She mustn’t despair at her predicament, she tells herself; this is not the end of her life: it’s a chapter.
Shamas is walking towards the Safeena. The drizzle has stopped completely. There is a small clump of reeds on the edge of the lake, and caught in this wet light the blades give out a diffused green gleam: each blade is a giant grasshopper wing. The bookshop is painted a rich brown, the colour of warm spices. In the early days — twenty years ago — it consisted of nothing more than a few boxes of books. It was all spiders and exposed wiring but then it was slowly cleaned up and a wallpaper that was a jungle of flame-of-the-forest sprigs and pairs of deer with powder-puff tails was put up. The walls had had holes in them before that and brightly dusty wedges of sunlight would be found in the interior in the afternoons as though someone had strung geometric paper lanterns everywhere. The roof leaked like a sponge sometimes.
But the owner was passionate about books and people would joke that given enough time he would track down even a signed first-edition of the Koran for you.
He looks up at the sky. Today will be one of those late English spring days that have no independent temperature: it will be hot out under the sun but the body will feel cold if taken indoors.
The owner of the Safeena went to Pakistan at the end of last year to untangle various financial matters concerning the money he had been sending his nephews for over a decade to buy land and property, and he died there, the relatives telephoning the widow here in England with the news three days after burying him. There is a possibility that he had been poisoned: there have been a number of cases recently where a person who had gone from Britain to sort out financial affairs had been murdered and buried by family members and business partners who had been misappropriating, siphoning off, or embezzling the money they were being sent.
The widow gave Shamas the keys to the Safeena when he said he would open the shop for a few hours each weekend until the existing stock sold out; she could then sell the hut. She had waved her hand resignedly, “All I need, brother-ji, is a place to spread my prayer-mat.”
The sun is pale, dripping silver. Fuses lit at random, the lemon-yellow dandelion flowers will be everywhere within the hour. The air smells of morning, of moist sunlight. He approaches the Safeena and stops. Someone — Suraya — is looking in through the windows, that red scarf still holding her hair in a bunch, the blue lozenges along its edge glittering in the morning air like unpurchasable gems, alive with reverberating pigment.
“I am sorry I couldn’t come yesterday, Mr. . Mr. . ” She must try to find out his name, in order to be able to tell what religion he is.
“I am Shamas.”
Muslim. She looks at the marriage finger: there is no ring, but that is no proof because the wearing of marriage rings isn’t really a strict custom in the Subcontinent.
She must try to keep him here, to find out more about him. “Tell me, do you think it was here that the police found a human heart some weeks ago? I overheard some little girls in a shop saying that when the children who chanced upon it had poked it with a stick it had given a few beats. What imagination the children have!” Perhaps he will now make a comment about his own children?
“No, it was closer to another shore, closer to the river where we met, nearer the area where there is a beekeeper from whom the Sultan of Oman bought forty queen bees, chartering a plane to fly them home. He had tasted their honey in a London hotel.”
She nods. The dawn surrounds them both with its green-and-blue, the deep sky above and the almost-luminous new growth of leaves below it. He is surely too aloof and dignified to be interested in her. He is obviously not a factory worker or taxi driver because his hands are soft-looking and almost pink.
“Yes,” he is continuing, “the heart was found in the other direction. A young white man was responsible. It was his dead mother’s and he stole it from the hospital just because he didn’t want it to be transplanted into a black man’s body.”
The information is shocking, and Suraya feels it as such, but she is aware that for several months now she is a little numb to the world, the news about it — no matter how monumental or significant — coming muffled by her own difficulties. Nor can she remember the last time she felt pleasure, genuine gladness that plumbs the soul, as she did when she embraced her son, pressing her nose and mouth into his soft neck, or when she tussled with him on the floor, glad that he was not a girl because you couldn’t be that rough with girls: she remembers her mother stopping in her tracks and sharply telling her father not to play too enthusiastically with his little daughter lest he cause “irreparable physical damage to her private areas,” having warned him many times before that, “If a flower loses a petal it doesn’t grow back!”
She is thankful to Allah that she doesn’t have any daughters.
Her longing for her boy is so great that last month while swimming in the lake, in the predawn darkness, she had had the urge at one point to just let go and sink to the bottom, let the water suck the life out of her while the bright moon watched above. If something doesn’t happen soon, she thinks now, I might still do that: float lifeless above the X-shaped giant’s still-beating heart. She remembers hearing from women in her childhood that this lake requires a sacrifice every six years, and she wonders how many years it has been since the last drowning.
“My daughter”—the man has begun another sentence—“thought it was the heart of her murdered uncle.”
It takes her a moment or two to register what he’s just told her. The force of it causes her to raise her hands to her breasts — it’s almost a blow to the heart. “Allah!”
“I am sorry,” he says, looking stunned. “I didn’t mean to shock you, forgive me.”
“When did it happen? Recently?”
“Yes. Please forgive me. I don’t know why I mentioned it.”
Recently. The poor man is living through the death of his brother, grieving, and there she was, planning, working out strategies, wondering whether she sensed in him an attraction towards her! Her eyes fill up with tears because of the disappointment of realizing that he is probably not interested in her — she’ll have to keep looking for someone else. She feels exhausted. And yet there is also a surge of shame, because with a part of her brain she’s also wondering whether it wouldn’t be easy for her to use his grief to her own advantage. She’ll offer him comfort and then he will become grateful to her — yes? She’s filled with self-disgust, her eyes brimming with water. What has she turned into and who is responsible for doing this to her?
“I am sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that. Are you all right?”
“Yes, thank you.” She raises her veil to her face and realizes she’s been holding a piece of the desiccated peel from the oranges the young artist had been eating last month: she must have picked up the cardboard-like fragment from the shore earlier. She lets it drop, and turns to leave.
“I’ll open the Safeena this afternoon if you’d care to come,” Shamas tells her, attempting to delay her departure. “I was out on just a walk now.” Though of course it’s all futile: he didn’t come to the bookshop yesterday because he was afraid of himself, but she hadn’t come either. She had said she would — but she obviously has a rich and full life already, friends, family, lovers. She stops at his words, eyes still swimming. She is obviously very sensitive: the mere mention of Jugnu’s death had produced tears. He can tell her other things too. He envisages a friendship. He’ll tell her how much he regrets never having continued with his poetry, and that he would like to go back to Pakistan now that he’s about to retire, go back and see if he can do something for the betterment of his country. He’ll tell her that he heard about the discovery of the human heart from two clandestine lovers — a Hindu boy, and a Muslim girl whose mother is convinced that she’s possessed by the djinn and is asking around for a holy man who’d perform an exorcism.