“Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself.”

This is how the beautiful story of Shamas, Jugnnu, Chanda, Kaukab and few other people unfolds in the book, “Maps for Lost Lovers” by Nadeem Aslam. …more It’s not just a book, it’s life itself, it’s love itself. It’s like those tears you cried at night for lost loves, like the warmth of sun on your face the first day of summer after long, cold winters…

I don’t even know how to began telling about this story. It’s flowing with tiny little stories, beautifully detailed, making them appear like legends, like myth. And Love; it is love that stands apart from all the injustice, the hatred, the ignorance in the book. At every page, in every line and every word, you breathe in the fragrance of love. Love never leaves your consciousness, even when its beaten to death in the form of the Muslim girl who committed the crime of loving a Hindu boy.

And when she dies, her lover doesn’t weep, does not kill himself; he leaves a letter in her grave, which is brutally torn apart by the relatives of the girl…

“You, who have gone gathering the flowers of death,
My heart’s not I, I cannot teach my heart:
It cries when I forget.”

And the dawn shows the torn letter floating on the lake, like love shredded to pieces but still alive… the more they curb it, the more powerful it seems.

Every line is hauntingly beautiful, every character’s life makes you want to weep bitterly.

Be it Kaukab, who in her ignorance and her strict adherence to the laws of Islam, loses her family, her children…but your heart will go out even to her because you really cannot blame someone who is doing things she believes are considered right by her God...

Be it Jugnu (the appropriately named moth-collector whose hands always glowed because of radium) and Chanda, the happy, crazed lovers who die because of their love and then as ghosts, haunt the tiny community of Pakistani immigrants in England.

Be it Shamas, the man forever in search of love; he who wrote poems for his fiancé, Kaukab, which she embroidered on her wedding dress; He who could not touch his wife after a certain age as she considered it inappropriate afher becoming a grandmother; he who falls in love with Suraya, and fears that he will die with her name on his lips, roaming the city madly, hopelessly – and he does just that…

Or Suraya, who has come to England, looking for a suitable temporary husband; she who is fighting fates; she whose husband divorced her under the influence of alcohol and now, to reunite with him and her son, she’ll have to endure another marriage, sleep with another man and then go back to her husband… she who is scared to realize even in her thoughts that she loves Shamas, scared because it is against allah to feel of such things for a man other than her husband…

There’s so much more I can write but I would rather have you read it. (less)