Two lost lives, one journey of discovery
Maps for Lost Lovers
By Nadeem Aslam
Knopf, 400 pp., $25
In the nameless English town known only as ''Dasht-e-Tanhaii," the ''Wilderness of Solitude," to the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan immigrants who live there, the river flows ''from right to left like Urdu," and the streets have been rechristened Naag Tolla Hill (as in Dhaka) and Malabar Hill (as in Bombay). Like Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, writers who are interested in the messiness and the poetry of immigrant life in England, Pakistan-born novelist Nadeem Aslam is drawn in his remarkable second novel to the din of cultures colliding as well as to the often devastating friction among the various religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent and, in turn, their friction with the various religious traditions of Europe.
At the center of ''Maps for Lost Lovers" is the spectral presence of two lovers, Chanda and Jugnu, murdered by Chanda's Muslim brothers for the sin of living together outside of marriage (the murders were ''a matter of honour," the brothers said). When the novel opens, five months after Chanda's and Jugnu's disappearance, Jugnu's elder brother Shamas and his family are still reeling from the calamitous interruption to their lives. Like many in the Muslim community in Dasht-e-Tanhaii, including Chanda's father, who proclaimed that ''his daughter had died for him the day she moved in with Jugnu," Shamas's devoutly Muslim wife, Kaukab, understands her brother-in-law and his girlfriend to be wanton and depraved sinners who must be punished.
But ''Maps for Lost Lovers" is a rich and beautifully wrought meditation on more than just sin and the legal and ethical codes of Islam. The murdered lovers are the novel's ''bloody Rorschach blot," representing sinful pleasures, or murderous religious fanaticism, or even love. If Kaukab's faith requires her to judge Chanda and Jugnu guilty of sin and thereby subject to punishments that ''are of divine origin and cannot be judged by human criteria," it also pushes her to acknowledge her deeply held belief in love and to question some of the fundamental tenets of Islam, consequently exposing her faith as more internally contradictory but, paradoxically, also making it more firm: ''Islam said that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing was required: love." The West is, admittedly, a loathsome place for Kaukab. But love, physical desire, is for her an emotion that transcends religious and geographical boundaries: ''Even in Pakistan everyone loved someone before marriage. . . . The West just gave a person the permission and opportunity to act on those feelings."
''Maps for Lost Lovers" is a hybrid novel, saturated with the mythic figures, the colors, and the scents of the subcontinent, but also deeply Western in its anticlerical outlook and its focus on physical and sexual freedoms. When Kaukab's grown daughter Mah-Jabin accuses Kaukab of refusing to liberate her from Islamic laws, codes, and traditions, Kaukab responds, ''I did not have the freedom to give you that freedom, don't you see?" Pakistan (''a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land") and the Islamic faith with which it is so closely associated do not come off well here. The religion that guides Kaukab is cast as the faith of fanatics who rape and murder under the cover of Allah and whose hypocritical belief in female sexual purity and modesty neatly justifies their turn to physical violence.
Aslam has articulately expressed the need, post-9/11, for ''moderate Muslims" to make their presence felt: ''Most ordinary Muslims say, 'We just want to get on with our lives. Don't identify us with the fundamentalists.' But it's a luxury. We moderate Muslims have to stand up." But, sadly, the ''moderate Muslim" is virtually impossible to find in ''Maps for Lost Lovers." The novel is overflowing with nonbelievers, like Shamas, and extremists and apologists for extremists. And yet, through the extraordinary character of Kaukab, Aslam does begin to suggest a provocative alternative.
The primary victims of Islamic law in Aslam's narrative are women. If Kaukab subjects her daughter to Islamic strictures of behavior, it is because she understands that Islamic codes are not simply spiritual ideas that float weightlessly up above, touching only the area of the brain responsible for religious faith; such beliefs have real, material effects on real, material bodies, sometimes in the form of sexual violence and sometimes even in the form of murder, as Jugnu and Chanda's case dramatizes so grimly. Kaukab's journey of discovery over the course of the novel brings her to a place where the injustices that she lives with and, perhaps, even embraces can no longer be ignored. Kaukab will never sacrifice her fundamental faith in Allah or her commitment to living a virtuous life consistent with her religious beliefs. But her firsthand experience of the contradictions within the religious and ethical system she endorses forces her to readjust and even reinvent her own Islamic faith, offering the promise of a model of Islam that cannot be confused with the fundamentalist beliefs of Mah-Jabin's former husband, or with those of Chotta and Barra, the brothers who murder, chop up, and burn the bodies of their sister and her lover.
Aslam's novel provides hope but also cause for worry in a world already too familiar with the fatwa pronounced against Salman Rushdie. As readers of such a bold story in a universe crowded by fundamentalisms of many shapes and colors, we need to support the right to wrestle creatively with our own (and others') religious traditions. We also need to embrace, as Kaukab's example suggests, the right to reshape and re-imagine our own religious faith not to ensure its demise but, rather, to guarantee its future.
Laura Ciolkowski teaches literature at New York University. 
