Maps for Lost Lovers

condemn them with her last breaths, the poet-saints of Islam expressing their loathing of power and injustice always through female protagonists in their verse romances: Heer didn’t consent to her marriage to the man she didn’t love—refused to say “yes, I do”—but the mullah conducting the ceremony had been bribed by her family and he said that he had seen her give a nod, and that that was sufficient as a sign of her consent. In their turn these verses of the saints—because they advocated a direct communion with Allah, bypassing the mosques—were denounced by the orthodox clerics, so much so that when the poet Bulleh Shah died the clerics refused to give him a burial, leaving the body out in the blazing sun until hundreds of his enraged admirers pushed the holy men aside and buried him themselves. Even today the Sufis are referred to as “the opposition party of Islam.” And always always it was the vulnerability of women that was used by the poet-saints to portray the intolerance and oppression of their times: in their verses the women rebel and try bravely to face all opposition. They—more than the men—attempt to make a new world. And, in every poem and every story, they fail. But by striving they become part of the universal story of human hope—Sassi succumbed to the pitiless desert but died with her face pressed to the last sign of her lover.
    Shamas watches as three women in the audience—one of them carrying a half-asleep child holding a doll with a moustache drawn on in biro—get up and leave the gathering: they belong to a sect that forbids this music and devotional singing, but since their disapproving husbands are restaurant waiters and wouldn’t have been home until after two a.m. they had decided to come to see Nusrat; they have obviously lost their nerve and are returning early.
    Kaukab had arrived with the three women in their car, and, with a glance and a raised hand towards Shamas, is leaving with them. He catches up to her—out in the narrow street with its cattle-like crowding of parked cars—to say that if she wishes to stay she should, that he will arrange for someone to take her home later, but she says she would prefer to leave with her friends; the strong perfume of the incense has given her a headache.
    He needs to be with her, agitated and forlorn after his thoughts of death. As Kaukab stands next to him, her face partly averted, her demeanour guarded, he can tell she doesn’t wish to be polluted by his breath: she tolerates, with melancholy weariness and faintly visible disgust, the glass of whisky he allows himself a few times a month.
    He’s alone as Kaukab drives away, alone under the stars that are nuclear explosions billions of miles above him. He watches as a shooting star traverses the night sky, reflected like the sweep of a razor in the paintwork of several metal roofs. According to Islam, when something important— favourable or disastrous—is about to happen in the world, and Allah is arranging the final important details with the angels, Satan moves closer to the sky to eavesdrop: shooting stars are flaming rocks that are thrown at him to drive him away; and they therefore should be read as the imminence of a momentous occasion.
    Inside, in the enclosure lit with parchment moons, Shamas positions himself for the first time tonight to bring Suraya into clear view, but— after their eyes have met and he has felt himself turning red as though fanned into flame by her presence, a smile beginning on his lips—he moves farther away: this is too exposed and public a place for them to get together. He imagines what any scandal would do to Kaukab. What the ideas of honour and shame and good reputation mean to the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh can be summed up by a Pakistani saying: He whom a taunt or jeer doesn’t kill is probably immune to even swords.
    Shamas feels a crushing loneliness—he feels old. Sixty-five this year, the grey hair on his head has outnumbered the black for nearly two decades now. And lately whenever he has awakened in the middle of the night and has lain there, awake and alone (Kaukab has slept in a separate bed for some years now), his whole being has filled up with a clean and intense pain: wrapped in private terror, he feels afraid at what’s to come— the inevitable black abyss. Five years? Ten? His heart fragments at the thought. The headboard of the bed feels like a headstone at that hour and he doesn’t know