traced on the hands in henna, reducing it to fit the fingers, enlarging it for the palms. She saved the sketches in a folder that lived in her sewing hamper and they were often lent to other women around the neighbourhood. Whenever she couldn’t find her tailor’s chalk she asked to borrow one of his colouring pencils.
    His grades at A-level were not high enough to get into medical school. Putting aside the feeling of guilt and disgrace and failure, he told his parents he would not be retaking the exams next year to improve his grades for medical school, nor would he go to university this year to read the many other science subjects for which his grades were good enough.
    He planned to go to art college.
    But he changed his mind when from the dark staircase he heard his mother slap the thirteen-year-old Mah-Jabin in the kitchen and say, “Who would marry you now?”
    The year he went back to repeat his A-levels was a year enclosed on all sides by loneliness. Everyone he knew had gone away to university. He sat alone on the bus on the way to the school that was a low long building among the hills, made of gleaming glass and greyness and as windy as a harmonica, and in the classrooms he found himself unwilling to make contact with the new batch of students. Things had changed at home also: his failure had been a cruel dashing of his parents’ hopes, and a cloud of something anaesthetizing hung over his brother and sister who had witnessed his commitment to his studies all their lives—and, having failed despite all the hard work, he had made them afraid of their own books and schoolwork; the event had injured their confidence in their own abilities.
    Early in October a pain opened in his back and legs, and the doctor— after checking his reflexes by trailing and wafting a tissue paper along his naked body—had wondered if he would like to be referred to a psychiatrist since there seemed no organic cause for the severe ache. His mother said it was out of the question: a young girl in the neighbourhood had been sent to a psychiatrist by the doctor and had within months rebelled against her parents and left home.
    The months passed. He lost the pain somewhere along the way, working hard on his studies, but again did not make the required grades. He went away to university