Maps for Lost Lovers

feet had made in the snow earlier. It is January in England, and it is January in Pakistan too. When they arrived in England, some of the migrants had become confused by the concept of time zones, and had wondered if the months too were the same at any given time in various continents. Yes, it’s January in Pakistan too. January—the month of Janus, the two-headed god, one looking towards the future while the other looks back.
    His father worked in Lahore and came home to Sohni Dharti, on the banks of the river Chenab—Pakistan’s moon river—only on Saturday nights, walking his sons to school on Monday morning before catching the train to Lahore where he was the editor’s assistant at The First Children on the Moon, an Urdu-language monthly for children that had a Bengali sister-publication in Calcutta and a Hindi-language one in Delhi. Shamas has two brothers—one elder, one younger, Jugnu—but Jugnu was fifteen years younger than Shamas, so Shamas had only one sibling during his school days. “Solve this riddle,” their father would say to the boys as they walked: “ Twelve or so princesses deep in conversation in their palace, huddledin a circle. What’s the answer?” He still remembers his delight at being presented with such puzzles. The eye that in the adult sees the rough material for metaphors and similes all around it, comparing one thing with another, that eye was already half open in the child. “An orange!”
    Shamas wants to get to the Hindu temple as quickly as he can but the snow makes for hard walking, the air itself an obstacle to be overcome, and he fears he’s catching a chill, having heard himself coughing in the night. A mass of dislodged snow slides rapidly down the tiles of the St. Eustace roof, burying with a subdued thump the beehives that are standing apart from the rest, perhaps waiting to be mended. During June and July, the bees work the many thousand flowers of the lindens that are dotted around the churchyard, and under whose fissured bark Humming-bird Hawk moths may be hibernating now—immigrants from Southern Europe that arrive in vibrating clusters each summer to breed here; their wing-beats are said to produce a sharp-toned noise audible only to children, whose ears can still register the higher pitches.
    He goes past Kiran’s house and the house that belongs to the woman who may be a prostitute, continuing along the road with the wild cherry trees, towards the river where the Hindu temple is situated. Someone had once asked him if the prostitute was Indian or Pakistani. She is white: had she been Indian or Pakistani, she would have been assaulted and driven out of the area within days of moving in for bringing shame on her people. And so had Chanda brought shame on her family by living with Jugnu: Chanda and Jugnu—the two missing bodies that were not found in the lake when it was dragged, the lake where the many hearts carved on the poles of the xylophone jetty enclose initials in Urdu and Hindi and Bengali as well as English, and where the colour of the waves is that particular blue grey green found on the edge of a sheet of glass, that bright strip of colour sandwiched between the top and the bottom surface.
    In another few hours the surface of the snow would harden to a fragile layer of ice that would give out a knife-on-toast scrape when stepped on, but for now it is still powdery.
    He comes to the end of the road through the wild cherry trees and begins to walk along the wider road it gives on to. On its way into the town centre, this road—planted with mighty horse chestnuts on either side, its surface patched like a teenager’s denim jeans with lighter and darker triangles and squares of tarmac—leaps over the river. The temple, dedicated to Ram and Sita, is on the riverbank where in early summer the reeds and flag irises stick out of the water in tight bunches as though being held in fists just below the surface.
    Just at the place where the road briefly becomes a bridge, the double-helix of a metal staircase drops down from the footpath to give access to the riverbank thirty feet below. A lepidopterist by profession, Jugnu, keeping himself alert with a flask of the coffee into which he had dropped a curl of orange peel and two green cardamoms, had spent many nights here, standing on the riverbank up to his waist in yellow daisies, calling the moths out of the darkness with his upraised hand, the fingers closing around each creature like the