365 Days of Solitude

Maps for Lost Lovers’ is the evocation of twelve haunting months in the life of a small Pakistani-English town, Dasht-e-Tanhaii (“The Wilderness of Solitude”, “The Desert of Loneliness”). When the novel opens, it is winter, and the first snow of the season is falling upon the sad little town. Shamas, watching the snow fall, puts out his arm to let the snowflakes fall on his hand: “Among the innumerable other losses, to come to England was to lose a season because, in the part of Pakistan that he is from, there are five seasons in a year, not four, the schoolchildren learning their names and sequence through classroom chants: Mausam-e-Sarma, Bahar, Mausam-e-Garma, Barsat, Khizan. Winter, Spring, Summer, Monsoon, Autumn. The snow falls and, yes, the hand stretched into the flakes’ path is a hand asking back a season now lost.”

It has been several months since the two lost lovers of the title, Chanda and Jugnu, have disappeared. Although their bodies have not been found, all of Dasht-e-Tanhaii knows that they are dead, and that it was an honour killing. Chanda’s brothers are being charged with the murder. The thoughtful and troubled Shamas, Jugnu’s brother, is trying to do what he can to work for change both within his community and outside it. His wife Kaukab, however, is torn between the rigid demands of her beliefs and the changing realities of the world around her — a world in which her children, Charag, Ujala and Mah-Jabin, are growing up and, with painful inevitability, growing away from her. And then there is Suraya, the lonely woman with whom Shamas finds a kind of fleeting happiness. Suraya is looking for a man who will first marry her and then give her a divorce, so that she can remarry her first husband —who had mistakenly divorced her in a drunken fit. Only then will she be able to return to Pakistan and to the child that she has had to leave behind there. Meanwhile, Chanda’s parents grieve for their daughter and search desperately for ways to save their sons from conviction.

These are the inhabitants of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, where Lahore meets Shimla and Bombay meets Dhaka: for the streets here have been rechristened after beloved haunts left behind in the subcontinent, a Malabar Hill and a Park Street, a Naag Tolla Hill and a Scandal Point. “They had come from across the Subcontinent, lived together ten to a room, and the name that one of them happened to give to a street or landmark was taken up by the others, regardless of where they themselves were from.”

Aslam’s prose is not perfect: it is dense, overwritten and obsessive, even shrill at times — for he has much to say about violence in the name of religion. Yet his prose draws its power from the great sweeps of its circular narrative structure, as it turns and turns around that single terrible killing that has destroyed the lives of so many people. As the narrative turns, it shines its light on the many and tangled ways in which everyone here is eventually connected to everyone else, sharing their pain and — whenever it is there to be shared — their happiness. For after all, they have come from “a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land, its history a book full of sad stories, and life… a trial if not a punishment for most of the people born there… Roaming the planet looking for solace, they’ve settled in small towns that make them feel smaller still, and in cities that have tall buildings and even taller loneliness.”

Finally, and most importantly, Aslam’s prose succeeds because it paints for us, vividly and with feeling, the landscape of this Pakistani-English town — an English landscape, seen through Pakistani eyes — where coloured motes fill the air, ivy grows like green paint, dandelion fluff is caught in a spider’s web, and the blue-and-pink trickle of the stream “flows from right to left like Urdu”.