Maps for Lost Lovers

teens, naming it Safeena, which meant both a boat and—in archaic use—a notebook; and he would take it out to sit in the cattails and the narkal reeds and the pan-grass of Chenab’s shallower regions, reading, the sounds of the migratory waterfowl coming to him from the other side of the green curtain if it were winter, the flocks arriving from the Himalayas at the beginning of October in minute-long V formations.
    This year’s butterflies would soon begin to emerge—a season heaving with life, the air above the river slightly fragrant like a garment still carrying the odour of its vanished owner. And now a piece of red cloth with a silken sheen, giving off a pronounced honeysuckle scent as though it had been used to swab up spillage from the perfume flask, floats across his vision, about to fall into the water. Instinctively he reaches for it before it disappears, and as he’s bending over the low wall towards it the newspapers slip from his grip and fall into the water below, changing colour instantly as the water soaks the paper. He’s suddenly lighter, his muscles relieved, the fingers holding nothing but that scarf which has butterfly blue lozenges along its crenulated edges. He looks around. The sun laughing in her glass bangles, a young woman is looking at him from a few yards away. He holds out the scarf towards her.
    “Thank you.” She whispers quietly. “I am sorry about your newspapers.” And immediately she turns and begins to move away from him, twisting the retrieved scarf and using it like a ribbon to collect and secure her hair in a loose ponytail at the base of the neck, her skin that pale rust-brown colour that white jasmine flowers take on at the end of the day.
    Propriety dictates that he should not attempt to detain her but he hears himself say abandonedly, “It’s a beautiful morning.”
    She stops—no doubt as staggered by his boldness as he himself is— and, turning around after a while to face him, nods her head which is a mass of curls, a few of which are already escaping the scarf and tumbling onto her shoulders. Small, fine-boned, she is perhaps in her late-thirties and is wearing a primrose shalwar-kameez with a wide length of see-through chiffon draped about the body to serve as a head veil when required. Her expression conveys a mark of consternation and she looks around, perhaps to make sure that this encounter is being observed by someone, that she is not too alone here with him, or perhaps to make sure that they are not being observed.
    Feeling ashamed for having given her cause for concern and irresponsible for not keeping in mind the risks to her honour before addressing her, he raises his hand part way to his forehead to bid her farewell in the courteous Subcontinental Muslim manner and quickly turns around to go back into the town centre and get more newspapers.
    “I was on my way to the lake. There is an Urdu bookshop there and I wanted to know the opening times,” he hears her say. Her face awaits him with the polite hint of a smile when he stops and turns around, the face that only seconds ago was tortured by doubts and dark considerations. She takes the edge of the veil and covers her head in a gesture of infinite grace, handling the fine material gently—one of those actions that reveals a person’s unspoken attitude to things; the thin sun-flecked fabric settles on her hair in a wonderfully slow yellow wave. “I think the shop is called the Safeena. It is, if I remember correctly, a poetic Urdu word for ‘boat’ and also for ‘notebook.’ ”
    Like a matchstick struck on the inside of his skull, spilling sparks, the ecstatic torpor of adolescent summers comes to him in a brief warm illumination, and he experiences a thrill which is very close to happiness. “It was the name I gave my rowboat during my boyhood on the banks of the Chenab. And the shop, the property of a friend, was named by me after my boat.”
    The bridge between them is made of glass and so he takes one very tentative step towards her.
    She’s considering him, as though thinking deeply. “My name is Suraya.” She smiles, more openly than she had the first time, and a very pale apricot-brown mole (if it were surrounded by others like it, it would be called a freckle—it’s that pale) on the side of her mouth gets pulled into a fold in the skin, vanishes into a laugh-line.
    “The shop is open in the afternoons on Saturday and Sunday, if you would care to visit,” he says. He