Maps for Lost Lovers Read Online Free PDF Page B

looking for something, shifting fistfuls of snow so that the area around the wooden hut is grooved and churned a pale lilac-blue, as though by the jabs of an aimless rake. The wind stirs a yellow feather stuck in the whiteness, a wisp of filaments—as bright as something to be found in a bazaar—that had belonged to the bird which had died with a diamond in its beak. Each melting icicle drills a hole in the snow the size of a half-penny piece, a coin now discontinued and missed so badly by Shamas in this moment of madness that it now represents all that has gone away never to return, his mind convincing itself that to be able to locate just one of those copper discs small enough to fit in a doll’s purse would solve every difficulty in life. The skin peels away from his fingers in strips of accordioned rice-paper as his hands dig the ground in their urgent search for a worthless bit of metal that has suddenly become the price of sanity.
    “I should never have let him out of my sight,” he hears himself say; these were the words of Kiran when she returned dazed from Pakistan all those years ago, having been turned away from Karachi airport. “I should never have let him out of my sight,” he repeats.
    Poorab-ji convinces him to be still and he closes his eyes in order to conquer his turmoil and, drained, leans his head against the temple wall, unaccountably thinking about the night that Great Peacock moths had hatched in the blue-walled kitchen, letting himself imagine the likely sequence of events after they had emerged from the cocoons. Their search for a way out of themselves finally over, the nineteen males had hatched in the blue kitchen during the night and, still damp from the chrysalis, fluttered into the adjoining drawing room where the vase Shamas had brought from Pakistan in the 1950s—as a reminder of home—was on the glass table arranged with sprays of yolk-coloured mimosa, the fine layer of dust he had picked the vase out of all those years ago continuing to cry out across the years with an agonised O for it to be put back exactly where it had been set by his mother’s hand.
    As large as a bat, with wings made of deep-paprika velvet and a necktie of white fur, a moth looped the thready globes of the mimosa, but food wasn’t what it sought as it had no mouth and was born to die; it alighted on a guava that had leaves and stalk attached to the crown as though it had been picked in a hurry, and then flew out of the strawberry-pink drawing room with its eighteen companions, arriving in the kitchen again.
    The absolute darkness was light enough for them and with passionate impatience they floated up the stairwell to the Leningrad-yellow room where Shamas slept beside Kaukab.
    Their tufted antennae questioning the air, they lingered indecisively above Kaukab—she who remembers even today the morning a butterfly had tried to lay eggs in her plait, drawn by the scent of the oil she applies to her hair—and she opened her eyes in the darkness for an instant or two, more asleep than awake, and sharply expelled air from her nostrils three times, because the Prophet had said, “If any of you wakes up at night, let him blow his nose three times. For Satan spends the night in a man’s nostrils.”
    She sank back into sleephood almost immediately and the moths moved out to the elder boy’s room, having first made sure at the open window that the summons was not coming from out there.
    The thirty-eight eyes painted on the thirty-eight red wings blinked in the darkness as the insects then fluttered into the room shared by the two younger children, and here they tried to pass through a circular opening only to discover that others were trying to emerge from it just as frantically—it was a mirror.
    A slippery spew of Indian movie magazines was at the foot of the girl’s bed.
    Through the open hatch in the ceiling of this room, the Great Peacock moths entered the attic that was embraced on the outside by the back