Maps for Lost Lovers

woman who is having to go through another marriage through no fault of her own is a thought that has occasionally crossed Suraya’s mind, along with It’s as though Allah forgot there were women in the world when he made some of his laws, thinking only of men —but she has banished these thoughts as all good Muslims must.
    She wonders when the tulips will bloom. It was her mother’s wish to have tulips on her resting place: she did tell Suraya the reason for the request but it seems to have slipped her mind completely. She planted all but one of the bulbs in perfect rows because her mother used to say that only Allah is perfect and that we should acknowledge that fact when performing a task, that we should introduce a tiny hidden flaw into every object we make. “The Emperor Shah Jahan had made sure that there was a built-in imperfection in the Taj Mahal—the minarets lean out by three degrees,” she said.
    When she set out at first light, there was an insubstantial rain—it was more a misty drizzle and there was no patter on the drumskin-tight nylon of the umbrella—but now even that has diminished; were she to look up, only one of her eyes would receive a droplet. The lake is girdled by concentric bands of many-coloured sands, pebbles, and, higher up the shore, pine needles; and the water’s edge is softly gnawing at them. She turns and moves towards the hut that stands surrounded by maple trees. Across a part of its side, ivy grows in every direction as though a large can of green paint has been splashed on the wall. This is the Urdu bookshop. She looks in through the window. What was the name of the man she met on the bridge yesterday? Was he a Muslim? The sign above the door is painted in a red as deep as dolphin blood: it depicts a small boat with a pair of oars lying next to each other inside it like man and wife.
    She mustn’t despair at her predicament, she tells herself; this is not the end of her life: it’s a chapter.
    Shamas is walking towards the Safeena. The drizzle has stopped completely. There is a small clump of reeds on the edge of the lake, and caught in this wet light the blades give out a diffused green gleam: each blade is a giant grasshopper wing. The bookshop is painted a rich brown, the colour of warm spices. In the early days—twenty years ago—it consisted of nothing more than a few boxes of books. It was all spiders and exposed wiring but then it was slowly cleaned up and a wallpaper that was a jungle of flame-of-the-forest sprigs and pairs of deer with powder-puff tails was put up. The walls had had holes in them before that and brightly dusty wedges of sunlight would be found in the interior in the afternoons as though someone had strung geometric paper lanterns everywhere. The roof leaked like a sponge sometimes.
    But the owner was passionate about books and people would joke that given enough time he would track down even a signed first-edition of the Koran for you.
    He looks up at the sky. Today will be one of those late English spring days that have no independent temperature: it will be hot out under the sun but the body will feel cold if taken indoors.
    The owner of the Safeena went to Pakistan at the end of last year to untangle various financial matters concerning the money he had been sending his nephews for over a decade to buy land and property, and he died there, the relatives telephoning the widow here in England with the news three days after burying him. There is a possibility that he had been poisoned: there have been a number of cases recently where a person who had gone from Britain to sort out financial affairs had been murdered and buried by family members and business partners who had been misappropriating, siphoning off, or embezzling the money they were being sent.
    The widow gave Shamas the keys to the Safeena when he said he would open the shop for a few hours each weekend until the existing stock sold out; she could then sell the hut. She had waved her hand resignedly, “All I need, brother-ji, is a place to spread my prayer-mat.”
    The sun is pale, dripping silver. Fuses lit at random, the lemon-yellow dandelion flowers will be everywhere within the hour. The air smells of morning, of moist sunlight. He approaches the Safeena and stops. Someone—Suraya—is looking in through the windows, that red scarf still holding her hair in a bunch, the blue lozenges along its edge glittering in the morning air like unpurchasable gems, alive with