She goes upstairs, and Shamas lowers himself into a chair. He tries to bring Suraya’s face before his eyes. Doesn’t she look a little like a younger Kaukab, the Kaukab he married when he himself was that young poet in Lahore? He wonders whether he had given her his name after she had introduced herself. And now he feels ashamed at this absurd train of thought. This is madness. But it was as though she herself had wanted his company. He sees other women, other women he finds attractive, during the course of his daily life, the way all men do, but, after he has registered that fact, remarked on their beauty, nothing comes of it because nothing can — they are not interested in him. Why would they be? He would have ignored this morning’s encounter similarly, but she seemed to want to be near him. He wishes he had shaved before going out this morning. No, no, this is insanity. Surely this is how teenage infatuations are born — he must act his age. She is much younger than him, by twenty-five or so years at least — she was probably born around the time when he was in his mid-twenties, writing those love poems. He takes a deep breath and tells himself to pull himself together. No, he won’t go to the Safeena this afternoon.
Relieved at the decision he’s just made, he lets out a small laugh at the madness of what he has just been thinking, and the weight of the world is suddenly off his shoulders. In one of Jugnu’s butterfly books, he had last year secreted a prostitute’s telephone number copied from the classified columns of The Afternoon; he gets up and finds it now, but then, filled with wretchedness, tears it up. He flicks through the book for possible distraction and comfort. There is a butterfly called Sleepy Orange. . In the woods of Siberia and the Himalayas there is a Map butterfly, and an Atlas moth in the islands of south-east Asia. . And other names, even stranger: Figure of Eight. Figure of Eighty. . One of the rarest gems on the planet, there is a butterfly in the wooded hills around Sikkim called Kaiser-e-Hind — the Caesar of India. . The thought of the magazines glimpsed in the newsagent comes to him, and he wonders whether he should take a bus to a shop in a faraway area and buy a few. If Kaukab ever discovers them he’ll say they must have been lying hidden since the time when the boys were growing up. But what if she checks the dates on the cover? And he burns with shame as he remembers that two or so years ago, his flesh aching with eager longing, he had found himself going through the things his teenaged sons had left behind in their rooms, lifting up the carpet, feeling for a loose floorboard, sending an arm out under the mattresses, hoping one of them had forgotten to throw away a magazine.
HIRAMAN THE ROSE-RINGED PARAKEET
The lake has the subdued glow of antique satin. Suraya stands on the xylophone jetty and looks at the names and initials lovers have carved on the wood in Urdu, Hindi and Bengali as well as English. The gouged dots and full-stops are the size of dimples on a doll’s knuckles. The wood is so skin-smooth that as she touches it she has a feeling of being stroked by it in return.
A wet late-spring dawn, Sunday, an emerald-and-grey hour, and nature is at its most creative. She should have come here yesterday afternoon, to visit the Safeena, as she promised that man on the bridge; but in the end a feeling of wretchedness had overpowered her. She is ashamed still of how she had approached the young artist here a few weeks ago. It had been her young son’s birthday the previous day, over there in Pakistan, and she had become desperate to change her situation, to fly and be with her son and husband. She had wept through the night, overcome by fear, doubts, and self-pity, with short nightmare-filled bouts of sleep, and just before dawn had entered the chilled waters of the lake.
The scent from the pine trees saturates the web-soft air. The solid world seems to have dissolved, leaving behind only light and atmosphere — a world made from almost nothing.
She walks over to where she had forced the young man to have a conversation with her. There are bits of his orange peel, nearly dried up and curling, on the shore, their brightness muted for now. Colours have long and slow births on such spring dawns.
The matchmaker has shown her no one she finds suitable. A number of them are illegal immigrants or asylum seekers who want to marry her to get official residential status in Britain. And amongst the legitimate citizens, not many are willing to go through a temporary marriage; and those who do, almost salivate when they see her, happy that they would be allowed to paw at her soon like a prostitute bought for a short while.
The matchmaker tells her not to lose heart: “Have you seen the way men look at you? Indian, Pakistani, and whites, and the blacks—ha, they can dream. They all cannot resist a second glance. And, no, you are not too old. Some white women of your age aren’t even married for the first time yet.”
She approaches the water and washes her hands. She has just been to her mother’s grave with a bag of potting soil and two dozen tulips. Her mother had contracted meningitis last autumn during the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia and Suraya had left Pakistan to come and nurse her. The divorce was still weeks old then, and her husband had decided that she should stay on in England after the mother’s death: “Marry and divorce someone there, and then come back. I’d feel humiliated if you married someone here, because I don’t want to see another man touch my wife, the woman I love.” She had resisted the idea because she had missed her son, but in the end she had relented. She lives in the house she inherited from her mother.
Allah has decreed that a man can marry any woman who is not his close blood relation. And so under Islamic law, the punishment Suraya’s husband must receive — for getting drunk and for not taking the matter of divorce seriously enough — is that he can have any woman except one. One woman is barred to him, as she is not to other men — that’s his torment. But — such is Allah’s compassion towards his creatures! — she is not barred to him permanently: if the woman who has been recklessly divorced can fulfill the requirement that Suraya is having to fulfill, then the original husband can possess her again. Limitless is Allah’s kindness towards his creation. Allah is not being equally compassionate towards the poor woman who is having to go through another marriage through no fault of her own is a thought that has occasionally crossed Suraya’s mind, along with It’s as though Allah forgot there were women in the world when he made some of his laws, thinking only of men—but she has banished these thoughts as all good Muslims must.
She wonders when the tulips will bloom. It was her mother’s wish to have tulips on her resting place: she did tell Suraya the reason for the request but it seems to have slipped her mind completely. She planted all but one of the bulbs in perfect rows because her mother used to say that only Allah is perfect and that we should acknowledge that fact when performing a task, that we should introduce a tiny hidden flaw into every object we make. “The Emperor Shah Jahan had made sure that there was a built-in imperfection in the Taj Mahal — the minarets lean out by three degrees,” she said.
When she set out at first light, there was an insubstantial rain — it was more a misty drizzle and there was no patter on the drumskin-tight nylon of the umbrella — but now even that has diminished; were she to look up, only one of her eyes would receive a droplet. The lake is girdled by concentric bands of many-coloured sands, pebbles, and, higher up the shore, pine needles; and the water’s edge is softly gnawing at them. She turns and moves towards the hut that stands surrounded by maple trees. Across a part of its side, ivy grows in every direction as though a large can of green paint has been splashed on the wall. This is the Urdu bookshop. She looks in through the window. What was the name of the man she met on the bridge yesterday? Was he a Muslim? The sign above the door is painted in a red as deep as dolphin blood: it depicts a small boat with a pair of oars lying next to each other inside it like man and wife.