Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Congratulations, Sajjad.’ She found she was genuinely happy for him. ‘I’m pleased for you.’

  ‘There’s just one problem.’ He looked very grave. ‘Perhaps you can help me with this. Who will make my tea in the morning?’

  ‘Oh.’ She blinked at him. ‘I hate the tea in India.’

  ‘Ah.’ He had done what he could. In his heart, he hadn’t ever truly believed she would say yes. ‘Well. I wish you the very best.’ He extended his hand. She took it, and then neither of them let go.

  They stood there for what seemed a very long time, fingers immobile in each other’s grip. Then she took a deep breath, as if preparing to submerge herself in an underwater world.

  ‘Come with me. I want to tell you something.’ Still holding on to his hand she led him to a bench in the middle of a covered pavilion on a slope near the Burton property. On most days the pavilion commanded a clear view of the Himalayas but today it just felt like the last stop before the edge of the world.

  And there, for the first time since it happened, Hiroko talked about what had happened to her when the bomb fell.

  The mist gave way to rain as she spoke – not a gentle rain that whispered of harvest and bounty but a harsh, hammering rain. It fell like sheets of liquid steel, pounding all the life out of the tiny creatures in its path. Monstrous watery shapes formed and disintegrated before Sajjad’s eyes as his tears splintered the rain. If he let go of Hiroko she would slip away in fluid form. Everything about her so precarious.

  When she finished speaking, she was lying on the bench, her head in Sajjad’s lap while his hands ran lightly through her hair as though afraid it would fall out if he touched it too roughly.

  ‘So you see, I can’t in fairness agree to be anyone’s wife,’ she said, sitting up. ‘No one knows the long-term effects of this thing. They don’t know if it will affect my ability to have children. They don’t know that it won’t kill me in another five years.’

  He leaned forward, so their foreheads were nearly touching.

  ‘I like being with you. I would like to go on being with you. I almost put that aside myself in fear of a possible tomorrow, but if these days teach us anything it’s that all we can do in preparation for tomorrow is nothing. So let’s talk about today.’

  She smiled. Optimism. That was Sajjad’s gift. She opened her mouth and breathed it in.

  ‘Can I ask, have you ever kissed a woman?’

  ‘A gentleman doesn’t answer such questions.’

  ‘I just want to make sure you know how to do it. My decision may hinge on the matter.’

  ‘I see I shall have to demonstrate.’

  11

  ‘Where do you think they are?’ James asked, for the seventeenth time that day (Elizabeth was keeping count, and noting that the spaces between each repetition were getting increasingly narrow). He looked out of the window of the family room to see nothing but the evening approach.

  ‘Really what you want to know is, what are they doing?’ Elizabeth replied, curling herself on the sofa and picking up the book which she had been pretending to read ever since she and James had returned to the cottage and left Hiroko and Sajjad outside. ‘If what we used to do in all our private moments at a time in our life when we looked at each other in that way is anything to go by . . .’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth.’

  ‘It embarrasses you to remember it,’ she said flatly.

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’ He sat down on an armchair next to her. ‘I just don’t think it’s the same situation at all. He can’t possibly be thinking of marrying her.’

  ‘Why not? Because it’ll make things socially awkward for us to invite him to our farewell party in Delhi with the “smart set”? Or because Hiroko might think that the “our home is your home” offer continues to apply, and what if she should arrive with him in London and expect to be put up in our house? What will your mother say? What will the neighbours say?’ At James’s look of irritation (once, he would have laughed and thrown a cushion at her for the acuity of her response) she added, ‘His mother is dead. That changes everything. He wouldn’t have come here if he was going to offer anything less than marriage. That will give her two options – him or us. Which would you choose?’

  ‘You could at least try talking to her.’

  ‘She won’t listen,’ she said.

  ‘So you disapprove, too?’ He leaned forward, but only slightly.

