Maps for Lost Lovers

inarticulate ache. He is embarrassed by the kind of impression he must have made on her— someone comically desperate for company. He hasn’t had a conversation with someone about the matters that interest him for a very long time. Talking with Kaukab is, for both of them, frequently another way of being alone, the conversation highlighting the separate loneliness of each.
    He has also lost most of his friends from the Communist Party: he used to feel enlivened at the meetings, but almost everyone in the Party thinks the break-up of the Soviet Union would result in a better world, while he himself thinks that one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century is that the Soviet Union disgraced itself, that we danced on Communism’s grave, and so he no longer attends the Party meetings. Additionally, of course, the death of Chanda and Jugnu has made him reluctant to talk to anyone.
    Suraya watches Shamas leave. She wonders how bold she should be when dealing with him. Her aim after all isn’t to just interest him in herself—it is to eventually get him to marry her. And while men are happy to consort with women who are forthcoming and assertive, they will judge that trait objectionable in a potential wife.
    She has been told that she can be vividly bold; and she herself had read that component of her personality as courageous, but now she thinks of it as adventurousness, perhaps even recklessness, because it is this very trait that has landed her in the trouble she is in. She’d been sent to a Pakistani village to marry a man she had never met, and she admits that she had occasionally behaved in a spirited manner because she knew that her in-laws—and her handsome and loving husband—were in awe of the fact that she was “from England.” Her husband’s behaviour was loving towards her at the start anyway, before his secret drinking got out of control—though she was, even early on in the marriage, frightened by his acts and rough demands when he got drunk, behaviour he had no knowledge of when he sobered up and became gentle towards her once again as though she was a porcelain doll.
    Yes, a delicate doll: she exaggerated the shock she felt at the primitive and coarse nature of village life, because it made her husband think she was something special, made of finer clay. She pretended not to understand the codes and mores which governed the daily conduct of the people around her, saying, for example, that she found the decades-old feud with a nearby family ludicrous. Her wide-eyed innocence was found endearing and laughed off, but one day she had gone too far. She discovered that a man—one of the men from the family with which her in-laws had the decades-long feud—had been raping his niece for the past few months and that the matter had come to light only now because the fourteen-year-old girl had fallen pregnant. The entire family accused the girl of having relations with someone and thereby bringing dishonour on the bloodline. She was unmarried but not a virgin! Terrorized by the uncle, she refused to tell who the perpetrator really was. The matter hadn’t yet reached the ears of the world outside the house because the girl hadn’t yet begun to show, but Suraya had been told about it by her servant girl who worked at that house too. Suraya feared the pregnant girl would be murdered any day for disgracing the family. She couldn’t go to the police because, under Pakistan’s Islamic law, rape had to have male witnesses who confirmed that it was indeed rape and not consensual intercourse; the girl did not have witnesses and therefore would be found guilty of sex outside marriage, sentenced to flogging, and sent to prison, marked an abominable sinner from then on, a fallen woman and a prostitute for the rest of her life.
    The confidence of her English life still clinging to her, Suraya decided to go to the house of the feuding family to reveal the real truth to them and ask them to be compassionate. She was walking into a conflict decades in the making but she thought she could be persuasive.
    She realized her mistake very soon after she walked into the enemy courtyard. She remembers every detail, the time slowing down. The men of the house clustered around her and barred her way when she attempted to leave. People were always losing their way in the thick winter fogs and she pretended she had entered the house by mistake, putting aside her fears about the pregnant niece, her own survival now at