Maps For Lost Lovers By Nadeem Aslam

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A few minutes into our conversation, Nadeem Aslam looks startled and asks, "Is it OK if I switch my mobile off?" He stares at it as if he's never seen one before. For the last 11 years, Aslam has lived untroubled by must-have gadgetry. "I basically removed myself from the world," he explains quietly. "My life has been so reduced. I didn't have a mobile phone until I'd finished my book and could afford one, and until there was any need. Now I am trying to engage with the world - things like e-mail and the internet. I feel like Rip Van Winkle." A few minutes into our conversation, Nadeem Aslam looks startled and asks, "Is it OK if I switch my mobile off?" He stares at it as if he's never seen one before. For the last 11 years, Aslam has lived …show more content…

Maps for Lost Lovers spans a year in a Muslim community in a nameless English town. The 65-year-old Shamas, director of the Community Relations Council, and his devout wife Kaukab, are waiting to learn what has happened to Shamas's brother Jugnu and his young lover Chanda, who has vanished five months before. Although their bodies have never turned up, several pages into the narrative Chanda's brothers are …show more content…

"I'm from a working-class family and I've always lived in these places," says Aslam. Shoppers gossip at Chanda's parents' grocery store over the loquats and hibiscus-flower hair oil. Here it's a neighbourhood curse to say "May your son marry a white woman", and Pakistanis with halting Eng- lish might only talk to three white people in a year - and that's three too many. Although set in a town, Maps for Lost Lovers - unlike Monica Ali'sBrick Lane - is pastoral. It follows the seasons, reflecting the emotional weather of the characters. Nature offers a vivid framework for tragic events. When Chanda first enters Jugnu's garden, the apple trees have not yet blossomed. The reference seems bridal. "That's what I wanted it to be," says Aslam. "Chanda will never see those blossoms turn into fruit because by that time she'll be dead. The trees seems to know it because they actually get hold of her veil at one point and try to hold her back." Aslam notices everything in microscopic detail: "glint-slippered" frosts, blown rose heads lying in clumps like "bright droppings of fantastic creatures", the white fur necktie of a moth. The missing Jugnu worked as a lepidopterist and so Cinnabar, Great Peacock and Large Emerald moths flitter through the

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