1The family of Nadeem Aslam, Pakistani-born British writer, arrived and settled in Britain when he was fourteen, as his father was forced to flee President Zia’s repressive regime. At the age of thirteen he had already written a short story in Urdu, which had been published in a Pakistani magazine. He sent the manuscript of his first novel, Season of the Rainbirds, to Andre Deutsch, who within ten days accepted to publish it. This was in 1993, and the book, with a story set in Pakistan, was well received, winning two awards. In 2008 he published his latest and third novel, The Wasted Vigil, a tragic story of war and terrorism set in Afghanistan. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers,1 published in 2004, is the only one to be set in Britain, and its plot and story line revolve exclusively on families of immigrants from the Asian subcontinent living in the North of England. Therefore it is particularly relevant to the theme of the Indian diaspora, and that is why it was chosen as the focus for this paper. MLL was written with an exquisite precision and a minute attention to detail worthy of the art of miniatures,2 and as a literary work of art it has been highly praised by many reviewers: it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, and won the Kiriyama Prize and the Encore Award in 2005.3

2The novel clearly shows that the diasporic experience can be very different for different characters, according to their age, gender, political ideas or religion. The main character, Shamas, born in India at the time of the British Raj, came to England thirty years before the beginning of the story, which takes place in an unnamed industrial northern city. Here however the portrayal of the Indian diaspora seems to marginalise the usual East/West oppositions, as if Aslam had aimed at turning England and Englishness into an invisible, relatively irrelevant world, to focus instead on the staging of communalist conflicts between various groups of immigrants, all vying to shape, control and inflect the diasporic experience. The unnamed city is ‘unseen’ in the same sense as Rushdie’s London in The Satanic Verses, the Englishness of which becomes hidden under layers of ‘tropicalisation’. And yet beyond this mutual invisibility Aslam is obliquely mapping the contours of the only possible space for a tentative meeting of two hostile worlds: a secret, subversive space of microscopic beauty within the city, a space where Western natural science and eastern, Sufi /Urdu poetry commingle, where rootedness and uprooted-ness try to find a common ground to stand and thrive on.

3 The novel centres on immigrants, many of whom live in English houses which they consider only as ‘temporary accommodation in a country never thought of as home—the period in England [being] the equivalent of earthly suffering, the return one day to Pakistan entry into Paradise’ (Aslam 2005: 96). Similarly, one neighbour wonders ‘why her children refer to Bangladesh as ‘abroad’ because Bangladesh isn’t abroad, England is abroad, Bangladesh is home’ (46, author’s emphasis). The migrants idealise their lost homeland, and it is significant that Shamas and Kaukab come from a fictional village called Sohni Dharti (5), often referred to in the novel, since this Punjabi phrase means ‘beautiful land’ and, in patriotic songs celebrating Pakistan, is used as a symbolical name to designate the whole country.

4The second-generation immigrants suffer from the predicament that Jhumpa Lahiri humorously defined in The Namesake, a novel in which Gogol, the main character, learns that he is an ‘ABCD’, i.e. an ‘American-born confused deshi’, ‘unable to answer the question ‘Where are you from?’, who, although ‘his parents and all their friends always refer to India simply as desh’, ‘never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India’ (Lahiri 2003: 118). both Amin Maalouf and Amartya Sen have often argued, identity is complex, multilayered; we are all made, not simply born, and sometimes the contradictions and multiplicity of identity can become deadly. Aslam pointed to a similar idea by choosing for the epigraph of MLL a statement by Octavio Paz, ‘A human being is never what he is but the self he seeks’.

