Hiroko smiled to see Sajjad help their son into the jacket he’d been wearing the first time she had seen him.
‘My lords,’ she said, with a trace of amusement, ‘I hate to be the one to say this, but winter is over.’
‘Oh, practical Ashraf! The restaurant will be air-conditioned. Raza can put it on when he gets inside.’ Sajjad brushed nothing off Raza’s lapel, feeling the need for an excuse to touch his son. It was in Hiroko’s company that he felt his love for Raza most powerfully – it was indivisible from his love for his wife. Those first years of married life which Hiroko recalled as ‘negotiations’ – he was still startled sometimes by the language of practicality which she could bring to situations of intimacy – he remembered quite differently. Always, in the beginning, the fear of losing her. She was a woman who had learnt that she could leave everything behind, and survive. And some nights he’d wake to find her looking steadily at him, and believe that she was imagining – practising – life without him. For him, the loss of home had a quite different effect – it made him believe he only survived it because he had her. Would survive anything if he had her; would lose everything if he lost her. All those ‘negotiations’ – he would have given in to her on each one if he didn’t know she would disdain him for it. So behind every negotiation was his own calculation of where to give in, where to hold his ground in order to keep her love and respect.
His fear of her leaving subsided over the years, but didn’t disappear entirely until the day Raza was born and he entered the hospital room to see his wife holding their child in her arms with a look of terror which said she had been handed something she could never leave behind, never survive the loss of. And then she looked at Sajjad, differently from ever before, and he knew she was tethered to their marriage by the tiny, wailing creature.
When, years later, he’d confessed all this, she’d teased him. ‘So if we’d had a child right away, you’d have been a tyrannical husband instead of the generous, accommodating man I’ve lived with all these years?’ But she never denied she used to imagine a life without him or – when he elaborated on his fears – that the new life would have been in the company of Elizabeth Burton, now Ilse Weiss, whose every letter in the first years implored Hiroko to come and stay with her in New York, while never mentioning Sajjad.
‘You’ll let me wear this tonight? Raza said, his hands gently stroking the arms of the jacket, wondering if his cousin in Dubai had anything this fine.
Sajjad kissed his son’s forehead.
‘It’s yours. A present for my young lawyer. You make me proud.’
Raza took off the jacket, and carefully folded it.
‘I’m not a lawyer yet,’ he said.
‘Only time stands between you and that.’ Sajjad looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. ‘This is the right way. You go to school, you go to college, you pass every exam, you prove what you are capable of and what you know. Then no one can take it away from you.’
‘Yes, Aba,’ Raza said automatically. Every father in this neighbourhood of migrants, each with stories of all they had lost and all they had started to rebuild after Partition, made a similar speech to his son. Perhaps he should be grateful that it was law, not medicine or engineering, that he was expected to spend his life pursuing, but that seemed a difficult thing to be grateful for when there existed a world beyond among the sand dunes where boys like his cousin Altamash who had never even passed his Matric exam could work in hotels with escalators and lifts and marble floors in the em ployee quarters, and earn a salary sufficient to buy everything new and gleaming while still having enough left over to send home for their families.
All those years in which he insisted he was perfectly happy working as general manager in a soap factory, Hiroko thought, looking at her husband, and from the day Raza was born suddenly he couldn’t stop using the word ‘lawyer’. He’d made only one attempt, when they first came to Karachi, to re-enter the legal profession in which he’d always imagined he would one day distinguish himself. The lawyer on whose office door he knocked said he could start the next day – on a clerk’s salary, a pittance of an amount. When Sajjad listed all he could do, all he knew about the law, the man said, ‘You have no qualifications whatsoever.’ Sajjad sat up straight, took the name of the solicitor in Delhi who had offered him a job, and was told that man was dead – no, not Partition riots, a hunting accident. Sajjad spent a single evening holding his head in despair and the following day went to find the newly migrated and well-connected Kamran Ali, in whose car he and Hiroko had driven into their wedding mist in Mussoorie, and came home, proudly beaming, saying, ‘General manager! With a factory of over a hundred workers to oversee!’ as though that was all he had ever wanted from the world.
