Insects trapped in beautiful amber
Charles R. Larson recommends a tale of sexuality and closed minds
18 January 2008, 18:00 PM
Maps for Lost Lovers
Nadeem Aslam
London: Faber & Faber
It would be difficult to imagine a more breath-taking and disturbing novel than Maps for Lost Lovers by the widely-praised and award-winning writer, Nadeem Aslam. The beauty of the author's language, the lush descriptions that almost jump off the page, are set against the background of a plot filled with mayhem and characters so emotional and bitter about one another that they'd best not share the same room. It is no understatement that the author, who was born in Pakistan and currently lives in England, is one of the finest writers in the English language today.
Here are the basics of the story: Two star-crossed Pakistanis--Chanda, a woman in her mid-twenties, and Jungu, her lover who is fifteen years older--who have been living together unmarried, are murdered by the young woman's two brothers because of the couple's willing flaunting of convention. The trial shakes the tightly-knit community, especially the family of Jungu's older brother, Shamas. Through Shamas' eyes we perceive most of the violent events, but we also observe significant moments through the perspective of his wife, Kaukab, and their three children. As the emotions of Shamas' family begin to conflict, the story becomes a harrowing account of family breakdown and compromised values that can no longer sustain the harmony of the past.
In a stroke of genius, Nadeem Aslam sets most of the events of his complicated narrative not in Pakistan but in England, in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, a community of Asian immigrants not so distant from London. In that almost hermetically-sealed enclave, the women who have arrived from Pakistan (or India) with their husbands can almost believe (or at least pretend) that they have never left their original homes on the Indian sub-continent. As one Pakistani woman remarks early in the story, "We should never have come to this deplorable country, sister-ji, this nest of devilry from where God has been exiled. No, not exileddenied and slain. It's even worse."
The women of the first generation remain staunchly conservative, relying on the faith of their religions (Muslim, Sikh, Hindu), while their husbands (typically at work and away from home) consume alcoholic drinks, commit adultery, and--worse--have sexual relations with Western women. What the children do is even worse because of the natural instinct for children to assimilate, to fit in, to understand new cultures. Thus, Kaukab and Shamas' daughter, Mah-Jabin, who is 27 years old, is divorced from the first cousin she married in Pakistan at age 16; Charag, the older son, had a brief marriage to an English woman that led to divorce; and Ujala, the youngest son, hasn't spoken to his mother in ten years because he can't accept his mother's fundamentalism.
All three children believe that their lives have been poisoned by their mother's faith. Mah-Jabin believes "her mother is the most dangerous animal she'll ever have to confront." On another occasion, after the trial for Chanda's brothers, Kaukab remarks to her daughter that "Jugnu died because of the way he lived." To which her daughter responds, "He didn't die, Mother…. He was killed." Earlier, Kaukab had told her children: "My religion is not the British legal system, it's Islam."
These are intense conversations in a story that is often so heated that the reader almost feels singed like the characters, who are constantly arguing and screaming with one another. And yet, the emotional tensions of this powerful novel are contained in scenes of exquisite beauty. One thinks of an insect, perhaps, trapped in a beautiful piece of amber. One thinks of an insect, especially, because JugnuShamas' murdered brotherwas a lepidopterist, and in many of the most elegant passages in the novel, moths and butterflies (and sometimes even peacocks) flutter in the background. In his work space, he often keeps the chrysalises of moths about to emerge. This, for example, is Aslam's description of a female moth and her many suitors:
"The female was motionless except when it swished its wings gently to disperse the odour that had gradually flooded the two houses with the faint electricity of a yearning inexpressible any other way, undetected by the humans but pulling the nineteen males towards its source slowly at first and then hand over hand a yard at a time as they learned to distinguish truth from lie and arrived to drape the entire cage in reverberating velvet."
The characters in Aslam's unforgettable novel are obsessed with their sexuality yet equally charged with an invisible force that makes it impossible for them to control their destinies. Assimilation is an option only for the younger generation, yet their parents have held them in such sway that too often both generations appear to be doomed to failure in an undecipherable land. And it should be noted that there are plenty of incidents in the novel belying the hostility of the English, who surround the immigrants who have settled in Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
Recently, when I had the opportunity to discuss Maps for Lost Lovers with a group of graduate students, virtually without exception, they pointed at Kaukab, the mother in Aslam's sorry family, as the source of misery for most of the other characters. "She's a monster." "She's emasculating," according to my students. I had to agree that Kaukab is one of the most repressive mother figures I've encountered in a literary work in many years. And I confessed that if the author were present and I could ask him a question, it would be difficult not to inquire when he last spoke to his mother. Fortunately, a partial answer can be found in an essay the author published in "Granta 93: God's Own Countries" (2005):
"On the very first page of my first novel ["Season of the Rainbirds"], I wrote about an adult who takes children's toys from them and hands them back broken. Islam forbids idolatry. Toys can be considered idols and are to be smashed. My uncle did that to me: he snatched from my hands a mask that I had just bought from a vendor in the street and tore it to bits. I can still remember my feelings of shock and incomprehension. My uncle's vision of Islam was the same kind practised by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan three decades later. It would be state policy in the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to ban children's toys, as well as music."
Maps for Lost Lovers focuses on the same oppositions. Jugnu is energised by the beauty of moths and butterflies. One of Kaukub's sons is an artist, excelling in portraiture, even though Islam forbids paintings of living things. Ujala, the other son, says of his mother, "She won't allow reason to enter this house." Chanda had three failed marriages before she moved in with Jugnu; yet her brothers are willing to murder both of them in order to defend the sanctity of marriage. Though Aslam's characters have lost the maps that traditionally would guide them into the future, it is their own self-destruction that has expedited such ruin.
Charles R. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University, in Washington, D.C.
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