5In MLL first generation immigrants consider England a place of impurity that has to be appropriated through language; hence all the places and streets are regularly renamed as new waves of migrants reach the city from various countries, ‘to give the map of this English town a semblance of belonging— [to amass] a claim on the place bit by bit’ (156):

Only one name has been accepted by every group, remaining unchanged. It’s the name of the town itself. Dasht-e-Tanhaii.
The Wilderness of Solitude.
The Desert of Loneliness.4 (29)

6At the end of the novel, the name of the city takes on a much more metaphysical dimension, and becomes a symbol of the human condition, as Shamas tries to persuade himself that he has played a positive part in Suraya’s life: ‘Shamas’ child is already saving her, already lessening the amount of pain in this Dasht-e-Tanhaii called the planet Earth’ (367). The name even evades the boundaries of fiction, slipping out into the paratext, into the explicit liber since the author rounds off the book with the following indications, just below the last paragraph:

London—Dasht—e-Tanhaii
October 1991—April 2003 (Aslam 2005: 369, author’s italics)

7The device imitates James Joyce’s famous ‘signature line’ at the end of Ulysses (Trieste-Zürich-Paris, 1914-1921), but mixes real and fictitious names, in a very postmodernist fashion.

8Thus England fades out, becoming a kind of vague background, a dangerous zone to which the inhabitants of the immigrant-populated neighbourhoods of the town venture as little as possible, fearful of being sullied, insulted, threatened. Kaubab is not the only immigrant who keeps ‘a few sets of clothing reserved solely for outdoors’ because England is ‘a dirty country, an unsacred country full of people filthy with disgusting habits and practices’ (267), ‘one big brothel’ (347), where blonde women in lace brassieres flaunt their female flesh on giant billboards. England is a country where ‘twenty black people died in police custody last year’ (174), where white prison inmates viciously attack Asian inmates (169). This effect is heightened by the fact that Aslam uses mostly first-generation immigrants as centres of consciousness, keeping the second generation on the periphery of his story. The novel’s locations are very restricted; there are a few fleeting allusions to London, where two of Kaukab’s children now live, but their current life is never described; for the most part the narrative stays within the streets and houses of the older immigrants.

9On one occasion two minor characters are obliged to leave their neighbourhood and take a bus to the ‘outskirts of Dasht-e-Tanhaii’ (169), to a ‘remote location’, to visit their sons in prison, and they witness a racist incident involving the Punjabi bus driver. The unnamed ‘white passengers’ are given a few rare lines of dialogue, as they try to persuade the distraught, humiliated bus-driver to resume driving. The only white person to be actually named in the novel is Stella, the English ex-wife of Kaukab’s elder son; the few other white people mentioned remain anonymous and are given only tiny, fleeting roles.

10Thus co-exist two worlds, alien and hostile to one another, the second trying to ignore and erase the first, the first trying to contain and control the second. This mutual invisibility is stated in realistic terms, but also in poetic, symbolical terms. Chanda’s mother, on the bus, ‘rubs the glass of the window, and it seems to [her husband] that she is trying to erase the outside world’ (176); Chanda’s parents, moving through the white English world, are mere ghosts, leaving no trace, no mark:

The […] bus lurches and winds its way through the town centre […], stopping every now and again at the piano keys of a zebra crossing, its reflection passing across the glass of shop windows the size of cinema screens, and they sit wordlessly side by side, their faint reflections out there making them feel they lack the quality of presence. (182)

11 Kaukab also feels a sense of alienation and fear when she ventures out, because ‘there’s nothing for her out there in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, to notice or be interested in’; her house, deserted by all her children, but in which ‘every beloved absence is present’, is for her ‘an oasis— albeit a haunted one—in the middle of the Desert of Loneliness’ (65). On the borders of the immigrant neighbourhood a few symbols of demarcation can be found: on one side of a rising street stands the ‘hundred-year-old Parish Church of St Eustace’, on the other side stands the mosque: ‘The crescent faces the cross squarely across the narrow side-street’ (9).

12‘Faiz Street’ is one of the names bestowed on an English street to appropriate it (97, 170), as a tribute to the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. He is among the three people to whom Nadeem Aslam has dedicated his novel, along with Aslam’s father and Abdur Rahman Chughtai.5 One of Faiz’s poems, entitled ‘Yaad’ (Memory) begins with the phrase adopted as the name of the town:6 Therefore the name given to the town is not only relevant in thematic and semantic terms of exile and loneliness, but also in generic and aesthetic terms, since in his writing Aslam uses images and devices borrowed from the masters of Urdu poetry, thus turning his novelistic prose into a poetic hybrid.