And it was true, Hiroko knew, that he was content to be in a position of authority, respected and well liked, able to provide for his wife and son, and also in large part for the family of his dissolute brother Iqbal in Lahore. But all those other dreams – for a career that would bring more than mere contentment – had come to rest on Raza’s shoulders now. And if only Raza had admitted he wanted something else, she would have found a way to show Sajjad the damage he was doing. But Raza only ever laughed when she directly confronted him and said, ‘Habeus corpus! A priori! We’ll add Latin to the list of my languages, Ami.’
‘Why must you be so adored,’ Hiroko grumbled to her husband as she picked up the jacket with its overwhelming mothball smell and took it into the courtyard to air out.
‘More adoring than adored,’ he called after her. He rested his hand on Raza’s back and gave him a gentle push. ‘Go, my prince. Go, conquer.’
Raza slung his satchel over his shoulder – inside was the textbook from which he planned to study during the lunch hour between his history and Islamic-studies exam – and kissed his mother on the cheek before heading out on the short walk from his quiet residential street to the commercial road where three other boys from the neighbourhood were already waiting for the bus. It was still early enough for most of the shops to be closed, though the advertisements painted on to steel shutters ensured there was always some kind of commercial life in process. Across the street men were unloading crates of squawking chickens from a van and carrying them into the butcher’s shop, which was located right next to a flower-seller, who carried on a roaring trade despite the stench of blood from next door. If your business is weddings and funerals, the flower-seller liked to say, nothing can stand between you and success – except another flower-seller.
‘Junior!’ one of the boys, Bilal, greeted Raza, his arm looping over his shoulder to bowl an apple core at high velocity between Raza’s legs.
Raza, ready for him, had already taken his textbook out of his satchel, and used it gracefully to flick the apple core on to the dusty pavement, where a crow swooped down and pecked at it.
‘Such a hero our Junior has become,’ Bilal said, affectionately grabbing Raza in a headlock. ‘Look, at him, all slicked-back and ironed.’ The nickname ‘Junior’ had followed Raza around since he was ten and his teachers had decided he should skip a class year and take his place among the eleven-year-olds.
‘Bilal, I ironed that shirt. If you crease it, I’m going to get very angry.’
At the sound of Hiroko’s voice, the boys turned, smiling, standing up straight, all the childhood that was still in their seventeen-year-old faces suddenly apparent. While every other mother in the neighbourhood was ‘aunty’, Hiroko was Mrs Ashraf – their former, and beloved, schoolteacher who only had to threaten disapproval to give rise to both consternation and obedience. When she and Sajjad had moved to this newly constructed neighbourhood in the early fifties and she had taken up a teaching position at the school near their house it was her students who were her first allies – recognising in her a woman who could never be fooled or flattered, but whose smiles of approval or encouragement could transform a day into glory. Through the children she won over the mothers, whose initial reaction towards the Japa
nese woman with the dresses cinched at the waist was suspicion. And once the mothers had made up their minds, the neighbourhood had made up its mind.
‘You didn’t take money to buy lunch,’ she said to Raza, handing him a five-rupee note. ‘And share with your friends. Now quick, quick, the bus.’
The brightly coloured bus was hurtling down the quiet early-morning street towards them, slowing rather than stopping as it came alongside the boys, who jumped on with cries of accomplishment.
‘Sayonara,’ they all called out to Hiroko as the bus picked up speed again. Or at least, all of them except Raza called it out. He only spoke Japanese within the privacy of his home, not even breaking that rule when his friends delighted in showing off to his mother the one or two Japanese words they’d found in some book, some movie. Why allow the world to know his mind contained words from a country he’d never visited? Weren’t his eyes and his bone structure and his bare-legged mother distancing factors enough? All those years ago when he’d entered a class of older boys, at an age when a year was a significant age gap, his teacher had remarked on how easily he fitted in. He saw no reason to tell her it wasn’t ease that made it possible but a studied awareness – one he’d had from a very young age – of how to downplay his manifest difference.
