Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Perhaps after you’ve spent some time among us you’ll see the satire.’

  ‘Oh, I see it already,’ Hiroko said, nodding, and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

  But Elizabeth Burton was laughing as she hadn’t laughed in a very long time. She took Hiroko’s hand in hers and held on firmly.

  ‘Forget this boarding-house nonsense. You’re staying here. We’re practically sisters, after all.’

  James Burton, standing in the doorway, watched his wife’s face glow with laughter, and nodded. Hiroko was far from convinced that living with the Burtons was an ideal situation but she was too weak to feel anything but gratitude for the continued offer of a bed to sleep in.

  A couple of mornings ago she had woken feeling much stronger – a greater relief than she allowed anyone else to know; she had feared the radiation sickness which had so incapacitated her in ’45 might have returned or simply reawoken from some state of dormancy, as the doctors had warned might happen. But as soon as she felt herself returning to strength she dismissed such thoughts with the briskness with which she had once dismissed Konrad’s repeated suggestions that it wasn’t prudent for her to continue meeting a German in Nagasaki, and decided it was time to start finding a way to fill her days. She had come to feel a greater affection towards the Burtons during her convalescence than she had imagined possible on her first day in Delhi but she knew she needed something beyond their company to occupy her.

  She thought she had a perfect solution but her suggestion that someone in Delhi must have need of a translator who could speak English, German and Japanese met with little enthusiasm from the Burtons. Dr Agarkar was called in to inform her she was not yet well enough to go ‘gadding around’, though Hiroko half suspected he only said so as an act of friendship to the Burtons, who seemed to think their hospitality was being called into question if their guest found employment.

  So Hiroko turned to the next option that announced itself to her.

  ‘I’d like to learn the language they speak here,’ she had said.

  ‘It’s not necessary. English serves you fine. The natives you’ll meet are either the Oxbridge set and their wives or household staff like Lala Buksh, who can understand simple English if you just know a clutch of Urdu words to throw into the mix. Those Elizabeth can teach you,’ James had said.

  It was the oddest thing Hiroko had ever heard.

  ‘Even so, I’d like to learn how to read and write,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone . . .?’

  ‘Sajjad,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He used to teach Henry – my son.’ Her upper lip didn’t really stiffen, Hiroko thought, but there was some subtle shift around her mouth suggesting tamped-down pain at the mention of the child sent a year ago to boarding school in England, from where he wrote letters to his parents saying he wanted to be ‘home, in India’.

  ‘He doesn’t have the time for that,’ said James. ‘You know I can’t let him work half-days now. I don’t have an office full of clerks any more.’

  ‘You still have the office, James. You just choose to pretend your leg isn’t healed well enough for you to go to it. And in any case, you and Sajjad do nothing but play chess all day.’ Let the boy work for his salary again, Elizabeth thought to herself. She had been profoundly annoyed by Sajjad’s acceptance of the raise James had given him at the start of the month; it seemed not just dishonest, but impudent.

  Hiroko slipped off the sofa and went to look through the bookshelves, hoping by her movements to remind the Burtons she was in the room before they started one of their more unpleasant arguments, and wondered if Sajjad would mind being asked to play the role of teacher. She should have asked him first, she realised. Coming from the Burtons it would be a command rather than a request. But much to her relief, when James grudg­ ingly broached the subject later that day, Sajjad seemed delighted.

  ‘I will teach you the chaste Urdu of Ghalib and Mir so that you can read the poets of Delhi.’ Seeing James’s look of unhappiness, he added, ‘And since you say you wake up early, Miss Tanaka, perhaps we could have our lessons before Mr Burton and I commence our day’s business.’

  James had smiled broadly and Elizabeth didn’t know whether it was Sajjad, James or herself who she wanted to hit for the effortlessness with which the Indian could delight her husband.

