Nadeem Aslam: Maps For Lost Lovers

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

This beautiful, brutal novel opens with a 65-year-old Pakistani man, Shamas, standing in his doorway in the pre-dawn dark, catching snowflakes on his hand. It's an unspecified location, but certain physical details start to take hold and it becomes apparent that, despite an ambiguous Asian-ness, we're in England.

Where exactly is never determined, although it could be anywhere Pakistani immigrants live among the English; two worlds standing opposite each other, like the church and the mosque near Shamas' house, although in this book the white world is but a menacing shadow, white-noise, backdropping the Pakistani, Islamic world. It's a palimpsest: Pakistani names supersede the English names for roads and suburbs (we are, for instance, in the town of Dasht-e-Tanhaii), Pakistani imaginations interpret the new physical world through the lens of their own cultural traditions.

There is so much unhappiness in these pages: lovers are torn from each other through the wishes of their families and the demands of religion, punished for being of the wrong religion, and relationships splinter as old ideas and new clash.

As the book opens, there's an air of melancholy that never really lets up, despite the many moments of beauty, sensuality and irony. There's bigotry, igorance, injustice.

There's also a mystery, around which everything else turns: Shamas' younger brother, Jugnu, and his lover, Chanda, have been missing for five months, no bodies found.

They had been "living in sin", and it soon becomes clear that they're the victims of honour killings by Chanda's brothers. The book takes us through the 12 months from their disappearance, and the unfolding of this mystery also reveals all the undercurrents within Shamas' family and community.

There's his devout wife, Kaukab ("trapped within the cage of permitted thinking"), her misery at being transplanted to England assuaged only by the strictest adherence to old values (it will shock many readers to see the number of times she and her friends have even spoken to any white person — usually just three or four times, for instance "when calling 999 in rudimentary English").

Shamas and Kaukab's three adult children, though, have been driven away by the harsh tenets of Islam and village-mentality Pakistani life symbolised by their mother. Their embracing of Western freedoms ("each time they went out they returned with a layer of stranger-ness on them until finally I didn't recognise them any more," Kaukab says) means they will no longer tolerate superstitious cruelty — the beatings to exorcise djinns, honour killings, forced marriages to cousins and so on, although, privy as we are to Kaukab's inner thoughts, we see how she suffers from their rejection.

Aslam is at once judgmental and incredibly sympathetic: he shows us the inside of each character, their point of view, their struggles, and then, in turn, the devastation their behaviour has on other family members. As poor Kaukab says, "I know I can't seem to move without bruising anyone, but I don't mean to cause pain."

His writing is powerfully sensual, his dissection of the immigrant experience devastating. Yet it's not a miserable read — quite the opposite. Hope and love stand always in the wings, and the ending is breathtaking.

* Faber and Faber, $37