13Salman Rushdie also is an admirer of Faiz, whom he recalls in his essays (Rushdie 2002: 371); in Midnight’s Children Nadir Khan is a poet and a Communist,7 and one of Faiz’s poems is quoted in The Satanic Verses (334-335), where Gibreel Farishta, fighting the advance of Satan within London, tries to ‘redeem the city square by square’ (the squares of the city’s A to Z map), aiming to ‘celebrate the conclusion of his labours’ on a golf course at the edge of the map called ‘Wildernesse’ (326-327). In this fifth chapter of The Satanic Verses, entitled ‘A city visible but unseen’ the narrator argues that Londoners and immigrants are invisible to one another, just as in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane the heroine feels transparent in the eyes of English people, who ‘were not aware of her’, ‘who could not see her any more than she could see God’ (45). Rushdie and Aslam develop similar motifs (British racism, or the refusal of second-generation immigrants to speak their parents’ language) but treat them differently: Aslam chooses a tragic realism while Rushdie adopts a comic and ironical magic-realist mode, turning London into a ‘demon city’ in which ‘your windows shattered in the middle of the night without any cause, you were knocked over in the street by invisible hands, […] and every day you heard about this boy, that girl, beaten up by ghosts’ (Rushdie 1988: 250). Nevertheless Aslam’s determined, opinionated Kaukab has much in common with Rushdie’s Hind Sufyan, of the Shandaar Café.

14Thematically, loneliness and exile are constant threads within the tapestry of MLL: Jugnu ‘never knew how lonely he was during those six years [spent in America] until the news of his mother’s death reached him in Boston where he was working on a doctorate’ (27). Kaukab, the housewife whose children all left the house long ago, feels ‘as bewildered as a child whose dolls have been stolen’ (70). In spite of the familiar road names, language is a constant reminder of exile, breeding hopelessness:

what was a person to do when even things in England spoke a different language than the one they did in Pakistan? In England the heart said boom boom instead of dhak dhak; a gun said bang! instead of thah!; things fell with a ‘thud’ not a dharam; small bells said ‘jingle’ instead of chaan-chaan; the trains said ‘choo-choo’ instead of chuk chuk…’8 (36, author’s italics).

15‘Compared with England, Pakistan is a poor and humble country’ and yet Kaukab ‘aches for it’, ‘because to be thirsty is to crave a glass of simple water and no amount of rich buttermilk will do’ (70). Kaukab cannot forgive England for not being Pakistan, she seriously tries to attract Pakistani birds by planting Pakistani seedlings into English soil (95), not unlike Rushdie’s Gibreel Farishta, who warns London that he will ‘tropicalize’ it, which would result in many wonderful improvements, such as ‘new birds in the trees’ and ‘new trees under the birds’ (Rushdie 1988: 355). But here again the mood is sadly nostalgic in one case, ironical and comic in the other. ‘Whenever the exiles talk of their homeland, tears well up in the morning’s eye—that’s what dewdrops are’, says one minor character in MLL, quoting a poem by Wamaq Saleem (212).

16Shamas’s feeling of ‘crushing loneliness’ takes the form of a ‘private terror’ which is not bounded by the limits of England but reaches out to the confines of the Universe; ‘his vision fails and he sees no new world in the vasts of the darkness’ (193), and his desolation is increased by his agnosticism, which prevents him from believing in an afterlife: ‘He knows humans are mere shadows across the face of time, stuff to fill graves. He feels he’s walking along life’s road with a thumb extended to hitch a ride on a hearse’ (193). As Akash Kapur noted in a review of the novel, ‘for all the alienation of their exile, [the] characters’ most devastating and irredeemable loneliness is within’ (1)