  Hiroko bent her face into the steam that rose from the teacup, its warmth a pleasant contrast to the chill of Delhi’s winter-morning air, and hoped Sajjad wouldn’t arrive soon. It was rare, and welcome, this feeling of being alone in the Burton house, no need to modulate her expressions so that nothing in them would give cause for concern or offence. When either James or Elizabeth was around she always had to look busily engaged with something to avoid provoking a panicked stir of conversation or activity; they behaved as though she had lost Nagasaki only yesterday, and their joint role in her world was to distract her from mourning. It was kind, but trying.

  She rubbed her thumb along the interlacings of the green cane chair. And this world, too, was ending. A year or two, no more, James had told her, and then the British would go. It seemed the most extraordinary privilege – to have forewarning of a swerve in history, to prepare for how your life would curve around that bend. She had no idea what she planned to do beyond Delhi. Beyond next week. And why plan anyway? She had left such hubris behind. For the moment it was enough to be here, in the Burton garden, appreciative of a blanket of silence threaded with vibrant bird calls, knowing there was nothing here she couldn’t leave without regret.

  She was less than halfway through her cup of jasmine tea when she saw Sajjad enter the garden from around the side. He seemed surprised – almost disappointed – to see her there, but all that was just a flicker of the eyes before his polite smile settled into place and removed all expressiveness from his face. She wondered if her own face had revealed and concealed exactly as had his.

  ‘There’s a lot of dew this morning,’ she said, watching his footprints turn the silver grass green.

  ‘Yes.’ He felt he should add something intelligent to that comment so he said, ‘The spiders like it. On dewy mornings they build elaborate webs. Or perhaps the webs only become visible when dew is captured in their threads.’

  ‘The spider is beloved of Muslims.’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled, pleased beyond measure that she should know such a thing, as he stood beside the bridge table and waited for her to rise from her chair and join him there.

  ‘Konrad told me that.’ The day they stood together on Megane-Bashi and his heart had leapt into hers in a blur of silver. She couldn’t recall the moment itself without an accompanying memory of remembering it as she lay on a hospital bed in the hours after Yoshi told her no one near Urakami Cathedral had survived the blast.

  ‘Mr Konrad was—’ Sajjad pulled his ear-lobe, trying to find a way to express himself. ‘I liked him very much.’

  Hiroko smiled as she sat down at the bridge table. It was so easy to see why Konrad had said this man was the only person in Delhi worth seeing.

  ‘He mentioned you. He said you were lovely.’

  ‘Lovely?’

  ‘Yes.’ She watched him take in the compliment as though it were a feast. ‘Why didn’t you want me to say anything to you in front of the Burtons the day I arrived?’

  Sajjad set down the lined exercise book he had bought with his own money for the lesson, wiping his cuff against the remnant of a tea stain.

  ‘I didn’t know what you were going to say. But it didn’t seem right.’

  ‘What didn’t?’

  ‘I work for Mr Burton.’ He quickly added, ‘Not like Lala Buksh. I’m not a servant. I’m going to be a lawyer, one day. Already I know all there is to know about . . .’ He stopped, aware he was boasting. ‘I’m not a servant,’ he repeated firmly. ‘But I’m . . . you’re . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You had just walked in. A link to her dead brother. It was not the time for you to stop and talk to me.’ What he meant was, ‘I could s
ee that you were going to speak to me as an equal. They would have held it against both of us. You would not have been asked to stay.’ ‘I think we should start the lesson.’ He opened the exercise book. ‘To begin with, you will have to let go of the notion that writing starts on the left-hand side of the page and moves right.’

  Hiroko started to laugh, wondered whether that would seem rude, but saw that Sajjad was unbothered – his head angled slightly to the side, his eyes curious, as though simply waiting for her to finish and explain herself rather than worrying that he had said something deserving of mockery. She turned the exercise book towards herself and wrote down its page.

  ‘This is Japanese,’ she said.

  Sajjad’s eyes opened wide.

  ‘After Urdu you’ll have to learn a diagonal script.’

  She laughed again, and they both looked at each other and then dropped their eyes. They had both decided independently that it was merely the unfamiliarity of the other’s features that gave rise to this desire to stare and stare which had been present since their first meeting.

  ‘The first letter is alif,’ Sajjad said, and the lesson commenced.

