Maps for Lost Lovers

oranges the young artist had been eating last month: she must have picked up the cardboard-like fragment from the shore earlier. She lets it drop, and turns to leave.
    “I’ll open the Safeena this afternoon if you’d care to come,” Shamas tells her, attempting to delay her departure. “I was out on just a walk now.” Though of course it’s all futile: he didn’t come to the bookshop yesterday because he was afraid of himself, but she hadn’t come either. She had said she would—but she obviously has a rich and full life already, friends, family, lovers. She stops at his words, eyes still swimming. She is obviously very sensitive: the mere mention of Jugnu’s death had produced tears. He can tell her other things too. He envisages a friendship. He’ll tell her how much he regrets never having continued with his poetry, and that he would like to go back to Pakistan now that he’s about to retire, go back and see if he can do something for the betterment of his country. He’ll tell her that he heard about the discovery of the human heart from two clandestine lovers—a Hindu boy, and a Muslim girl whose mother is convinced that she’s possessed by the djinn and is asking around for a holy man who’d perform an exorcism.
    “I’ll come, yes. When I was a girl, my father, may he rest in peace, brought me here to a reading by the Pakistani poet Wamaq Saleem.”
    Shamas is delighted. “I was among the organizers for that reading.” They were the years of Wamaq Saleem’s exile—the monstrous military regime had succeeded in forcing him out of Pakistan. His books of verses sold by the hundred-thousand in Pakistan and India, and about a hundred people had arrived at the lakeside hut to hear him recite that afternoon despite the fact that the autumn sky was breathing a chilly wind.
    “It has been said that Wamaq Saleem did for Pakistan what Homer did for the Mediterranean and what the Bible did for Jerusalem.”
    Suraya says, “I remember the women listeners had brought him flowers, containers of perfume, and jars of honey, because just like the Prophet, peace be upon him, it was his favourite food. And men presented him with bottles of whisky and gin. My father had brought an embroidered shawl, and I presented it to him.”
    Shamas realizes he’s smiling, feeling light if not lightheaded.
    She seems to be one of those people to meet whom is to meet oneself.
    She is wearing a short woollen jacket, yellow with white embroidered paisleys, and, lightly gripping it between fingertips, she says: “This was once a Kashmiri shawl, identical to the one we gave to Wamaq Saleem. It was my late mother’s—may she rest in peace—but moths chewed up a part of it. I couldn’t bear to throw it away so I cut it up to make a jacket.”
    He wants her to stay but senses that her wish for his company is vanishing like dew by the second, and, as though about to take her leave, she touches the cherry-red scarf at the nape of her neck and says, “Thank you once again for this.” She smiles at him. That mole. Every moment he has spent talking to her has been of great value and worth: an image comes to him of an hourglass filled not with the usual sand but little diamonds. He would like to converse for a while longer but he must go now, fettered by his conscience—that self-arresting chain—because although it has been exhilarating to be in her presence he won’t be able to forgive himself if he becomes a cause of dishonour or harm for her. Someone returning from the mosque after his dawn prayers could notice them together and by midmorning the entire neighbourhood would know, and by the afternoon the whole town due to the communication radios in taxis. And, just as numerous other places and roads have been given Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi names to give the map of this English town a semblance of belonging—amassing a claim on the place bit by bit—this lakeside location would then be named Scandal Point, after the prime rendezvous spot in Shimla, so called because fifty years ago an Indian prince and the beautiful daughter of a senior British official had met there for a long ride together on their horses, their subsequent absence over the following few days scandalizing the town’s white population.
    “So, yes, come to the shop this afternoon, if you’d like to look over the books,” he hears himself tell her again, desperately, before walking away. The moment of parting leaves in him an