Maps for Lost Lovers

stake. Eventually she was allowed to leave the house with her virtue intact; the men did, however, tell her that they were going to let everyone know that they had raped her because it would cast a mark on their honour and their name and their manhood if people thought they had had a woman from the other side of the battle-line in their midst and hadn’t taken full and appropriate advantage of the opportunity.
    As it turned out it was as bad as if they had raped her. What mattered was not what you yourself knew to have actually happened, but what other people thought had happened. Her husband and in-laws believed her completely when she said that she was still pure, that nothing irrevocable had occurred in the house of the enemy, but in the end that fact was worthless.
    All this pushed her husband over the edge. More and more he began to seek solace in alcohol, saying he needed it to breathe, often coming home knee-walkingly drunk, taking off his cap and waistcoat and attempting to hang them on the shadow of the hat-stand on the wall, his behaviour becoming increasingly volatile so that eventually she was afraid to even let her bangles make a sound, not knowing what would provoke him, though he was always remorseful after his outbursts, telling her how much he loved her, that he just couldn’t get the barbed comments of people out of his head.
    There were days when, in his shame, he didn’t want to see anyone: not even himself—he draped the mirror with a cloth. But then there was disgust and rage in him as he handled the veils that came into the house to be dyed because her father-in-law was a dyer: “They are getting shorter and shorter. The women of today are increasingly shameless.”
    She could always tell by the sound of the knock on the door at night that he had been drinking and also how much he had had; his language was coarse when he addressed her on these nights, as though he wouldn’t get the full worth of the money he had paid the alcohol-seller if he didn’t call her abusive names.
    She tried to resort to her earlier spiritedness, trying to remind him of happier times, but that behaviour now seemed to enrage rather than enchant him, a sign of Western decadence.
    One day he slapped her with his coarse rectangular hand. The next day he began to shake her violently: “I know what you did in that house. Admit the truth at once if you don’t want my fist to aid your memory.” He did beat her the next day. And the day after that he waved a knife and shouted, “Your death is hidden in this dagger . . . The role of a woman is to give life, the role of a man is to take it . . .” The next day he took the final step:
    He said the word talaaq three times: I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee.
    And he pushed her away with his foot. In the morning he claimed he didn’t remember uttering the deadly word in triplicate; and even if he did say it, he certainly hadn’t meant it—but what had been done could not be undone now. The husband—who was the only one in a Muslim marriage with the right to divorce—had uttered the word three times and according to Islam they were now divorced.
    There were no witnesses but even then they couldn’t ignore what had happened: Allah had witnessed.
    Many drunks were repentant in the mornings when they woke up to find the wife and children weeping at the ruin their life had become a few hours earlier: the husband, intoxicated, had probably had his hands pushed away in the darkness by the wife who was revolted by the smell of alcohol and he had said the word three times in rage. Talaaq. Talaaq. Talaaq. It was as simple as that.
    Every day the clerics of the mosques all across the Subcontinent were visited by thousands of distraught couples, and every day the Muslim newspapers—here in England, and there in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—received letters from men who said they loved their wives and children dearly, and that they wanted to keep their family together, that the word talaaq was uttered by them only in anger—but Allah’s law was Allah’s law and nothing could be done.
    Nothing except the path Suraya has already embarked upon.
    The man—her husband—doesn’t have to marry another woman before he can marry her again. Allah’s law is Allah’s law and cannot be questioned.
    Shamas sits in one of the yellow chairs with the newspaper and listens to Kaukab. Having just returned from the neighbourhood shops, she is telling him about the various