  ‘It makes me nervous to be unable to imagine the life she’ll lead as Sajjad’s wife. We really know nothing about Delhi beyond our narrow circle.’

  ‘He’s a good man.’

  ‘Good men don’t necessarily mean good marriages.’

  They looked at each other, and James came to sit beside her on the sofa.

  ‘New start when we get back to London?’

  Across the room was a sealed envelope containing the letter Elizabeth had finally written to Cousin Wilhelm. In German it said:

  Dear Willie,

  You make New York sound so appealing. Yes! I will come there. But not with James. I am leaving him. Please, please say nothing of this to anyone. Even he doesn’t know yet. I will go back to England with him and settle him into his life there. And then I will come to New York and see if there’s anything of your cousin Ilse left to be salvaged from the lonely, bitter (but still well groomed, you’ll be glad to know) wreck that is Mrs Burton. Dearest, why didn’t I simply listen to you when you said it would kill me to be the Good Wife? I will write to you from London when my plans are more assured.

  With love, I.

  Elizabeth touched his cheek gently.

  ‘New start, James.’

  James patted her hand and stood up quickly so that she wouldn’t see the tears coming to his eyes. In doing that, he ended any thoughts she had of tearing up the letter.

  ‘On the matter of London, I think we should leave sooner than we’d planned. I think we should leave as soon as possible.’

  ‘I thought we wanted one last Mussoorie season.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen in this country the day British rule ends.’ He started to pace. ‘They haven’t even settled the boundaries yet. Millions of people with no idea which country they’ll find themselves in less than a month from now. It’s madness waiting to happen. And Delhi . . . so many Muslims, so many Hindus. If the violence reaches there, it’ll be carnage.’

  ‘But James. How can we leave Hiroko in that? After all she’s already had to suffer?’

  ‘Well, you tell her not to marry him then.’

  But it was already too late for that. If Kamran Ali in the cottage next door had gone out to his garage he would have seen that the MG in which he’d been giving Hiroko driving lessons was gone.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Sajjad had said, earlier in the day, getting into the passenger seat after he’d pushed the car far enough away from the cottages for Hiroko to turn on the engine without being heard. ‘And to repeat my question yet again, if he doesn’t mind you using his car why couldn’t you start it up in the garage?’

  ‘We’re going to get married,’ Hiroko replied, which successfully removed the other question from Sajjad’s mind. ‘What do we need? A mosque?’

  ‘We’ll have to have a civil ceremony,’ he said, since pulling her into his arms didn’t seem a wise option while she was so intent on pushing knobs and levers on the dashboard. ‘By Muslim law, I can’t marry out of my religion unless you’re a Jew or a Christian. You aren’t, are you?’

  ‘No.’ She finally found the switch she wanted and turned on the headlights. The more brightly coloured flowers were starting to splash colour in the mist, but it was still far from clear on the road ahead. ‘How does one become a Muslim?’

  ‘One repeats the Kalma – la ilaha ilallah Muhammadur rasool Allah – three times.’

  ‘Say that slower.’ As the car headed down the hill, speeding up, the flowers appeared increasingly blurred in their frenzy to burst out of the surrounding greynes
s.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can repeat it three times.’

  Sajjad was silent for a while. ‘Don’t you at least want to know what it means?’ he said at last.

  ‘No. I’m not saying it because I believe it. I’m saying it because I see no reason to make things more difficult for you with your family than is necessary.’

  Again he was silent, and this time she began to worry.

  ‘Have I offended your beliefs?’

  ‘I’m just surprised by your practicality.’ He touched her arm. ‘And grateful for it.’

  By the time they found a mosque she was a Muslim.

  And by the time James had asked for the seventh time, ‘Where do you think they are?’ Hiroko was taking her husband’s hand and leading him into a secluded grove with springy turf squelching beneath their bare feet, a blanket over Sajjad’s shoulder. (Hiroko’s remarkable practicality had made her stop to procure it on the way from the mosque, though her reason for doing so had only just made itself known to Sajjad.)

