Maps for Lost Lovers

know that part of their task is to light up the distance between two human beings.
    “Thank you,” Kiran says, standing in the door. “I approached the mosque earlier—knowing there would be people there, hoping I would bring one of them back with me but they were busy with their own troubles.”
    “Troubles?”
    “Someone left a”—Kiran hesitates—“a pig’s head outside the door during the night. A lot of noise and shouts outside the building as people discovered it.”
    A quill of vapour emerges from Shamas’s mouth. He has just been to the mosque to assess the situation, the building that was an ordinary home until a decade ago when it was bought to be converted into a mosque. The widow who had lived here had slowly lost her reason after her husband’s death. She was alone: her husband had brought two of his nephews into England in the 1960s, declaring to the immigration authorities that they were his sons, and when she miscarried complicatedly five times in the 1970s, the doctors did not see why they should not suggest a hysterectomy since the couple already had two children. The husband had consented and persuaded her to consent: knowing very little English and nothing about how the law operated in this country, he feared their refusal to have the operation would somehow result in the doctors’ alerting the immigration authorities and landing all four of them in prison.
    The nephews did end up in jail once they grew up. They were briefly brought to the funeral of their uncle in handcuffs: one was serving a sentence for breaking-and-entering, the other for possession-with-intent-to-supply. She flew at them with her nails at the ready and then went into convulsions and the women had to prise open her clenched teeth with a spoon to get at her tongue.
    Losing weight rapidly over the coming months—there were reports that there were spiders’ webs on the hobs of her cooker—she went about in rags, her veil as wrinkled as a poppy, having locked all her other clothes and jewellery in a trunk and thrown the key into the lake. Within the year she became convinced that someone had been tampering with the sun: “I can’t find it anywhere, and if ever I do it’s in the wrong place.” That was when her brothers came and took her back to Pakistan, putting the house up for sale.
    Shamas pauses outside the mosque, having gone in there looking for the cleric. He had to offer help, talk to the cleric—even though he didn’t want to initially. After the previous cleric died last year, the father of Jugnu’s girlfriend Chanda had taken up the reins at the mosque. Chanda’s family had disapproved of her “living in sin” with Jugnu, and so Shamas would rather not face the missing girl’s father.
    But then he remembered being told by Kaukab last week that the missing girl’s father is no longer headman at the mosque: he had stepped down recently, unable to do anything about the talk in the mosque about his “immoral,” “deviant,” and “despicable” daughter, who was nothing less than a wanton whore in most people’s eyes—as she was in Allah’s—for setting up home with a man she wasn’t married to.
    And so Shamas had gone in and found the worshippers weeping. They were in tears at the realization that Allah does not consider them worthy enough to have placed them in a position where they could have prevented this insult to His home.
    The director of the Community Relations Council, Shamas is the person the neighbourhood turns to when unable to negotiate the white world on its own, visiting his office in the town centre or bringing the problem to his front door that opens directly into the blue-walled kitchen with the yellow chairs.
    Had the CRC existed back then, the fears that led to the woman agreeing to the hysterectomy would have been allayed.
    Breathing quills of vapour he stands outside the building where plastic bags containing the animal’s head and the blood-soaked crystals of snow are lying against the stump of the apple tree that had been cut down because, according to the cleric, it was the seat of the 360 djinn whose evil influence was responsible for the widow’s lonely bewilderment.
    He must go and see if anything has happened at the Hindu temple— responsibility to his neighbourhood driving him on.
    Snow creaks underfoot as he goes back towards Kiran’s house once again. Torn pages in a wastepaper basket, the new snowflakes have partly filled the oblong cylinders his