14
Hiroko exited the sanctuary of the bookshop with its thick walls and slowly whirring fans into the chaos and furnace-like heat of Saddar. This used to be her favourite part of Karachi in the early days, when almost every one of the yellow-brick colonial buildings housed a café or bookstore, before it became a thoroughfare for buses with their noxious exhaust fumes and the impassioned university students disappeared into a new campus built far away, while the migrants who had crowded in refugee camps within walking distance of here went wheeling into distant satellite towns. Now every time she came here another several bookstores or cafés had disappeared, often replaced by the electronic shops through which her son loved to wander.
The one she most missed was Jimmy’s Coffee Shop with the art deco stairs leading up to the ‘family section’ with lurid green walls where, for years, she used to meet a group of Japanese women on the first Saturday of each month at 5 p.m. Those monthly meetings had started in early ’48 when she and Sajjad were still living in the refugee camps, not so far from here, and he had come running to find her one evening and said he’d met a Japanese woman, her husband worked at the Embassy, she was sitting in one of the cafés waiting for Sajjad to bring Hiroko to meet her. Through her, Hiroko met the other Japanese wives in Karachi, and entered their weekly gatherings at Jimmy’s – it had meant a lot, more than she would have guessed, to have the promise of an evening every week to sit and laugh in Japanese. She never told any of them about the birds on her back, though. Considering it now, she decided the day she knew her life had tilted into feeling ‘at home’ in Karachi was when she found she was able to tell her neighbourhood friends that she had lived through the bombing of Nagasaki, while still insisting to the Japanese women that, although she grew up there, she was in Tokyo when the bomb fell.
The ripple ice cream at that café – she closed her eyes to remember it – was particularly wonderful. But really, the heart went out of those meetings when the capital shifted to Islamabad in 1960, taking the Japanese Embassy with it. The café stopped reserving the entire family section for them, though the meetings continued – Hiroko’s participation becoming more sporadic after Raza was born – until the demolition of the café a few years ago brought an end to the weekly gatherings altogether. She found herself mourning the loss, even though in the last years prior to Jimmy’s closing she had attended the meetings mainly from a sense of obligation – she had become the fount of wisdom about all things Karachi-related for the group.
She wondered sometimes near the end if she seemed as foreign to the newer members of the group as they did to her – so Japanese! she sometimes caught herself thinking. The only person she could really talk to about this was the one Pakistani member of the group – Rehana, who had spent twenty years in Tokyo before her Japanese husband had come to Karachi to set up an automobile plant. Rehana had grown up in the hills of Abbottabad, and said Karachi might be part of the same country as her childhood home but it was still as foreign to her as Tokyo, ‘but I’m at home in the idea of foreignness.’ When Hiroko heard her say that she knew she’d found a friend. But now Rehana was back in Abbottabad – she had moved there two years ago when her husband died – and months could go by without Hiroko going to the Japan Cultural Centre and meeting other past members of the group, though there were several for whom she retained an affection.
As she retained an affection for Saddar, despite the electronics shops and the loss of Jimmy’s, she thought, looking around. There was one world at street-level – frenzied, jostling, entirely in the now: pavement vendors, large glass display windows, neon signs, gaping manholes, rapid-fire bargaining, brakes and horns and throaty engine sounds, the rush, the thrum of urban life – and then, overhead, if you stood still, shoulders squared against the passers-by, and looked at the arched windows, the cupolas, the intricate carvings, there was another world of buildings constructed in the belief that life moved at a different pace, more elegant, more pompous.
She was entirely happy for the pomposity to be displaced, but there was something else seeping into the atmosphere, worse than electronic shops, which made her uneasy. A few minutes earlier she’d picked up a copy of War and Peace to replace her battered copy, shaking her head in fond exasperation at the memory of her son telling her time and again that eventually he’d learn Russian and then he’d read it, when a man standing beside her – the air of ordinariness about him – said, ‘You mustn’t read their books. They are the enemies of Islam.’
After the man left, the bookseller apologised.
‘Strange times we’re in,’ he said. ‘The other day a group of young men with fresh beards came in and started to pull all the books off their shelves, looking at the covers for which were unIslamic.’
‘What makes a cover unIslamic?’ Hiroko asked.
