Maps for Lost Lovers

and wasn’t allowed to fall asleep even for five minutes, and when she soiled herself she was taken upstairs to the bathroom by her mother to be cleaned and brought back down for the beating to continue. The holy man heated a metal tray until it was red hot and forced her to stand on it. It was obvious that she was possessed because she began to speak in Punjabi, her mother-tongue, which she had never spoken with her parents, the cunning djinn inside her realizing that the holy man could not speak English and could only be reasoned with in Punjabi, pleading for mercy.
    According to the report in The Afternoon the coroner found the arms and legs broken by a cricket bat. The front of the chest had caved in as though she had been jumped on repeatedly.
    His beard large enough for peacocks to nest in, the holy man has been arrested and will probably be sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, and the mother and father would perhaps receive a decade or so each for being accessory to the killing.
    In the neighbourhood there are as many opinions about the death as there are mouths:
    Amid the young: “I went to school with her and she was fine with us, her friends. She must’ve acted strangely only at home. And I too wouldn’t be caught dead speaking my parents’ language—even though I can.”
    Amid the old: “What kind of mother is she, hmm? What kind? How could she eat herself when the girl was going hungry? He beat her with a bicycle chain.”
    Amid those in the middle years: “These holy men are crooks, the kind who are aiding the white people to blacken Islam’s name. I myself was exorcised and it was successful. Look how healthy I am now, while before I used to have terrible stomach pains and used to black out all the time.”
    Some of these Shamas heard today at the girl’s house and during the burial, and some were told to him by Kaukab. Shamas has been careful to control his rage and grief when talking to her about the killing because he knows that Islam requires her to believe in djinns, in witchcraft, in spirits. She too has quietly preempted his objections, saying to herself earlier today but within his hearing, “ This holy man was a charlatan or incompetent, and the diagnosis that the poor girl was possessed could have been wrong—but that doesn’t mean there are no djinns. Allah created them out of fire—it’s stated plainly in the Koran.” Almost everyone in the neighbourhood believes in such things. Only today Kaukab said that, while she was at the shop buying hibiscus-flower oil for her hair, a woman had nervously approached her and, having casually opened the conversation by asking her if she knew a way of getting out eye-kohl stain from white linen, had asked whether her husband’s name was Shamas: “The children are going around saying that in the lakeside woods a pair of sad ghosts wanders, luminous, like figures stepped down from a cinema screen, a man and woman, his hands and her stomach glowing more than the rest of their bodies.” Kaukab and Shamas both know about this rumour, but now there is a new detail: “And they call out repeatedly and quietly to someone called Shamas without moving their lips.”
    The air is filled with the perfumed longueurs of an Urdu lyric as Suraya arrives at Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s performance. Troubled and tender, Nusrat’s voice is singing its moon song inside the glowing white-canvas enclosure on which the blue foliage moving in the warm breeze has draped its slurred shadow. Faces, alike as coins in their attentiveness, are turned towards him, the arena lit intimately with pale paper lanterns containing electric light-bulbs.
    Suraya was getting ready to come here when her husband and son telephoned. While she was speaking to her boy he said, “You are wearing your gold earrings, aren’t you, the ones Father says look good on you? I can hear them jingle.” Yes, she was, and after telling him that he was a clever young man, she had taken them off, feeling she was betraying her husband by ornamenting herself for another man. But after the shocking news her husband gave her a few minutes later, she had decided to put them back on. Her mother-in-law is planning to find another bride for her husband. Suraya had almost screamed out in pain but then the old woman had come on the phone to tell her that a man needs a wife: “How long is he supposed to wait for you?”
    The pendant earrings tinkle gently on her ears: she needs them, has adorned