Maps for Lost Lovers

in London to do a BSc in Chemistry: there was one last path open to medical school still—if he managed to do well in his degree finals he could apply for entry then, in three years’ time.
    But during his second year in London, everything changed: one night, drunk, he found the courage to speak to Stella. “I am never wrong about colour,” was one of the first things he said to her.
    “Are you wearing contact lenses?” he shouted over the music. “No one with hair that colour has such blue eyes. I am never wrong about colour.”
    She looked at him. “My eyes are that colour naturally. How do you know my hair isn’t dyed?” It fell onto her shoulders from beneath a large black hat the rim of which had been turned up above the face, the slice pinned to the crown with a pointy rose made of folded ribbon, also black. His hands were shaking. During the year in which he had tried to improve his grades, he saw many Pakistani and Indian boys and girls— who had been waiting since the beginning of puberty to leave home and find lovers at university—make desperate, clumsy and foolish attempts to pair up now that freedom had been delayed by one more unbearable year. But he had kept his distance and reserve. And upon arrival in London, the sadness was of a different kind: there was no fear of discovery or repercussions here but he was inhibited by incompetence and inexperience, by a profound sense of shame regarding his virginal state.
    “Well?” she had now turned her back squarely on the boy she had been talking to when he approached her, and—in the privacy which included him—made a quick male-masturbatory gesture with the looped thumb and first finger of her left hand, to convey to him what she thought of the boy. Shunned, the boy stood behind her for a while and then miserably walked away.
    Her confidence filled him with terror. Would she dismiss and denounce him similarly upon meeting the next person? Her lips were red and syrupy like glacé cherries.
    “Well, young man, how do you know my hair isn’t dyed?”
    “It just isn’t. I would know if it were. As I said I am never wrong about colour.”
    She shrugged and smiled: “Hey, listen, I have seen you around the campus. And at the weekend you work at that bar in Soho, don’t you. I have wanted to talk to you for weeks now.”
    “My name is Charag.”
    “I know. I am Stella.”
    “I know.”
    They had to lean very close to each other to be heard and as a result could hear each other’s breath. They were in the cellar of a student house in Notting Hill, the space packed with people, and, softly, she took his hand and led him to the edge of the room, the walls that had been stencilled with giant capsules and pills in acidic colours, tumbling and floating, a brightly glowing mural celebrating their milieu’s fetish. There was to be a performance by a band—some friends of the party-givers who had travelled down from Scotland—but the party dispersed when the police arrived, summoned by the neighbours whose extreme dislike of the stu dents and the young they themselves were unable to comprehend, thinking their high-decibel drinking sprees and benders went unheard just as their intense internal storms of confusion did. Charag and Stella lost each other in the crowd that spilled onto the street like a nest of termites broken into.
    She came to Soho the following Friday, then again the next night, and asked her friends to leave without her, waiting for the staff to finish the after-work duties. And just before dawn—when the red dots on her bed covers were juxtaposed on the windowpane as though berries hung on the tree outside—he left her room to go back to his own house, burning with longing and humiliation, kicking in murderous rage at the dry plane leaves that littered the footpaths.
    He had watched the cigarette in her hands: tiny pink eyes opening and closing, breathing, where the paper burned and sent into the air a brown thread parallel to and distinct from the blue wisp of smoke rising out of the live tobacco.
    The anxieties had been many. The sense passed on to him during his upbringing was that the differences between the whites and the Pakistanis were too many for interaction to successfully take place; many marriages ended. The cleric at the mosque had advised the boys to stay away from the “faeces-filled sacks” that were earthly women and wait for the houris of Paradise. He said the boys should handle their members with tissue