17 Thus the novel plays down classical postcolonial oppositions between the coloniser and the colonised, offering us instead a detailed vision of the dissensions within the immigrant community, structured along lines of class, nationality, language, generation, and above all religion and gender. The immigrant community as dramatised by Aslam resides in the impoverished city centre, which most relatively well-off immigrants have fled to settle in the suburbs, except for Shamas, who for ideological reasons refused to move. This made his wife angry, since in her eyes a better neighbourhood would have improved her daughter’s matrimonial chances. Kaukab does not want to be associated with the common village women who groom their hair with rancid butter (297). As for Suraya, brought up in England, she was taken out of her English school by her mother and enrolled into a girls-only Muslim school headed by a rich Pakistani woman living in the suburbs, whose own daughter went to a private, co-educational school:

While her own daughter sang about the pussy cat that went to London to see the Queen,9 the girls at the Muslim school sang, Fatima, Fatima, where have you been? I’ve been to the mosque with Nur-ud-Deen10 (203)

18At one point Kaukab and her daughter discuss a rich Pakistani woman, on holiday in Britain, who is brought by her relatives to gape at the inner city immigrants as if they were in a zoo; she sneers at the women’s clothes, at the ‘bright village-like embroidery’ on their shalwar-kameez (312). This woman pits her superior English, her Oxbridge education and her villa in Islamabad against the insignificance of the ‘filthy and stinking’ white man who dared to call her a ‘darkie bitch’, and against the habits of the majority of the immigrants, whom she defines, in a sentence resonant with indignation and compound participles, as ‘sister-murdering, nose-blowing, mosque-going, cousin-marrying, veil-wearing inbred imbeciles’ (312). When Mah Jabin admires her elegance, remarking that she is not nouveau riche, Kaukab bitterly retorts:

What’s all this talk about old money and new money? If it’s new money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who are being used and abused in the present, and if it’s old money it’s tainted with the blood and sweat of the poor people who were used and abused in the past. The legs of the rich people’s thrones have always rested on the heads of poor people. (312)

19Suraya, born and bred in England of Pakistani parents, and married off in Pakistan, stands as a mirror image to this Pakistani woman, since she herself behaves in a superior way when in Pakistan, enjoying the awe felt by her in-laws because she is ‘from England’ (157).

20As for religion, it divides the cohorts of immigrants into endless groups and subgroups in which endogamy is the rule: Kaukab ‘barely knew what lay beyond the neighbourhood’; ‘full of apprehension concerning the white race and uncomfortable with people of another Subcontinental religion or grouping’ (32), she approves wholeheartedly of the family strategy that prevented a love match between her Sikh neighbour Kiran and her own (Muslim) brother (7). Kaukab believes devoutly in a very strict, narrow form of Sunni Islam, but also in the universality of her beliefs; she always refers to her faith, ‘Islam’ as if it were a single, homogeneous, indivisible entity, and her younger son, Ujala, bitterly resents her literalness and superstitious cast of mind, her uncritical acceptance of the Muslim women’s magazine she reads, ‘full of orthodox rants and strictures, apocalyptic visions and prophecies’ (301). For Ujala, his mother’s habit of chanting the Koran in Arabic without understanding the words is ‘like chewing gum for the brain’ (322), and Mah Jabin, Kaukab’s daughter, reflects to herself that ‘trapped within the cage of permitted thinking, this woman—her mother—is the most dangerous animal she’ll ever have to confront’ (111). Mah Jabin, as a teenager born in England, knew that ‘everyone [in her community] was imprisoned in the cage of others’ thoughts’, and the freedom of the English teenagers, for her and the friends from her own community, ‘was of no use’, ‘as a lamp with a genie was of no use to a person whose tongue had been cut off, who could not form words to ask for three wishes’ (117-118).