‘Portraiture,’ the man replied. ‘Particularly of women. Fortunately, there was a policeman walking past who saw what they were doing and came and stopped them. But I don’t know what’s happening in this country.’
‘It won’t last,’ Hiroko assured him. When any of her friends in the staff room complained of this new wave of aggressive religion which was beginning to surface in some of their students she always told them that compared to the boys she’d first taught who dreamt of kamikaze flights these Karachi boys with their strange fervour for a world of rigidity were just posturing youths. And in any case, nothing could supplant cricket as their true system of worship.
Ignoring the crippled beggar who had dashed crazily across the street in his wheeled crate to get to the foreigner in whom he saw the possibility of compassion long since erased from locals, she looked around for her son. He was late, which was unlike him, but everything in Raza had been a little bit strange these last weeks since he finished his exams. She couldn’t explain to Sajjad exactly what disturbed her, beyond saying there was a falseness about their boy as he threw himself into enjoying the time before college, talking loudly and excitedly about the law, boasting that when the exam results came out his name would be at the top of the list – he who’d always been so circumspect about his successes. She found herself thinking that she shouldn’t have agreed when the teachers suggested he skip a class – intellectually he was ready for it, but there was so much growing up to be done in the year between sixteen and seventeen and she wondered if he was yet ready for the next stage of life.
‘Ma!’ Raza pulled up in Sajjad’s car, extending his torso through the window to take the heavy bag of books out of her hands, impervious to the car horns behind him.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I forgot my other shopping inside. Go round the block and come back.’ Without waiting for a response she darted back into the shop.
R
aza continued sitting where he was, taking a strangely masochistic pleasure in the humid stillness which made sweat stains bloom on his shirt. As the beeping of horns grew more insistent he gestured to the cars behind to go round, even though there was no room for them to manoeuvre. The crippled beggar raised a hand in supplication towards the open car window but Raza’s indifferent ‘Forgive me’ – the words a matter of custom, rather than meaning – convinced him that nothing would be gained by staying here. As the man wheeled away, Raza’s hand rested briefly on the afternoon newspaper on the dashboard, its reflection in the windscreen revealing columns of names – the exam results. Grimacing, he picked up the newspaper and slid it beneath the mat on which his feet were resting. Almost immediately, he changed his mind and returned it to the dashboard.
At least it had finally happened. No more lying, no more pretence. By the time he arrived home he knew all the boys in the neighbourhood would have seen the newspaper. Who would be the first of them, he wondered, to stop scanning the lists of candidates who had ‘passed’ and realise that it wasn’t just an error that prevented him from finding Raza’s name where it should be?
And when they asked him what had happened, urged him to appeal to the Board because obviously it was a mistake, it couldn’t be anything else, right, Junior, right, even total idiots got the 33 per cent required to pass – what would he say then? How could he explain to anyone – when he didn’t understand himself – what had happened the final day of the exams when he sat down to the Islamic-studies paper?
The initial moment of panic when he looked at the questions was nothing new. For years he’d been familiar with this sickening sense of free fall as his eyes jumped from one question to the next, unable to finish reading one before darting forward, individual words and phrases from different questions clumping together in his mind to create an unintelligible mass. But then he’d steady himself, force his mind into quietness and read more slowly – and meaning would attach to the words, answers flying from his pen to the paper as quickly as he could write. There had been times, through these Inter exams, when the moment of panic had lasted longer than normal, and it took three or four attempts of reading through the questions before everything fell into place. But that afternoon, that final exam of his school-going days, nothing fell into place. The jumble of words only grew more jumbled, bright spots of light appeared before his eyes as he tried to read, and nonsensical answers to questions he didn’t even understand kept coming to mind in Japanese. He knew he had to calm down, that panic only bred panic, but then he remembered that this was a compulsory paper, failing it would mean failing everything, and how would he ever look his father in the eyes again? As soon as he thought of Sajjad Ashraf – pictured his trusting, expectant face – everything emptied from his mind. And then, the examiner was collecting the papers. Just like that. And his was blank. He picked up his pen, wrote firmly on the page, ‘There are no intermediaries in Islam. Allah knows what is in my heart,’ and handed in the paper.
Burnt Shadows Page 14