Maps for Lost Lovers

are produced and he is right: “Please give 25p more, each. Haram-khor! No, no, then out please! You make trouble for me. Or 25p more, each. I ask nicely. Behen chod. ” All six are speaking at once and it is an equally matched quarrel: each side finding a fitting arrow to return to the other’s accusation.
    “Oi!” The man standing at the front of the bus shouts, startling everyone. “Oi, Gupta, or whatever it is you call yourself, Abdul-Patel. Mr. Illegal Immigrant–Asylum Seeker! Get back into your seat.”
    The driver looks back, stunned. The boys’ protests fall to a murmur, their exuberance sinking like suds.
    “Get back now. Come on, quickly,” he points to the driver’s seat and jerks his finger as when an adult orders a child. “Stop wasting everyone’s time.”
    “But, please, I lose my job if inspector comes suddenly now . . . ,” he wheedles. “Each need to pay 25p more after this stop . . . please . . .”
    “Come here.”
    Whipped, the driver takes a few steps. “I lose my job . . . They make trouble for me . . .”
    They look at each other, a border lying between them.
    “I’ll pay you—here—how much?” He opens his wallet. “Come here, I said.”
    The driver returns to his seat without another word, is paid, and the man gets out ostentatiously after saying, “Show us some respect. This is our country, not yours.”
    The white passengers continue to look out of the windows. Chanda’s mother’s heart bangs hard and painfully against her chest. Her face and, inside her clothing, her body is burning, her blood flooded with heat.
    “I hope the driver won’t take his humiliation out at home later today,” says Chanda’s mother as the bus moves on, “lashing out at his own children, and the wife.” But the bus suddenly halts now on the side of the road and the driver comes out once again into the aisle, avoiding the eyes of the passengers. He opens the door and goes out. One minute, two, three, four and then five pass, the passengers becoming restless, and then a few of them get up to go to the front and notice that the man is sitting by the roadside, on a rock beside a flowering shrub, with his head in his hands. There are several quiet “Excuse me”s to attract his attention but he won’t look up.
    No one knows what to do. “Please come in, dear,” a white woman tentatively sticks her head out of the door and says, but he does not respond. She stands with her hand pressed to her mouth, and then Chanda’s parents watch as Shamas comes downstairs with a puzzled look on his face, still holding that bright green feather. He goes out and they watch him talk to the driver and a few minutes later the man comes back in. “There is something you can do about it. Report it to your superiors,” he tells the driver in Punjabi. “Report it and then ask them to begin a record of racial incidents on the buses, racial abuse towards drivers. Come to my office tomorrow. We’ll also take up the matter with them.” The man nods and gets back behind the wheel.
    Shamas glances at the other passengers and then he goes back upstairs.
    “Do you think he saw us?” Chanda’s mother asks.
    “That woman in the paisley jacket was standing in the stairs, waiting for him. But it could be just another anxious passenger. No?”
    She assents with a nod, “I suppose.” The bus resumes its journey. Neither says anything during the many minutes it takes for the bus to arrive at the ring road around the town centre, the vehicle’s turnings and movements jolting the passengers lightly like bottles in a crate. The little anglers at the back begin to collect their nets and baskets and harp-stringed rods, and it is suddenly discovered amid much merry howling that the bait tin had been left half open.
    It is the pearl hour of late afternoon, mildly radiant, and the bus passes the roads lined with shops on either side. The boys scented with the green-leafed world are walking on their haunches in the aisle, looking for the maggots between the passengers’ shoes, grinning widely as though each holds a slice of melon before his face. Chanda’s mother lifts her feet up with great anxiety, holding them away from the carrion-eating worms, kin to those who have fed on her dead daughter.
    “I can’t help wondering if something is going on upstairs,” Chanda’s father points up towards the metal ceiling.
    “Don’t,” she shakes her head. “He’s a good man. See how helpful he was to the driver?