Maps for Lost Lovers

herself for Shamas. Apart from the encounter at the dead girl’s house earlier today, the two of them have met several times since going out to see the flock of rose-ringed parakeets, and she has even persuaded him to recite fragments of his poetry, has brought her mother’s old car back into use to be able to get to him more conveniently, and they have even had a small argument (about his irreverence towards Islam: “Whenever I said something that my mother perceived as contrary to Islam,” she had told him, deeply shocked by his words, “she would respond: ‘Speak softly! My Allah lives in my heart and He will hear you.’ ” And when he persisted with his reasonings she had snapped at him, deeply offended, telling him that the limited proofs and illusory understanding of this world couldn’t cast a veil upon Allah: “The water’s surface does not stop a plunge.”) But she has been unable to decide what her next step should be.
    Nusrat and his party of eight musicians are on a slightly raised dais at the front, the bright Persian carpet under them as intricately patterned as the foil around Easter eggs, the wool flashing its sapphire and lapis lazuli. The complexity of this music requires years of dedicated training and absolute coordination within the party as a whole, but the resulting melodies and rhythms are so immediately appealing that they are loved and memorized even by children—like Suraya’s own son; and since children are always included in family outings and occasions in the Subcontinent—the concept of babysitters being alien—there are several of Nusrat’s younger admirers here tonight, a four-year-old recognizing him upon entering the marquee and shouting to his mother, “Mummy: Nusrat! Look, there!”
    Suraya’s mother-in-law said: “He’ll marry another woman now and when you are finally through your own difficulties he can marry you too. Islam allows him four wives.”
    “I won’t tolerate another woman as a rival wife,” Suraya had roared down the telephone. “As Allah is my witness, I’ll kill her.”
    But isn’t that what she will be asking Shamas’s wife to do—share him with her, even if briefly?
    Her hands shaking, she steels herself as she listens to Nusrat who is singing a love lyric, and when he comes to the word “you”—denoting the earthly beloved—he points to the sky with his index finger to indicate and include Allah in the love being felt and celebrated—a lover looking for the beloved represents the human soul looking for salvation.
    Time is running out for her. She turns and searches for Shamas in the crowd: something (what?) must happen soon. Tonight.
    What have you written under my name in the Book of Fates, my Allah?
    Shamas locates Kaukab from where he stands at the back—she has made her own way here with a group of neighbourhood women—and then, with the same glance, he spots Suraya, shadowy in olive-green silk, poised as a cypress, the moonlight smiling in her glass bangles.
    Nusrat is in the Thal desert of Southern Pakistan, a sandstorm raging about him, many centuries ago: he is the beautiful Sassi, the young woman who was born to a Brahmin priest but had been placed in a sandalwood box and floated down the Indus because the horoscope predicted she would bring disgrace to the family by marrying a Muslim; she was found by a Muslim washerwoman and raised as her daughter. Now, grown up, and become lost in the burning dimensionless Thal, she cries out to her beloved Punnu, looking for any sign of him as the howling gusts tear at her clothes. Punnu had mysteriously disappeared from her side during the night and she had set out to look for him . . .
    The tips of the tabla-player’s fingers are moving on the skin of his drum very fast like a skilled typist’s on a keyboard.
    The birth horoscope of Sassi had also said that her story would be told for many centuries to come.
    She will die in the desert, but not before a single footprint left by Punnu’s camel has provided some hope, the last sign of her beloved:
    She pressed it to her breast.
Too often though, she feared to touch it
Lest it disappear.
    She dies with her head resting on the crescent shape.
    A girl in the audience, moved to tears, is weeping to herself as Nusrat sings in a pain-filled voice. Shamas recognizes her: according to Kaukab, she is married to a first cousin brought over from Pakistan, and their first child was born with one lung smaller than the other, while the