  Within a few minutes Sajjad discovered what her German teacher at school and the priest who tutored her in English had earlier come to know: that for her language came so easily it seemed more as though she were retrieving forgotten knowledge than learning something new. Before he knew it they had progressed to the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.

  ‘This is zal, the first of four letters in Urdu which replicate the sound of the English zed,’ Sajjad said, drawing a curved shape with a dot on top. ‘Zal, zay, zwad, zoy.’

  ‘Why four letters for one sound?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who don’t see the beauty in excess?’ he cried – it was the first time she saw his deliberately ridiculous side.

  ‘In other words, you don’t know, Sensei.’

  ‘What does that word mean?’

  ‘Teacher.’

  She was surprised by how red his skin could become. He picked up a pen, rolled it between his fingers, pressing a thumb against its nib and then examining intently the blue ink that spread across his skin.

  ‘You call them Elizabeth and James. You mustn’t call me anything other than Sajjad, Miss Tanaka.’

  ‘You mustn’t call me anything other than Hiroko, Sajjad.’ The one thing she had liked most about the Americans was their informality with each other. No stifling honorifics to make every relationship so bounded in. She saw, in their company, how ridiculous she had been in referring to the man she loved as ‘Konrad-san’. And she had even started to believe that if she’d said ‘Konrad’ instead he would have proposed earlier, and everything would have been different. Everything, except the bomb.

  Sajjad saw that her mind was winging away from Delhi and everyone in it. He knew what the Burtons would do in such a situation – interrupt, hold her in the present. As far as he knew there was only one occasion on which Elizabeth had asked about her life before Delhi – Sajjad had been passing by the open door of her room when Elizabeth broached the question and he couldn’t help but stay and listen. He had been struck by how matter-of-fact her response had been.

  ‘After the bomb, I was sick,’ she’d said. ‘Radiation poisoning, though we didn’t have a name for it at the time. Konrad’s friend, Yoshi Watanabe, had a relative in Tokyo who was a doctor. Nagasaki’s hospitals were overrun. So Yoshi-san accompanied me to Tokyo. He felt responsible, you see, because he felt he’d betrayed Konrad. Taking care of me was one way of making it up. He had me admitted to the hospital where his cousin worked, and then he went back to Nagasaki. Some American Army doctors came to see me when we were there. I was such an object of curiosity. I spoke to them in English, and one of them asked if I was interested in working as a translator. Working for the Americans! After the bomb, you might wonder how I could agree to such a thing. But the man who asked me – he had such a gentle face. It was impossible to hold him responsible for what had been done. It was impossible, really, to hold anyone responsible – the bomb was so . . . it seemed beyond anything human. Anyway, I agreed.

  ‘I worked as a translator for over a year. Made friends with one American nurse in particular, who took me to have my hair cut short like hers, and let me borrow her clothes when we went out to nightclubs together. I’d grown up in the war; these peacetime luxuries were all new to me. I didn’t ever want to go back to Nagasaki, but I was content to be in Tokyo with the Americans. And then one day – near the end of ’46 – the American with the gentle face said the bomb was a terrible thing, but it had to be done to save American lives. I knew straight away I couldn’t keep working for them. The nurse came to find me when she heard I was leaving. What are you going to do, she said. The words just came out of my mouth – go far away. Not you as well, she said. That Canadian friend I keep telling you about is shipping out to India.

  ‘India! She said it, and I knew immediately where I would go. I told her and she said that’s crazy. But OK, let’s see if we can find someone to keep you company. I love that about the Americans – the way they see certain kinds of craziness as signs of character. That night she and I took the Canadian to dinner and gave him lots of sake, and by the end of the evening we were drinking toasts to travelling companions. In case you’re wondering if he had ulterior motives, Elizabeth, he was – what is that phrase you used about your cousin Willie? . . . of a Wildean persuasion.’

  Later, when Elizabeth repeated all this to James, in Sajjad’s hearing, he shook his head and said, ‘I hope your curiosity is satisfied. But don’t you think we should simply let her forget all that now?’ And since then the Burtons had never asked a question about Japan, or allowed her a moment of contemplation that could lead to memory.

