Maps for Lost Lovers

organism, out of control. He was he but less and less with each passing moment. With one jerk she freed her wrist from his grip when he grabbed hold of her to take her back. As though she were walking in a howling storm, she staggered to the sink and washed her hands:
    She had been cutting up chillies earlier and didn’t want to touch her baby with those hands.
    With safe hands she picked up the baby and nursed him, despoiling his fast, wincing at the pain breast-feeding had always caused her.
    They didn’t speak to each other for the next six or seven months. One day he decided that he should talk to her: she listened to his apology, listened as he hinted that an apology from her too was required—and later, to convey to him that she hadn’t forgiven him, and had no intention herself of asking for forgiveness, she burnt the wedding dress on to which she had embroidered his verses years ago.
    He moved out of the house within the week, having rented a small room two bus-rides away on the other side of town. Each month he posted most of his wages into the house through the letterbox. One year passed, and then two; two-and-a-half. He lived in squalid conditions and days would at times go by without him having talked to anyone. His world was so reduced that half an eggshell would have served as sky.
    He met her and the children only a handful of times, either by chance or very reluctantly. When he saw her coming up the stairs one day he locked the door from the inside and pretended to be out: she banged to be let in, aware of his presence perhaps, and was eventually forced to say out loud through her tears that she was bringing him the news of his mother’s death back in Sohni Dharti.
    Although they both wept in each other’s arms for over an hour, and although he sent her back with the reassurance that he would be there in the house with her and the children before the week was out, he was still not there months later. One day in the snow-buried March of 1978 he came to leave his wages for her at the little seafood shop where she had started work not long ago; he had made sure that it was an hour when she would not be there—the other shop assistants would pass the money on to her. There was no one at the counter and he sat down to wait in the warmth. Outside, the day was as white as a new page, and there were icicles as long as spears. As he dozed and half-dreamed, the shop turned into a kaleidoscope brightly filled with black-and-cobalt-blue fragments whose reflections produced changing patterns on everything, including himself.
    The winkles had escaped from their tank.
    They were roaming because the urge was on them: on the coastline a hundred miles away the tide had come in, and things of all kinds were emerging from the sand to feed on what the sea had brought in. The small shelled creatures in the seafood shop had not been away from the beach long enough for their internal rhythms to adjust yet, and they had begun to explore, having lain motionless till now as they would on the beach— retreating underground and sealing the entrances to the burrows as though holding their noses shut at the low-tide stink.
    The other life of the planet had broken through into the one being lived by the human beings, that immeasurably vast life for which the humans were mostly an irrelevance.
    Shamas watched the nightsky-blue creatures surrounding him. The tide had come in far away but the sea had flooded the interior here. He let the beautiful lapis lazuli creatures leave the tank and make their magnetized way up the walls, explore the windowpanes like a child’s eye losing concentration and beginning to roam the page of the textbook, paint wet trails on the foliage of the plants like a tongue on a lover’s skin, and climb onto the tables to go on slow voyages.
    The shop assistant came out from the back and said she hadn’t remembered to secure the lid of the tank in time for the tide.
    She gave him a letter which Kaukab had left for him, and, as she hurried from corner to corner to pick up the blue shells, she asked Shamas to hand over the money but he said there was no need because he had just decided to go home to Kaukab for good.
    He picked off the shells from the chilled glass panes of the window. Shamas helped contain the homesick beach-creatures and afterwards glanced at the letter: it was from Jugnu; he wrote that he was thinking of leaving America and coming to live in England, that he could be there with them