Maps for Lost Lovers

and the locks are collected in a bun at the top of the head. “Shamas? I am sorry to disappoint you but I am still alive. I know you cannot wait for my death to get your hands on my jazz records.” The wood these walls are made of has soaked up more music than the birdsong it had absorbed as trees in the forest.
    Shamas approaches and drops by his side. “I pray for it every day but you are stubborn.” Blood vessels creep close to the surface on the man’s cheeks as on the bodies of shrimps. Together in the harness of their arms, he and Kiran lift the old man as heavy as a stone Buddha onto the bed.
    “Thank you, sohnia. ” His eyes droop close as Shamas arranges the quilt around him. Sohnia: the Beautiful One. “I want to leave and go up there. The temptation on my part is strong to arrive and watch with these eyes all the greats playing music together.”
    “God’s very own backing band!” Shamas smiles. Through his socks he can feel a zone of greater warmth on the carpet where the body had lain next to the bed all night.
    “God’s very own backing band. Yes.” Loose strands of his dishevelled beard are softly bristling away from his skin, some short, some long, the colour of mist on a spring morning, floating above his face as though he is below water. The room expands and contracts with the unfocused dazzle thrown off the white crumbs falling past the window. Tenderly, the old man places a hand on Shamas’s sleeve and whispers, “Thank you for coming, my friend.” And then, mischievous once again, he shouts: “Watch him on his way out, Kiran. Don’t let him steal. I’ll count the records this afternoon just to be sure.” He shuts his eyes, the lips keeping the shape of the last word.
    Shamas closes the door quietly behind him as he leaves the room.
    “They are three weeks old.” Kiran, who had been in the kitchen, comes out into the hallway where he stands looking at the roses on the piano. “Duke Ellington taught me to put an aspirin in the water to make them last.” She presses a key without sounding it, exposing the dull yellow wood of the adjoining key beneath the gleaming lacquer. “He mentions it somewhere in the ‘self-interview.’ ”
    “Sidney Bechet uses the word ‘musicianer’ in his book. It’s lovely. I don’t think I have come across it anywhere else, but ‘a practitioner of music’ should be called a ‘musicianer.’ ”
    “Come through. I am making tea.” The kettle is whistling back there like a toy train. Around her wrist there is a gold bracelet composed as though of a series of semicolons—

    He declines her offer. She doesn’t know this but her lover eventually named his baby daughter after her—Kiran, it being a name acceptable to both Sikhs and Muslims. A ray of light.
    She plucks open the front door for him. “I’ll tell him you failed to steal anything.”
    It was this father and daughter who had introduced Shamas and the other migrant workers to jazz in the house they shared all those years ago. She would stop suddenly on hearing the pulse of sound coming out of the Woods music store. “Unless I am mistaken that’s Ben Webster.”
    At home she would take out the new record that would look painfully vulnerable out in the air, and examine it carefully for imperfections, blowing on it quietly as though it were on fire, and then place it onto the turntable with the caution of a mother setting a baby in a cradle, while, an open book of faces, the others would be sitting in a semicircle around the gramophone, waiting for it to begin—Louis Armstrong “calling his children home” with his trumpet, or the genius of Count Basie so unmistakable that the stylus would seem to be travelling around the very whorls of his fingerprint.
    The record would begin and soon the listeners would be engrossed by those musicians who seemed to know how to blend together all that life contains, the real truth, the undeniable last word, the innermost core of all that is unbearably painful within a heart and all that is joyful, all that is loved and all that is worthy of love but remains unloved, lied to and lied about, the unimaginable depths of the soul where no other can withstand the longing and which few have the conviction to plumb, the sorrows and the indisputable rage—so engrossed would the listeners become that, by the end of the piece, the space between them would have contracted, heads leaning together as though they were sharing a mirror. All great artists