Maps for Lost Lovers

day I’ll come to the Safeena and ask you to recite for me, like Wamaq Saleem. The only difference being that ours would be a private reading, for one.” She approaches him with the two volumes by Chughtai, holding them in the crook of her arm like a college girl. “I’ll take these. I looked for them in Pakistan but the village where I was didn’t have a very well-stocked bookshop, as you can imagine.”
    “What were you doing in Pakistan?” Her hair is secured by the length of silk he had retrieved for her yesterday: at lunch the red insides of a Moroccan blood orange—one of those fruits that always produce intensely scented urine—had reminded him of the colour of the scarf.
    So he has a wife, she who had the only copy of his book of poems. But he could still marry her because a Muslim man is allowed four wives.
    Suraya had wondered, before coming to the Safeena, and has wondered during her visit here too, about how much she should reveal to him. Should she tell him everything about her situation—I am looking for someone to marry temporarily . . . But that would frighten him. Should she wait until they are better acquainted—until she has “a better hold on him”? And how will she get him to divorce her eventually? At home she had burst into tears at that. Dear Allah, why can’t I understandthe reasons behind your laws? It’s the man who deserves to be punished if he has uttered the word “divorce” as idle threat, in anger or while intoxicated, and, yes, the punishment for him is that he has to see his wife briefly become another man’s property, being used by him. But why must the divorced wife be punished? Nothing is more abhorrent to a Muslim woman than the thought of being touched by a man other than her husband. She hides her body like a treasure. But if she wants her husband back she has to let another man touch her. This is her punishment: a punishment she deserves, perhaps, because she did not know how to teach her husband to be a good man, how to teach him to control his anger and be a good Muslim, stay away from alcohol?
    But Suraya knows she’ll be able to go through with every humiliation and degradation eventually, that she’ll let another man—Shamas, for instance—touch her because she doesn’t want to go through life without her son and husband: she’ll be one person’s friend, another’s confidante, someone else’s mistress—but she is their everything.
    “I was married to someone there. I am now divorced,” she hears herself tell Shamas now, in answer to his question. “I have an eight-year-old son who is with his father.” That’s it for now. She feels drained. “I don’t know when or if I’ll go back to Pakistan. As things stand I have no one and no plans.” She pays for the two books but she cannot leave without first arranging their next meeting. She has been thinking quickly for the past few minutes, but nothing has come to her. She tries to find a way to prolong her presence here while thinking.
    And, of course, she mustn’t let him think that the next meeting is her idea—it’s possible that he’s the kind of man who likes to be in control (and most men are; women just have to orchestrate the events to let men think they are in charge).
    “It’s just occurred to me that the noise you heard earlier could actually be a bird and not a child’s whistle.” And she tells him how a flock of Subcontinental rose-ringed parakeets is causing havoc in the gardens and orchards on the outskirts of Dasht-e-Tanhaii. She saw them herself last week. About thirty in number, they are the descendants of a pair of Indian rose-ringed parakeets that had escaped from their cage some years ago.
    “I am very fond of those birds,” he tells her, “but I haven’t seen one for decades now.”
    “I wouldn’t mind taking you to where the flock is,” she says (perhaps a little too abruptly?).
    “I would like that, yes. We’ll look for the birds the way my brother used to look for butterflies. His name was Jugnu by the way—”
    “Please don’t feel you have to tell me things you’d rather not.”
    “No, I want to. I’d like to.” He looks straight into her eyes and says: “So how shall we arrange to meet again?”
    As he watches her leave along the path lined with tall grasses, he wants to run after her and tell her why he is fond of parakeets. But he stops himself, deciding he’ll tell her the next time they meet. “Do you know the story of Hiraman the