21The feelings of anger expressed by some of the characters against obscurantism (and endorsed by the narrative voice) are not exclusively levelled at Islam: the vicar of the Anglican church in Shamas’s neighbourhood has asked his congregation no longer to associate with two members who have left their respective spouses to live together in sin; he predicts their damnation, quoting I Corinthians 5: 7 (247). Thus the apparent opposition created by the symmetry of cross and crescent (9) is shown to be only superficial: the attitude of the vicar and that of the Muslims towards sinful lovers is different in degree, not in essence. Akash Kapur finds Aslam’s stance on religion a little strained: ‘the gloominess of his novel is infused with an anger that is occasionally overdone, yielding passages that read like an assault on the religion from which all the characters’ unhappiness seems to originate’ (1). Mah Jabin reflects that ‘for millions of people, religion [is] often another torture’: ‘the world gives them terrible wounds and then the holy men and women make them put those wounds into bags of salt’ (302).

22Therefore it certainly cannot be said that the novel opposes Western rationality and secularism to an alleged Eastern religiosity and lack of reason. Shamas and his brother Jugnu embody a rational skepticism, Shamas as a non-believer and a Communist, Jugnu as a scientist. The boat that Jugnu keeps in his garden is named the Darwin, but when the brothers discuss Darwinism, the East/West dichotomy is challenged by the fact that Jugnu’s white, English girlfriend, just like Kaukab, expresses doubts about the reliability of scientific, rational knowledge (38). Shamas and Jugnu embody the Indian capacity for heterodoxy, which encourages scientific progress, and India’s long tradition of contradictory public debates celebrated by Amartya Sen (2007: 26). In an essay entitled ‘The Diaspora and the World’, Sen raises the question of the need felt by emigrants to derive self-respect from the culture and traditions of their original homeland; he derides Samuel Huntington’s assertion that rationality, tolerance and modernity are specifically Western (76), and denounces the distorted conception that Westerners have of India:

An adequately inclusive understanding of Indian heterodoxy is particularly important for appreciating the reach and range of heterodoxy in the country’s intellectual background and diverse history. This is especially critical because of the relative neglect of the rationalist part of an Indian heritage in the contemporary accounts of India’s past, in favour of concentrating on India’s impressive religiosity. (25)

23Aslam’s Shamas deplores the loss of this tradition of free thought and the repression by religious authorities of the desire for fruitful debate: ‘Most people live in the past because it’s easier to remember than to think. Most of us don’t know how to think—we’ve been taught what to think instead’, he remarks to Kiran (282). Aslam dramatises the debate over obscurantism in Pakistan. According to Ujala, the youngest son of the family, Kaukab ‘won’t allow reason to enter this house’ (302), but her bigotry has nothing to do with her exile and isolation, her lack of knowledge of the English language, since in Pakistan, she had been in a position to know better. Wrong, retorts his sister Mah-Jabin, invoking the vulnerable position of women within the state of Pakistan, where the military authorities have colluded with Islamists, putting an end to the secularism and the tradition of intellectual debate that prevailed when Pakistan was still within ‘India’ (323).

24Gender is another powerful line of demarcation in the novel, in which tribal codes of honour combine with a strict interpretation of Islam to create an equation between female chastity, and male honour. If sexual desire in general is frowned upon, boys being urged to abstain and wait for celestial houris (126), the independent expression of female sexual desire is savagely repressed, as is the refusal of Muslim women to comply dutifully with a husband’s desire (thus the refusal of the Muslim girl in love with a Hindu boy to have sex with her Muslim husband results in an exorcism which becomes synonymous with torture and subsequent death). Guilt and fear must always assail the hearts of women raised in such a context, thinks Shamas, who, made to believe that Suraya desires him, sees ‘a war raging in her expression, a wild internal disorder, ‘the dinful strife of faith and disbelief’ (194). Chanda’s brothers kill their sister and her lover not so much because they have sinned, but because they are cowed by a sense of masculine shame and impotence: ‘she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by not paying attention to our wishes’ (342).

