Maps for Lost Lovers

paint. She listened as the sticks continued to burn, each flame sucking the thickness out of the wood and growing fatter itself; they went off and bent and remained luminous at the tip, looking like streetlights. She was wearing the jacket of his pyjamas, he the bottom half.
    She told him he had to abandon his Chemistry degree immediately. “Simple.” How light the burden of one’s life became in the hands of a lover! She told him what he had to do and made plans for contingencies, showing him he was several moves away from disaster—he who had always thought that he could make one wrong move and sink.
    After Easter he went home more and more often, wishing to tell his parents he was no longer a student, but came back to London without having had the courage to tell them. He heard Kaukab say to Shamas that the boy is probably being bullied by racist thugs at university and is coming home to escape them.
    He would reveal the truth to them several months later, at Christmas, the house smelling the way it always did in winter, of fabric conditioners and washing powder because the day’s washing was drying in the kitchen.
    “A painter is not a secure job. When we came to this country we lived in broken-down homes and hoped our children wouldn’t have to,” Kaukab said.
    “Mother, I am struggling because I am young. That’s all.” The skin above her breasts sagged, a funnel of wrinkles narrowing to where the division between the two breasts must be—nothing like Stella’s new precisely stretched silk. This evidence of his mother’s frailty and helplessness made him want to reassure her. “Mother, please don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
    “At least Allah is smiling on me as far as my daughter is concerned. Her husband loves her and she’s happy.” There was not an hour in the day when a letter was not in progress to Mah-Jabin from Kaukab, in blue aerogrammes or on loose sheets in fat envelopes that bore the stamps on the left corners—Kaukab always forgot that the stamps were fixed to the right-hand corner. Mah-Jabin’s own letters were happy when not ecstatic.
    Even though she was many thousands of miles away, Mah-Jabin was closer to Kaukab than Charag, who was only a train journey away. She could imagine Mah-Jabin’s life, against a background she had thorough knowledge of; Charag’s life, on the other hand, was beyond her imagining—he was lost to her.
    Stella remained a secret from everyone at home until Jugnu came to London to visit him while he was at art college. Charag hadn’t wanted to tell him because he knew Kaukab wouldn’t forgive Jugnu if she ever discovered that Jugnu had known about Charag’s “sinning” and kept it from her. He was sure that his father wouldn’t have a problem with it either but he couldn’t confide in him due to the same fear.
    The sky is so blue it appeals to the sense of touch. Soon it will be blue and gold. He rounds one of those small reed-covered islands that drift about the lake’s surface and now discovers that he has swum straight into another swimmer, also naked, badged with a small leaf above the left nipple, her hair floating in the water, curly and heavy-looking like seaweed. Her breasts are supported high by the water as though being cupped by invisible hands. “My Allah,” the woman whispers, and he can see that her pubis is shaved clean like a Muslim woman’s is supposed to be. She cannot swim away and simultaneously conceal her breasts and groin with her hands, and so she splutters and goes under, her foot brushing his penis where there is a dab of aquamarine from when he had had to urinate whilst painting yesterday. In trying to assist her he loses the rhythm of his own stroke and now it is he who’s underwater, amid the silt and rotting foliage, fingers tangled in her long tresses. All bubbles and olive-coloured skin, she manages to break away and swims off as he comes up and expels the water from his windpipe and nose, blinking away the grit in his eyes. He treads water as he watches her arrive at the shore in the distance: she stands up and turns to look in his direction, the sheath of liquid swinging off her arms and hips in long tassels, dripping brightly from the tips of the breasts.
    He waits until she has run off into the trees before beginning his own journey to the shore. Going along a path more daisies than soil he begins to put on his clothes. He cannot see her anywhere. He shivers. From the car parked under a nearby street