Maps for Lost Lovers

reverberating pigment.
    “I am sorry I couldn’t come yesterday, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .” She must try to find out his name, in order to be able to tell what religion he is.
    “I am Shamas.”
    Muslim. She looks at the marriage finger: there is no ring, but that is no proof because the wearing of marriage rings isn’t really a strict custom in the Subcontinent.
    She must try to keep him here, to find out more about him. “Tell me, do you think it was here that the police found a human heart some weeks ago? I overheard some little girls in a shop saying that when the children who chanced upon it had poked it with a stick it had given a few beats. What imagination the children have!” Perhaps he will now make a comment about his own children?
    “No, it was closer to another shore, closer to the river where we met, nearer the area where there is a beekeeper from whom the Sultan of Oman bought forty queen bees, chartering a plane to fly them home. He had tasted their honey in a London hotel.”
    She nods. The dawn surrounds them both with its green-and-blue, the deep sky above and the almost-luminous new growth of leaves below it. He is surely too aloof and dignified to be interested in her. He is obviously not a factory worker or taxi driver because his hands are soft-looking and almost pink.
    “Yes,” he is continuing, “the heart was found in the other direction. A young white man was responsible. It was his dead mother’s and he stole it from the hospital just because he didn’t want it to be transplanted into a black man’s body.”
    The information is shocking, and Suraya feels it as such, but she is aware that for several months now she is a little numb to the world, the news about it—no matter how monumental or significant—coming muffled by her own difficulties. Nor can she remember the last time she felt pleasure, genuine gladness that plumbs the soul, as she did when she embraced her son, pressing her nose and mouth into his soft neck, or when she tussled with him on the floor, glad that he was not a girl because you couldn’t be that rough with girls: she remembers her mother stopping in her tracks and sharply telling her father not to play too enthusiastically with his little daughter lest he cause “irreparable physical damage to her private areas,” having warned him many times before that, “If a flower loses a petal it doesn’t grow back!”
    She is thankful to Allah that she doesn’t have any daughters.
    Her longing for her boy is so great that last month while swimming in the lake, in the predawn darkness, she had had the urge at one point to just let go and sink to the bottom, let the water suck the life out of her while the bright moon watched above. If something doesn’t happen soon, she thinks now, I might still do that: float lifeless above the X-shaped giant’s still-beating heart. She remembers hearing from women in her childhood that this lake requires a sacrifice every six years, and she wonders how many years it has been since the last drowning.
    “My daughter”—the man has begun another sentence—“thought it was the heart of her murdered uncle.”
    It takes her a moment or two to register what he’s just told her. The force of it causes her to raise her hands to her breasts—it’s almost a blow to the heart. “Allah!”
    “I am sorry,” he says, looking stunned. “I didn’t mean to shock you, forgive me.”
    “When did it happen? Recently?”
    “Yes. Please forgive me. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”
    Recently. The poor man is living through the death of his brother, grieving, and there she was, planning, working out strategies, wondering whether she sensed in him an attraction towards her! Her eyes fill up with tears because of the disappointment of realizing that he is probably not interested in her—she’ll have to keep looking for someone else. She feels exhausted. And yet there is also a surge of shame, because with a part of her brain she’s also wondering whether it wouldn’t be easy for her to use his grief to her own advantage. She’ll offer him comfort and then he will become grateful to her—yes? She’s filled with self-disgust, her eyes brimming with water. What has she turned into and who is responsible for doing this to her?
    “I am sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that. Are you all right?”
    “Yes, thank you.” She raises her veil to her face and realizes she’s been holding a piece of the desiccated peel from the