Read Maps for Lost Lovers for Free Online

garden’s purple beech, and in a blur of near-misses they went into the space above the adjoining house, bought newly by Jugnu, the two hatches open for his stored possessions to be zigzagged across from here to there and then handed down. A number of his belongings were still scattered about the house: these included the hatbox containing the nineteen chrysalises. It was left in the blue kitchen till tomorrow because everyone had decided to leave things as they were when night fell and they realized that they had been working without a rest for ten hours, helping Jugnu move.
    Like kites whose strings have been cut, the moths swooped down out of the attic into the room wallpapered with twisted leaves and tiny indigo berries.
    Here, the Great Peacocks ignored the sleeping Jugnu even though his hands weren’t covered by the blanket, the hands that had the ability to glow in the dark. No moth could resist being drawn to his hands, but that night the interior was noisy with another call that only they could hear— that of a female moth. It had hatched the day before and hung in the cage Jugnu had constructed by knitting copper wire around a bottle and then smashing the glass.
    The female was motionless except when it swished its wings gently to disperse the odour that had gradually flooded the two houses with the faint electricity of a yearning inexpressible any other way, undetected by the humans but pulling the nineteen males towards its source slowly at first and then hand over hand a yard at a time as they learned to distinguish truth from lie and arrived to drape the entire cage in reverberating velvet.

A BREAKFAST OF BUTTERFLY EGGS
    Walking home from work at the end of the day, with The Afternoon under one arm, Shamas hears the echoes of his own footsteps on the snow as though he is being followed.
    For almost a week now the country has been draped in daisy chains on the television weather maps. During the nights, the condensation on the windowpanes has frozen into sparkling patterns of bird feathers, insect wings and leaf skeletons, as though each home contains within it a magical forest, tangled with fables and myths, the glittering foliage growing pressed against the glass. Each street has become a row of books on a shelf.
    Shamas no longer feels the pain in the fingers that he wounded the other morning, scrabbling for half-penny coins in the snow on the riverbank. He no longer feels the wasp-sting soreness. The skin is mending itself fast. Under the hard scabs on his fingers, the new skin has the fine buffed sheen of mother-of-pearl. Pale pink. Jugnu—the lepidopterist— said that because there are no pink butterflies in nature, the ones that were released into the air during the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park in July 1969 were in fact white ones dipped in pink dye.
    Shamas doesn’t know what led the police detectives to name their investigation into the disappearance of Jugnu and Chanda “Operation Ivory.”
    The officers who came to the house that morning to inform him officially of the arrests said that the two men were being held separately—to highlight inconsistencies in their tales—and he has visited the police station twice since then, talking first to the Detective Chief Inspector and then to the Detective Superintendent, both of whom are in charge of the case. The Detective Superintendent said that the lack of bodies is a stumbling block but it will not prevent the team from battling on to secure a conviction. He has been told that the trial will be in December. There are numerous legal precedents in which the murderers who thought they had covered their tracks had been brought to justice. As long ago as 1884 there were cases in which the courts were prepared to bring in convictions without a corpse: that year, two seamen who had eaten cabin boys while drifting for hundreds of miles at sea in an open boat, were found guilty of murder. A more recent case concerned a wealthy woman kidnapped for