  Sajjad considered all this as Hiroko’s gaze turned inwards, then sat back in his chair, looking out at the garden, and let her be.

  4

  Hiroko watched the shadows thrown on to the ruins of Hauz Khas, around which an elaborate moonlit picnic was in progress. The ruins were just ruins, shadows just distorted impressions created by the interplay of light and dark. So even this had come to pass: a collapsing structure, the silhouette of a man falling upon it, did not impair her ability to turn with a polite smile to hear the question posed by the woman beside her.

  ‘How are your Urdu lessons coming along?’

  Hiroko couldn’t recall the name of the Englishwoman who asked the question, though she knew her husband was on the Viceregal staff and that she had the finest jacaranda trees in New Delhi.

  ‘Very well, thank you. It’s been three weeks and we’ve finally accepted that I can only make a “k” sound using the roof of my mouth, not the back of it. It has drenched Sajjad in sorrow, but sorrow is inescapable with Urdu so he’s not blaming me.’

  ‘Sajjad? Oh, James’s dogsbody. Is that what he said, “sorrow is inescapable with Urdu”? They make the oddest claims, don’t they?’

  Dogsbody? Hiroko bit into a piece of roast chicken to give her mouth something to do other than retort. She didn’t know how to behave around these people – the rich and powerful, a number of whom had asked her about the samurai way of life and thought she was being charmingly self-effacing when she said the closest she had come to the warrior world was her days as a worker at the munitions factory. Two years after the war they could accept an ally of Hitler sooner than they could accept someone of a different class, she thought, and wished she had entered India in a manner that would have allowed her into the houses of those who lived in Delhi’s equivalent of Urakami. And yet, that was unfair to the Burtons and at least partially untrue. The soft sheets, the abundance of mealtimes, the dizzyingly coloured dresses Elizabeth had passed on to her, the vastness of the Burton library, the kindness of the Burtons themselves . . . she was more than grateful for all these things, and all too conscious that they were hers by generosity, not by right.

  ‘Why are you wasting your time with U
rdu?’ Kamran Ali, one of the Indian Oxbridge set, lowered his bulky frame on to the picnic blanket beside Hiroko. ‘Language of mercenaries and marauders. Do you know the word “Urdu” has the same root as “horde”? Now, Latin. That’s a language worth learning.’ He held up his empty glass and a liveried bearer stepped forward to fill it. ‘Vini, vidi, vino,’ Kamran Ali said, and the Englishwoman next to Hiroko laughed and drew him into the conversation about the odd utterances of one’s Indian staff.

  Hiroko felt someone touch her elbow and looked up to find Elizabeth there.

  ‘Elizabeth, are you joining us?’ the Lady of Jacaranda said without making any attempt to shift and make space.

  ‘Thank you, no, Violet. The air’s much too stifling here.’ She paused for just a moment before adding, ‘I mean, because of those—’ She waved her hand in the direction of the six-foot-high sticks with flames billowing from their tips which lit up the picnic area.

  Hiroko stood up with a mumbled excuse, caught between amusement and sadness at the acerbity of Elizabeth’s interactions with these dull but harmless creatures. As the two women started to walk away from the gathering, James, watching them from a distance, saw the light shimmer off Elizabeth’s emerald-studded necklace – he’d placed it around her throat for the first time in a world burnished so bright with love that the green gems had seemed dull by comparison. In a rare imaginative burst he saw Hiroko and Elizabeth as the twin slim gold chains of the necklace, progressing side by side except when some gleaming interruption (the Viceroy, the wife of one of James’s clients, the Nawab of Somewhere) prompted them to diverge for a while, assured that they would meet on the other side. James believed Elizabeth was solicitous of her foreign guest in establishing this pattern, never realising how much it counted for his wife finally to find herself a friend and ally.

  Occasionally these last few weeks she had even found herself looking forward to going out when Hiroko agreed to accompany them to whatever social gathering was taking place that evening (there was never an evening without a social gathering).