25The complexity of relationships is reflected in the precision of the languages spoken by the migrants, such as Punjabi or Urdu, which ‘contain a quite specific name for each conceivable relative’ (Rushdie 1984: 75). This specificity brings comfort to the lonely Kaukab, for whom Jugnu was ‘her husband’s brother, her children’s uncle, her own brother-in-law. Daily and deeply, she loved these words and what they meant’ (32), but it brings shame to men who put their honour in their women, and for whom the word ‘brother-in-law’ is loathsome, because even the legal sexuality of a married woman can be a source of shame:11

Language reflected this matter: anyone who made himself too comfortable at another’s expense was told to mind his ways because the world wasn’t ‘the house of his family-in-law.’ And there was deeper humiliation too: the word sala—‘brother-in-law’—was a term of abuse all over the Subcontinent: to call someone sala was to say, ‘I fuck your sister and you can’t do anything about it! ’ […]. What could be more humiliating to men who had been brought up to defend their women’s honour above all else? A man’s brother-in-law was a swear-word made flesh, and, frustratingly, he had to accept it. (347)

26Chanda’s mother is also betrayed by language, in two different ways. First, not only are her feelings difficult to control and analyse, but foreignness is imposed upon them when she visits her sons in prison: ‘That prison guard kept telling me not to talk to them in ‘Paki language’ each time I felt like saying what I truly feel. ‘Speak English or shut up, ’ he said’ (174). Secondly, her own language is inadequate, because, as Kaukab reflects, ‘there are words to describe all kinds of bereaved people’ ‘but none for a parent that has lost a child: it’s a fate too terrible for even language to contemplate’ (209). In fact her story points to the want of another word that would carry an even more tragic weight, since her daughter’s killers were her own brothers.

27The tribal codes of honour do not stand alone in the implicit indictment carried out in the novel, which also underlines the legal side of repression. Thus Mah-Jabin bitterly accuses her mother of wanting ‘to kill Chanda all over again’ ‘for going against your laws and codes, the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this country with you like shit on your shoes’ (114, my emphasis). The political dimension of the violence done in the name of religion is also made explicit by Ujala, who denounces the barbaric ‘amputations, stoning to death, flogging’ carried out in Pakistan, and when Kaukab mentions the ‘divine origin’ of such punishments, that ‘cannot be judged by human criteria’, Ujala insists on the repressive, theocratic laws of Pakistan (322). In fact Ujala is implicitly underlining a point that Sara Suleri made when she claimed that Pakistan, embarking on ‘an official program of Islamisation’, had ‘institute[d] in writing what had thus far functioned as the law of the passing word’ (Suleri in Williams, 252): in other words, the victimization of women is sanctioned by the law of the land, in this specific instance the Hudood Ordinances promulgated in 1979.12 Salman Rushdie also asserted that ‘the Islamic revival’ in Pakistan was ‘imposed from above’, by an autocratic regime rather than advocated by the people.13 (Rushdie 1984: 251)

28Aslam’s language resorts to simplicity and plain, unemotional descriptions when denouncing the ‘organized crime called arranged marriages’ (106), the ‘legalized brutality’ (210) visited upon women within their families, or the sexual molestation of children inside the mosque. But this plain outspokenness contrasts with Aslam’s much more frequent use of a poetic voice, of an exquisite, chiselled prose filled with similes and metaphors. Aslam is constantly contrasting the bleakness and absurdity of the diasporic experience with the wonder of a poetry of small things, of miniscule epiphanies. This, expectedly, relies in part on a post-colonial, distanced gaze, which imposes a sub-continental vision onto the British universe. This Asian vision of the world is usually focalised through the gaze of characters who are certainly not devoid of imagination, so that an uneducated woman like Kaukab, cooking in her kitchen, indulges in flights of the imagination and decorative arabesques: ‘She cuts the cauliflower into florets, and as she washes them in a basin her hand becomes a starfish, the florets among which it moves appearing like a coral reef’ (298). Other tropes bring together tenors and vehicles belonging to a simple, everyday Asian world, totally devoid of cheap exoticism. Thus in one of the Asian shops, tall rolls of cloth stand against the counter, ‘like a queue of very thin and very tolerant women wearing saris’ and ‘scissors hang from strings like a pair of dead birds, upside-down, drained of blood’ (212, the latter image being a halal version of a still life painting). Elsewhere the sunrise ‘is the colour of the insides of fruit, bright and wet-looking’ (144).

