Someone has heard someone else say that Chanda was pregnant at the time of her murder and that, like Jugnu’s, the foetus’s hands were lumi nous, that they could be seen glowing through Chanda’s stomach and clothing.
Music and talk from the radio tuned to the Asian station accompanies the two of them as they clear the table after lunch. There’s a phone-in about the problems of life in England:. . Are you tired of being treated like a coolie by the whites? Give us a call. We would also like our younger listenersto contact us. Are you in a rage, one of those unemployed, newly bearded, mosque-going misanthropes they are writing about in the newspapers; the kind of guy who is either still a virgin or married to a non-English-speaking first cousin brought over from a village in Pakistan or Bangladesh, the guy who lives with his parents, hides outside his sister’s school to see if she’s talkingto boys, and thinks she shouldn’t be allowed to go to university. Give us a call on. .
He settles down after lunch to look at a local health authority pamphlet that has to be translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati — he will do the Urdu. Tuberculosis was thought to have been eradicated in the 1960s and all medical research into it was stopped in the West while it continued to rage elsewhere in the world, but now it is resurfacing in the poorer neighbourhoods (those pockets of the Third World within the First) of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, New York and San Francisco. He remembers the mobile radiography units parked outside mills and factories and the Employment Exchange thirty years ago. The rate of infection was above average in the migrant workers because they had poor nutrition and lived in over-crowded lodgings, one inhaling the germs coughed up by the other. Many of them live in similar conditions even today — over half the houses in this neighbourhood were declared unfit for habitation seven years ago — and they must be warned about the dangers of infection. And the regular trips back to the Subcontinent also expose them and their children to a greater risk.
He works for most of the afternoon, and then walks through a lace of insects to open the bookshop soon after three o’clock, under a sky filled with widely separated white clouds shaped like forest animals. On a wall the graffitied initials of the National Front have been modified by Asian youths so that they now read: NFAK RULES — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan being the world-renowned Pakistani singer of Sufi devotional lyrics. Beside the path that will convey him to the lake, a day-flying Cinnabar moth flutters away to safety inside the Oxford ragworts. He cannot see the lake yet but the white-paper scraps of the fluttering gulls hint at where it lies ahead.
The thought of Suraya has been with him constantly during the previous hours. As he walks under the blue-and-white forest of the sky, he realizes that he has been standing on knife-blades of impatience all day, waiting for this hour to arrive, even when he was a thousand leagues under concentration, doing the translation an hour earlier. He has been thinking of her, yes, but there has also been the fear that someone had seen her talking to him and that she is even now — somewhere — being harmed for it. This terror has been hurtling around inside him like a grenade with the pin pulled out. From time to time his breast narrows and his strength diminishes.
He unlocks the shop and goes in. The eyes of the deer on the wallpaper shine like little lamps draped with blue veils. The small creatures sit two by two, surrounded by branches of the flame-of-the-forest, the petals curving like the beaks of parakeets.
As he waits for her to walk out of the deserted spaces of the afternoon, the sun striking the lake’s silver at an angle, a part of him hopes she won’t come. He had drawn pleasure by talking to her, and she too had seemed animated several times, but he is too aware of the dangers. He is reminded of an Urdu saying which advocates caution when in the presence of something beautiful or pleasurable: Don’t forget that serpents haunt sandalwood trees.
From the door of the Safeena, he sees her arriving, and as she reaches Scandal Point and moves towards him he wishes he hadn’t opened the shop this afternoon too: he is relieved to see that she is safe, but he now suspects that someone (a husband or brother or — after an inch-long story in the inner pages of the Urdu newspaper which said that a middle-aged woman was found with her neck broken in a village outside Lahore — a young nephew) has followed her and is hiding nearby to confirm his suspicions about her.
“I went to the door because I heard a strange musical noise,” he explains to her. “I have heard it all day. Either it is a strange bird or a shop around here has recently stocked a new kind of whistle that is proving very popular with children.” She is wearing a fresh set of shalwar-kameez and the same paisley jacket cropped at the waist. He raises his hands to indicate the shelves: “Fiction there. Non-fiction from here to here. Poetry there. And the few books on art there.” And he tells himself to remain silent from now on so she can look around and leave as soon as possible— for her own safety. They say it’s hard to kill a fellow human being. Don’t aim at the victim: aim at something on the victim — the knot of a tie, a flower printed on the dress. Would they aim at one of the paisleys, with its tiny ruby centre, before pulling the trigger, they who had watched her talking to him this morning and have followed her here this afternoon, they who are hiding just outside now?
She picks up the large mustard-yellow Muraqqa-e-Chughtai from the shelf — a volume of the Mughul Urdu poet Ghalib’s verse illustrated with paintings by Abdur Rahman Chughtai — and says quietly, “Oh, you have this.”
“Yes. Originally published in 19. . 28. There is Naqsh-e-Chughtai beside it — same text but different paintings, from 19. . 34.” He remains in his chair, telling himself not to draw close to her: between them lies a fragile bridge of glass. “Can you see it? The dust-jacket is grey and shows a deer sitting beside a small cypress tree growing out of a jewel.” He must try to remain quiet and not point out any more books to her. She moves along the shelves of Urdu and Persian poetry, opening and closing the volumes, and after a while says to him,
“A lot of Persian poems are about flowers and spring.”
“Yes. My younger brother visited Iran some years ago, and he said that the abundantly flowered arrival of spring in that country cannot fail to inspire even a casual observer. I personally think that it would be difficult to find more rapturous descriptions of spring than those in the poetry of Qani.”
“Is that the brother who. . was. . murdered?” She looks down at the floor.
“Yes, and I am sorry once again for revealing that to you so clumsily earlier.”
“Please think nothing of it. May I ask how it happened?”
He doesn’t want to distress her. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I understand.” She turns to the shelf and gives herself over to the books.
He looks at the afternoon. “I think I saw the butterfly I have been chasing fly in here,” Jugnu said — once, when both he and the bookshop’s owner were still here. Out of breath, he’d come into the Safeena holding his green long-handled butterfly net like a flag. Shamas had pointed to the Urdu translation of Madame Bovary on the shelf and said: “The only butterflies in here are the ones in there.” Jugnu went out to continue his search, but he returned to the Safeena later and picked up Madame Bovary: “Now. I do remember that there are butterflies in here. Three, I think — the first black, the second yellow and the third white.” And five minutes of turning the pages later he announced: “Yes, they are still here.”