Maps for Lost Lovers

things she has heard from the women out there as she prepares food in the blue kitchen, keeping up a monologue as she moves from cupboard to dresser to counter to oven. On a tablecloth as white as canvas, she arranges the still life of their lunch. A spring or summer meal is nothing without the freshly beaten coriander-chilli-and-mint chutney, so she had gone to the shops to pick up the mint and the coriander—bushels of the freshest imaginable green secured by stationery-shop rubber bands—and the chillies in polythene bags so finely thin they failed to rustle. She also brought limes that had scars on the peel, made by the sampling pecks of birds, indicating that the fruit had grown on the outside of the tree crown and had therefore been exposed to more sunlight than the ones that had grown concealed within the canopy, the ones with undamaged skins. She halved a lime and rubbed one piece on the plates they would eat out of, to impart a note of zest into each mouthful, and squeezed the other half over the salad of sliced onions and then coated each slice with fiery black pepper so that every curving piece would become as lethal as a sword in the hand of a drunkard.
    Mangoes the colour of copper pots have arrived in the shop, she says, £3.60 for a box of five, as have guavas whose flashing pink insides are like a burst of poetry and the red pears which everyone is always reluctant to peel because you want to eat that colour, wishing eyes had tastebuds.
    A woman in the neighbourhood has received a letter from the wife of the Bengali family who used to live in the house next door—before Jugnu bought it because the family had decided to go back after their son had been beaten to death in a racial attack by the whites—and in the letter she says that she was totally devastated to hear that her old neighbours’ daughter Mah-Jabin has cut short her lovely long hair.
    The Indian and Pakistani mothers of growing daughters are asking the shopkeeper to stop importing a certain English-language women’s magazine published in Bombay. They deem it vulgar and pornographic because in this month’s issue a young Delhi wife had written in to say that she had recently given birth to her first baby and that her husband, saying that her vagina was too loose now, had taken to entering her where she was tighter; the letter was to the medical-advice page and the woman had wanted to know if there was any way she could tighten her vagina, or failing that, perhaps some way could be suggested to make what her husband now does to her not hurt as much.
    The parents of a seven-year-old Muslim child—who had recently begun to be educated, at home and at the mosque, about various sins and their punishments—had been summoned to the headmistress’s office yesterday and informed that the boy had been telling his white school-mates that they were all going to be skinned alive in Hell for eating pork and that their mummies and daddies would be set on fire and made to drink boiling hot water because they drank alcohol and did not believe in Allah and Muhammad, peace be upon him.
    Someone has heard someone else say that Chanda was pregnant at the time of her murder and that, like Jugnu’s, the foetus’s hands were lumi nous, that they could be seen glowing through Chanda’s stomach and clothing.
    Music and talk from the radio tuned to the Asian station accompanies the two of them as they clear the table after lunch. There’s a phone-in about the problems of life in England: . . . Are you tired of being treated like a coolie by the whites? Give us a call. We would also like our younger listenersto contact us. Are you in a rage, one of those unemployed, newly bearded, mosque-going misanthropes they are writing about in the newspapers; the kind of guy who is either still a virgin or married to a non-English-speaking first cousin brought over from a village in Pakistan or Bangladesh, the guy who lives with his parents, hides outside his sister’s school to see if she’s talkingto boys, and thinks she shouldn’t be allowed to go to university. Give us a call on . . .
    He settles down after lunch to look at a local health authority pamphlet that has to be translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati—he will do the Urdu. Tuberculosis was thought to have been eradicated in the 1960s and all medical research into it was stopped in the West while it continued to rage elsewhere in the world, but now it is resurfacing in the poorer