29However this poetic strategy also aims at a re-appropriation of the beauty and specificity of the English world. In other words, the ‘invisibility’ of the unseen English world is only superficial, and a kind of rural, almost pastoral beauty specific to England is reintroduced, through tropes and descriptions, and superimposed upon the unseen, unnamed English city. This is filtered through the gaze of Shamas, a kind of official go-between, but also carried by unfocalised descriptions and notations. Dasht-e-Tanhaii ought to be a desert, a wilderness, but it is in fact presented as a series of lovingly portrayed, microscopic descriptions not of city life, but of nature within the city. Shamas for instance mourns the loss of a season, since Pakistan has five to England’s four (5), the fifth being Monsoon, between Summer and Autumn. And yet this loss, one of the ‘innumerable other losses’, is made up for by the institution of other rituals, the investment of affection and wonder in the natural phenomena of this Western land:

A habit as old as his arrival in this country, he has always greeted the season’s first snow in this manner, the flakes losing their whiteness on the palm of his hand to become clear wafers of ice before melting to water—crystals of snow transformed into a monsoon raindrop. (5)

30 If Shamas’s nostalgia is still present in this intrusion of the monsoon into the English winter, the narrative strategies are less ambiguous, since the book is composed of four parts, each referring to one of the four English seasons, beginning with the snow of winter and ending in a closed circle as autumn reaches its end, with the fall of the first snowflakes. This circular return to winter rather than spring reflects the sombre, pessimistic mood of a novel in which nothing is resolved, no happy ending is envisaged. The use of seasons in the architecture of the book is mirrored in the description of Chanda, whose ‘eyes changed colour in keeping with the seasons’ (359).

31The middle sections however offer a few close-ups on nature, fertility, beauty and desire. In spring ‘the lake has the subdued glow of antique satin’ (149) and at dawn Charag notices that ‘the small daisies growing on the path beneath [Suraya’s] feet look like a stretch of living stars’ (131); soon, he knows, ‘the rays of the sun would go in through the windows and ignite consciousness in every house of Dasht-e-Tanhaii, the caterpillars climbing the milk bottles on the doorsteps to drink dew off the foil tops’ (133). It is the English spring which features in Suraya’s version of nostalgia, she who was born in England and who, as a married woman in Pakistan, felt so homesick: ‘The lake, I missed terribly, and the woods beyond it, in spring, full of bluebells’ (131).

32The minute observations and scientific precision of biology fuse with poetry and symbolism, since the omnipresent moths, butterflies and peacocks, in all their variations (some moths being ‘peacock moths’), symbolise the inescapable tyranny and delight of desire, the irrepressible urge of life to survive and reproduce itself. When the lost lovers, Chanda and Jugnu, first met, the heat in Chanda’s face brought stupefied Bhutan Glory butterflies back to life, causing them to ‘dip and swill’, ‘as though they were all threaded at regular intervals onto an invisible string, [like] the bowed tail of an unseen kite that swayed and undulated’ (361). The two lovers are also consistently linked to peacocks and peahens, an apt objective correlative in a community of strutting males, and reticent women whose duty it is to remain drab, colourless, and invisible, ‘creature[s] of the home and the night’ who ‘had no place outside in the world of men’ (235). Kaukab, who at one point rejects her daughter’s gift of a silk patterned with butterflies because ‘Islam forbids pictures of living things’ (92), remembers how male Great Peacock moths had been invincibly drawn to one single female in a wire-net cage, pursuing invisible signals; having ‘learn[t] to distinguish truth from lie’ they ‘drape[d] the entire cage in reverberating velvet’. The cage is in Jugnu’s bedroom and the moths’ attraction symbolises the strong link between Chanda and Jugnu.