  By the eighth time James asked the question, Sajjad and Hiroko’s clothes were hanging from a tree branch, the breeze scattering tiny yellow flowers over them.

  By the ninth, Sajjad was trying to recover his voice to explain to Hiroko that certain parts of the male anatomy were best left unsqueezed.

  By the tenth, Hiroko’s head was tucked under Sajjad’s chin, her quick breath ruffling his chest hair as his hands traced the outline of her burns.

  By the eleventh, they were lying on the blanket, and Hiroko was about to give up her search for a word in any of four languages to describe the pleasure of sliding rainwater off a leaf into Sajjad’s belly button and then curling her tongue into the dip. (‘The pleasure is nectarous,’ Sajjad said, and though she couldn’t feel it she knew he touched one of her birds as he said it, and the words and gesture together made her kiss his mouth.)

  By the twelfth, she was beginning to think the pain meant he didn’t know what he was doing, and was on the verge of telling him so.

  By the thirteenth, a silver fox came to investigate the sounds, and then streaked away, running through a narrow beam of sunlight as it departed, convincing Sajjad that at that moment of climax he had seen a burst of starlight.

  By the fourteenth, Hiroko, who had seen the fox for what it really was, rested her head on Sajjad’s arm and told him the Japanese word for fox was ‘kitsune’ – a figure prominent in myth. The oldest and wisest of the kitsune are kyubi – nine-tailed – and the colour of their fur is silver or gold. With a flick of just one of their tails they can start a monsoon shower, she said. So let’s presume the break in the rainfall is a sign of our kyubi’s favour. Our kyubi, he asked? Yes, I think we’ve found ourselves a guide and guardian.

  By the fifteenth, she demanded to know why he had shifted down to rest his head on her thigh, thereby depriving her of his arm as pillow. So he showed her, and she stopped complaining.

  By the sixteenth, they discovered the branch on which they’d hung their clothes was wet, and it only made them laugh.

  By the seventeenth, they were on their way to the Burton cottage, where they had decided Hiroko would stay while Sajjad returned to Delhi and found a place for them to live. The mist had lifted entirely and Sajjad, who had never seen mountains before, believed the Himalayan peaks were surrounded by quick-flowing rivers of snow until Hiroko said, ‘Don’t be silly, husband, they’re clouds.’

  Lamentation will not follow, Sajjad thought, putting his arm around Hiroko’s shoulders. The exaltation is too great. No sorrow could ever match this joy.

  12

  Sajjad stood on the banks of the Bosporus, and wondered how he could have ever thought the mosques of Istanbul beautiful. Now it was clear: the buildings were too squat, their minarets too narrow. The Bosporus itself was a strait, not a river; it should have been a river. And the written language – in Roman script! How could a nation choose to discard the grace of Arabic lettering (generations of Ashraf calligraphers wept in their graves at the thought). No, nothing here conformed to his aesthetic; even the crumbling decay of this once grand city did not have the right tempo, the right texture, the right quality of sighing.

  James Burton. It was all his fault they were here.

  He had been so convincing that evening when Sajjad and Hiroko walked into the Burton cottage, Sajjad desperately self-conscious because of the wet patches on his clothes, and said they were married. It was obvious the Burtons had expected the news, if not the timing of it. Elizabeth had at least pretended some happiness, but James had taken Sajjad by the arm and walked him outside.

  ‘You can’t take her to Delhi,’ he’d said. And then he’d begun to speak in his lawyer’s tones, as Sajjad hadn’t heard him do for a very long time. Here were the reasons, he said. He talked about the likely increase of violence leading up to, and leading on from, Partition. The communal make-up of Delhi he laid out in great detail. His own thoughts on the nature of violence and its effects on the most seemingly rational of human beings. The actions that desperation or rage or self-defence could provoke. He asked Sajjad questions starting with ‘What would you do if . . .’, asking the younger man to consider his possible responses to a range of violations – personal, religious, communal, familial. And when Sajjad was crouching on the ground, head in his hands, he had bent down, hand on Sajjad’s shoulder, and delivered his coup de grâce: ‘And after all Hiroko has had to endure, do you want to add to her suffering?’

