Maps for Lost Lovers

course, but I refuse to settle there permanently even though there is nothing I would like better. There is nothing on this planet that I loathe more than this country, but I won’t go to live in Pakistan as long as my children are here. This accursed land has taken my children away from me. My Charag, my Mah-Jabin, my Ujala. Each time they went out they returned with a new layer of stranger-ness on them until finally I didn’t recognize them anymore. Sons and daughters, on hearing that their mother is dying, are supposed to come to her side immediately to ask her to cancel their debt, the debt they incurred by drinking her milk. It is her privilege and her right. There is nothing more frightening for a person whose mother has just died in his absence than to learn that no one had asked her whether she released him from the debt of milk; you are supposed to beg her to lift that mountainous weight from your soul. I can’t see any of my children doing that when my time is near. Perhaps Allah is punishing us for leaving behind our own parents in Pakistan and moving to England all those years ago.” She shakes her head and says after a silence: “Weren’t you a little too long with the newspapers? Was the shop not open yet for some reason or did you wander off on one of your walks?”
    He panics as though he’s been caught stealing. “Yes, the shop wasn’t open yet,” he tells her abruptly. I look forward to seeing you this afternoon at the shop —she, Suraya, had said just before they parted.
    No, he won’t go to the shop today. He cannot believe he has just lied to Kaukab, and he doesn’t understand why he has done it.
    Kaukab moves towards the stairs. “I won’t move to Pakistan. What would my life be then? My children in England, me in Pakistan, my soul in Arabia, and my heart—” She pauses and then says: “And my heart wherever Jugnu and Chanda are.” Her eyes fill up with tears as she declares this last, knowing the look on Shamas’s face is saying “Really?” She knows no one will believe that she misses Jugnu and prays for his safe return constantly; she would have been overjoyed had he made his union with that girl Chanda legitimate in the eyes of Allah and His people. The only way, it seems, she can convince the others of her loss regarding Jugnu is by renouncing Allah and His injunctions, by saying that what Chanda and Jugnu were doing next door was not a sin. But how can she renounce Allah?
    She goes upstairs, and Shamas lowers himself into a chair. He tries to bring Suraya’s face before his eyes. Doesn’t she look a little like a younger Kaukab, the Kaukab he married when he himself was that young poet in Lahore? He wonders whether he had given her his name after she had introduced herself. And now he feels ashamed at this absurd train of thought. This is madness. But it was as though she herself had wanted his company. He sees other women, other women he finds attractive, during the course of his daily life, the way all men do, but, after he has registered that fact, remarked on their beauty, nothing comes of it because nothing can—they are not interested in him. Why would they be? He would have ignored this morning’s encounter similarly, but she seemed to want to be near him. He wishes he had shaved before going out this morning. No, no, this is insanity. Surely this is how teenage infatuations are born—he must act his age. She is much younger than him, by twenty-five or so years at least—she was probably born around the time when he was in his mid-twenties, writing those love poems. He takes a deep breath and tells himself to pull himself together. No, he won’t go to the Safeena this afternoon.
    Relieved at the decision he’s just made, he lets out a small laugh at the madness of what he has just been thinking, and the weight of the world is suddenly off his shoulders. In one of Jugnu’s butterfly books, he had last year secreted a prostitute’s telephone number copied from the classified columns of The Afternoon; he gets up and finds it now, but then, filled with wretchedness, tears it up. He flicks through the book for possible distraction and comfort. There is a butterfly called Sleepy Orange . . . In the woods of Siberia and the Himalayas there is a Map butterfly, and an Atlas moth in the islands of south-east Asia . . . And other names, even stranger: Figure of Eight. Figure of Eighty . . . One of the rarest gems on the planet, there is a butterfly in the wooded