33This pattern of imagery links up with the traditional motifs of Sufi poetry, among which features the moth, and its fatal attraction for the flame. The precise, scientific treatment of the peacock motif is an ironical answer to those fictions which exoticize and ‘vilely beautify’ India, turning it into a country ‘of elephants, tigers, peacocks, emerald and dancing girls’ (Rushdie 2002: 374). Aslam chooses deeper, more significant references, since the thread uniting flowers, insects and eroticism also leads to the Hindu element present in the collective memories of those sub-continental characters. Indeed when Shamas gets to know Suraya he reminds her of how Shiva, seeking Parvati, came upon ‘luminous orchids’ arising from the ‘spilled semen of mating animals and birds’ in a forest where ‘the urge of existence forced creepers and vines towards faraway chinks of sunlight’, and where ‘the sky turned red as though the departing sun had heaped rubies on the day’s shroud’ (Aslam 2005: 165); later when Shamas is walking to his tryst with Suraya he finds two fallen orchids on the ground, just as ‘luminous’ as those in the mythological tale, because lit up by fireflies (196).

34Thus the poetry of myth combines with the precision of natural science: Nature intrudes into the human and urban world, onto wallpaper ‘with twisted leaves and tiny indigo berries’ (22) and into ‘the garlands printed on [Suraya’s] clothing’ (232), proclaiming the presence of desire, the urgency of biology. But in this culture ‘based on segregation [between the sexes] and on the denial and contempt of the human body’ (133), desire is always endangered and threatened: the book ends on Shamas’s dreams of an imminent ‘calamity’, ‘of rocks and stones being hurled at butterflies’ (369), and death and desolation lurk, as on that ‘remote hilly island’ where some flowers have to be pollinated artificially because their pollinating insect has become extinct: ‘they are like flowers placed on a grave, mourning an absence’ (183). Images betray the futile, desperate attempts at liberation, as life and desire try to get themselves born: ‘ [there] stands a leafless tree resembling an antler, as though a deer buried there is beginning to emerge free of the earth’s grip’ (232)

35 Maps for Lost Lovers is a novel about nostalgia for Pakistan that refuses to share in that nostalgia. On the surface, Aslam is out to erase Britain and Englishness, to create a world seen from the point of view of unhappy, hostile migrants, whose children themselves cannot easily find a sense of belonging and legitimacy. But through a complex web of patterning and echoes, Aslam’s novel shows that the diasporic condition is not only made of nostalgia for the old land, combined with a rejection of the new country in which one is exiled; it leads some characters to a rejection of the simplistic ‘purity’ of Pakistan, of an uncompromising theocracy that seeks to impose the oneness of ‘an austere, volatile faith’ (83), in order to reach back to the multiple, heterodox culture of India, fusing Hinduism and many different threads and traditions of Islam, fusing Sufi poetry, Hindu mythology and a strong tradition of sharp scientific and intellectual questioning. Far from erasing England and Englishness, it creates a complex vision of a country that is indeed alien and threatening, bleak as a ‘town under curfew’ (79), but where the beauty and tenacity of nature is celebrated as a metaphor for the infinite desirability and infinite vulnerability of life, love, and desire. Amitava Kumar once noted how often Indian writers in the West ‘return to India in what they write’:

This is not simply a case of nostalgia. Distance produces a shift in perspective, and the immigrant writers find that they are discovering not only the new country, but also the place that they have left behind. A new India is explored and mapped in the imagination of the writer abroad. (Kumar xiv)

36What Aslam attempts to map, tentatively, are the microsopic, invisible spaces of life, youth and poetry which are so necessary if ‘Dasht-e-Tanhaii’, the desert of loneliness, is at last to flower and bloom into a beautiful golden land, an English ‘Sohni Dharti’.