Maps for Lost Lovers

lamp, he takes a net of oranges, his sketch pad, and a dozen pastel-sticks held together by an old wristwatch like a comic-book time-bomb, and returns to the lake, sitting on a piece of driftwood that is heavy for its size the way a lobster is. He sketches the mist. In the dawn light the paper is a soft luminous blue, and his hands are soon covered with pastel dust, and it is also there on the ground where his blowing has carried it in sweeps beyond the edge of the paper; the fans of coloured dust on the ground are as though his breath petrified and preserved. White, and grey, green as a surgeon’s gown, and the chalky-red of a school’s cracked clay tennis court.
    Consumed in succession, he notices, each new orange has a flavour subtly its own, different than the last. Putting away the pastel sticks and the drawings, he closes his eyes, feeling that all the stars have been sieved out of his bloodstream for now.
    He knows that his art has become uninspired of late, needing new direction. It’s the thing that he has invested in most passionately, and he knows that his dissatisfaction with it could lead to the profoundest crisis within his adult self.
    “Forgive me, but I hadn’t meant to startle you,” the voice comes from behind him.
    He turns and finds her standing a few yards away, fully clothed, a gauzy veil covering the wet hair and shoulders. Has she been watching him? He thought she had fled the vicinity. “Are you all right?” he says. “I was too engrossed in my thoughts to hear anyone else in the water.”
    “Me too.”
    The small daisies growing on the path beneath her feet look like a stretch of living stars—the narrow earthen path between tall grasses that leads to the entrance of the Urdu bookshop owned by his father’s friend.
    She waves away an insect, blinking those sleepy eyes.
    To bring a car to this place at the height of summer would be to have Gypsy moths come out of the pine trees and lay eggs on the tyres.
    He is not sure what to do or say—she’s just standing there looking at him—and so he begins to collect his things.
    “My name is Suraya,” she says, and hesitantly takes a step towards him. “Did you find the water too cold?”
    He shakes his head. He has never really known how to act in the company of an Asian woman: it’s always been his understanding—the result of his upbringing—that reserve and aloofness is the best way to behave towards them.
    She is perhaps in her late thirties, and extremely beautiful to him, Italian-looking, Spanish, Latin American; she says: “I used to swim in the lake when I was a child and couldn’t resist going in an hour or so ago, thinking no one would see me. I returned from Pakistan at the beginning of the year, and have been waiting for the water to warm up ever since then. My patience ran out finally.”
    He stands up, clutching his things. “What were you doing in Pakistan?”
    But she says, “The lake, I missed terribly, and the woods beyond it, in spring, full of bluebells—I longed for them both in Pakistan.” She points to the sketches he’s holding: “May I see those?” And while looking at them, standing beside him, their clothes almost touching, she says, quietly, “I was married to a man in Pakistan. I have a little son there. But my husband got drunk one night last year and divorced me.” She is looking intently at the pages, avoiding his eyes, not willing to see the expression on his face. “He’s repentant and we both want things to be the way they were, but according to Islamic law I cannot remarry him until I marry someone else first. The new man would have to divorce me soon after we marry and then I’d be free to marry the father of my son again.” She’s staring at a fixed point on the page in her hand. “Are you a Muslim by any chance? What’s your name?”
    Charag takes a step away from her.
    “I miss them both so much.” She’s still not looking at him. “Are you married?” There is a faked nonchalance in the voice.
    “Forgive me but I have to go,” Charag says and extends his hand to take back his sketches. But she doesn’t move. The neckline of her tunic is embroidered like the young gypsy’s in the first version of Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller, her hand pointing to the girdle of Venus on the palm of her unsuspecting victim’s hand while she gently removes the gold ring from his finger, having beguiled the innocent boy with her beauty. The subtle thief.
    “If only I could