  Sajjad looked up, a supplicant before a man of wisdom.

  ‘But what other option do I have?’

  James held out his hand and pulled Sajjad to his feet. This last act he would perform before leaving this place, these people. This final act of benevolent rule, against the tide of the Empire’s blood-soaked departure from India.

  ‘There’s an old general in Mussoorie who wants to give you a wedding present.’

  It had been Elizabeth’s idea. There was no point telling Hiroko not to marry Sajjad, she’d told James; instead a way must be found to keep them away from Delhi ‘until all the Partition nonsense clears up’. She’d joined him in pacing for a while, and then cried out ‘Istanbul!’ and reached for the telephone. She placed a call to the General who had stopped Hiroko on the Mall to talk about flowers. His first wife, who had died many years earlier, had been Japanese and Elizabeth saw no reason to do anything other than take advantage of the old man’s sentimentality in regard to the figure of his lost love.

  ‘He has a home in Istanbul. His second wife was Turkish. But he hasn’t been there since her death in ’43. There’s a caretaker, though, and the General’s forever making drunken offers to anyone who’ll listen to go and stay in his yali by the Bosporus. And now he’s made an entirely sober offer for you and Hiroko to spend an extended honeymoon there.’

  Honeymoons were for the English. Even if Sajjad had considered one, he couldn’t afford it. Hiroko would understand that. All his savings would have to go towards their new home in New Delhi. But he had heard the talk in the Old City about defence and revenge and infidels and justice, and he knew that James Burton was right when he said that Hiroko could not be allowed to witness further brutality. He would find a way to borrow money for the house when they returned to Delhi.

  It had all seemed so inevitable, so sensible.

  Sajjad turned his back on the indisputable beauty of the Blue Mosque, and trudged towards the ferry which would take him to the General’s yali and Hiroko. She would be sitting by the window looking at the light sparkling off the Bosporus, he imagined, finding a glimpse of calm in the image.

  In fact, right then she was standing on a table, her palm pressing against the damp, sagging ceiling, trying to determine whether there was any immediate danger of the roof caving in. The yali, which had clearly once been glorious, was entirely in a state of disrepair. Its wood was rotting, the deep-red paint of its exterior peeling, and most of the windows had broken panes, or no panes at all. Even so, she had come to lo
ve the place in the months she and Sajjad had been here. They only used one room – the recessed one that overhung the Bosporus, and which Sajjad insisted had tipped forward several degrees since they started living there – but that was quite enough for both of them.

  Hiroko stepped from the table to a chair and from there to the floor, and returned to the recessed room in which she thought she could detect the faint scent of this morning’s lovemaking. As she walked past the rosewood cabinet she touched the top drawer as thought it were a talisman. Inside was Elizabeth’s wedding present to her.

  ‘This belonged to Konrad,’ Elizabeth had said minutes after James took Sajjad by the arm and marched him outside the cottage. She unlocked a cupboard and took out a velvet box. ‘It was given to him by our grandmother, for his bride. He would want you to have it.’

  Hiroko opened the box and, seeing the diamond set inside, she thrust it back at Elizabeth.

  ‘Let’s leave the grand gestures to the men,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You are the only person in the world with any claim to this. I’m not saying it in reproach to you for marrying someone else. I might hardly have known him, but I still know enough to be certain Konrad would only want your happiness. Take it.’

  ‘Save it for your son’s bride,’ Hiroko said. She felt no guilt about Konrad – could almost see a beautiful shape to the way he had brought both her and Sajjad to Bungle Oh! and to each other – but she wouldn’t claim things to which she knew she had no right. ‘What occasion will I have to wear it anyway?’