Maps for Lost Lovers

find someone suitable. I meet with the matchmaker regularly but haven’t been successful so far. As I said, it’ll only be a temporary arrangement. And, of course, we wouldn’t have to be compatible in age. The Prophet, peace be upon him, was nineteen when he married a woman of forty.”
    And he was in his sixties when he consummated his marriage with a nine-year-old, thinks Charag.
    She asks him: “How old are you?”
    “Thirty-two.” But his voice doesn’t come out. He stands dumbfounded, this encounter beyond anything he could have ever imagined for himself—or for anyone else, for that matter. He gently takes hold of the sketchbook. She lets go but not before a tear the size of a pear seed has slid off her cheek and fallen audibly onto the paper.
    It was the first sound you heard upon coming into this world: women—screaming, cooing, reassuring, out of control, in charge, shouting in pain, in pleasure, laughing, sobbing. Charag sometimes feels that to come to this old neighbourhood of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, these Asian streets and lanes of his childhood, is like entering one large labour room, full of the voices of women expressing a spectrum of emotions. It is like being born.
    He doesn’t know what to do with the tear as it lies glistening on the paper. Should he brush it away or shake it off, but wouldn’t that hurt her needlessly, be too graphic a rejection of her proposal?
    He watches it soak into the paper.
    “You are very talented.” She looks at him at last and produces a large smile, her eyes raw and red. And she decides to make one last effort: “I’d like to see more of your work. Where do you live?”
    He is seized by an embarrassment so acute it seems to be organic in its origins—a pain almost, arising from the very meat and membrane of him. Of course what’s taking place can hardly be termed seduction, but he recognizes in her desperation something of his own earlier anxiety and amateurishness regarding contact with the opposite sex. The culture she shares with him is based on segregation, and on the denial and contempt of the human body, and in all probability this is the very first time she has “propositioned” someone.
    And just as he is about to walk away, she becomes resigned:
    “You are an artist,” she says. “Tell me, can you paint this.”
    He knows that by “this” she means the humiliation she’s just suffered, the despondent clumsiness to which her circumstances have reduced her, and the longing she must feel for her son and husband.
    “Can you?” Her pain stares out of her eyes.
    “I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I can try.”
    She nods, wipes her eyes with her veil, and slowly walks away from him.
    He goes back to the car and sits there for a few minutes.
    Soon the rays of the sun would go in through the windows and ignite consciousness in every house of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, the caterpillars climbing the milk bottles on the doorsteps to drink dew off the foil tops. He’ll stay here, looking out at the sun on the lake for a while, and then go into the town centre for breakfast—before beginning the journey back to London.

THE MANY COLOURS OF MILK
    Shamas, on his way back from the town centre to fetch the Saturday papers, very soon after dawn, sees countless single threads of spider silk shining on the riverbank, sagging between tall reeds like lovers holding hands. They gleam and the eye wishes to return to them like favourite verses in a book of poems. A swarm of grey insects spins in the air, keeping to a funnel shape almost as if it believes itself to be trapped. He is crossing the bridge, and the river—down there—seems to drink the sunlight, sucking at its warmth. The grass is so rich there that it would creak underfoot. Down there was where the two lovers were looking for the place where the human heart was found: Kaukab says that the girl’s mother is convinced that she has become possessed by the djinns—that is why she won’t accept her new husband. Shamas has been careful not to tell Kaukab about his chance encounter with the girl and the Hindu boy—their secret trysts must remain a secret.
    This river is a recent stream compared to the rivers of the Indian Subcontinent: the Indus, its far bank wedded to the horizon, is an ocean-wide stretch of water that remembers thousands of years of history. And the river of his childhood—the Chenab—could rise by several metres during the monsoon.
    He built a small boat for himself during his early