Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  Sajjad took a step forward, and then another one.

  ‘But you were a child,’ he said. ‘Really? Henry . . . Henry Baba!’

  ‘Just Harry now. I’ve been working in Islamabad for the last six months at the American Embassy. I’m a consular officer – you know, visas and things. And I couldn’t be in Pakistan without coming to see you.’

  The American stepped forward and held his hand out to Sajjad, who laughed and said, ‘I used to carry you on my shoulders. Can’t we do more than shake hands?’ He clasped one hand against the small of Harry’s back and leaned his head forward so his chin was just above Harry’s shoulder, his ear inches away from Harry’s ear. Then he moved his head so that it was Harry’s other shoulder, his other ear framing part of Sajjad’s face. It was all too quick for Harry to respond before Sajjad was standing back, smiling. ‘Don’t you remember? You made me teach you how to gala-milao when you came to condole with my family at my father’s death. You walked into the courtyard, took your shoes off, stood up on a divan and embraced each of my brothers like that. They all thought you were the finest Englishman in India. You must have been about nine.’

  ‘Seven. I was seven. It’s one of my clearest memories of childhood. My first time in a home that wasn’t English. Why was I there without my parents? I don’t remember that part.’

  Sajjad could barely contain his delight at hearing the Urdu sentences trip so lightly off the tongue of his former student. Unable to think of anything to say that wouldn’t strike a false note with this stranger who was not a stranger, he took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with the sleeve of his kurta. When he put them back on he nodded as though he now had a better view of the events of 1944.

  ‘You wanted to come. You said, I wish to condole with your family on behalf of my family.’ Sajjad smiled and nodded at Raza as though imparting a lesson. ‘I was so proud of my Henry Baba that day.’

  The tips of Harry’s ears reddened to be provided with such a good account of his younger self. He was spared having to think of a response by Sajjad holding out his hand to gesture to the woman who was walking up to them.

  ‘My wife. Hiroko.’

  ‘Hiroko-san.’ Harry bowed. He was not a man used to bowing and was conscious he looked as though he had been attacked by a back spasm.

  Hiroko took Harry’s hands in her own.

  ‘Just Hiroko. It’s very good to meet you. Harry.’ Her smile recognised – and dismissed – Harry’s startled awareness of the associations she must have with that name. ‘There is a piece of my heart reserved for members of the Weiss family.’ She turned to her son. ‘Raza, this is Konrad’s nephew.’

  ‘Oh.’ The boy regarded Harry with new interest. ‘My middle name is Konrad.’

  Harry nodded, as though there were only delight, not surprise, to be garnered from this revelation. In the months leading up to their daughter’s birth, still unaware of her gender, Harry and his ex-wife had searched the world around them for names that they could both commit themselves to for the rest of their lives (they already knew by then that their commitment to each other would crumble, but that only gave extra impetus to this desire to find a mutually loved syllable or two to which they could hold on long after they’d let each other go). His ex had been the one to suggest ‘Konrad’ for a boy after a weekend visiting Ilse in New York, but Harry had waved his hands at her in distress and taught her the Urdu word ‘manhoos’, meaning ‘bad-omened’. And yet here was Sajjad, who had taught him that word, smiling as his son claimed the name of the man Hiroko had loved first, who had been eradicated from the earth’s surface before he turned thirty.

  ‘So are you at school or university, Raza Konrad?’ Harry turned back to the boy – something about the discovery of his middle name allowed Harry to feel avuncular.

  Raza’s head dipped forward, hair tumbling over his eyes.

  ‘My father never went to university. Why should I have to?’ He spoke in German, and Harry was aware of a strange tension in the air, and of Sajjad looking sideways at Hiroko for a translation that was not forthcoming.

  ‘No reason,’ Harry replied in German while casting Sajjad a glance meant to convey that there was no conspiracy here. ‘If you read the world in five languages you’re probably better off without classrooms boxing in your thoughts to fit the latest fashionable mode of thinking.’

  Sajjad watched his son straighten, smile and widen his stance into something that was almost a swagger and, recalling the ease of his early relationship with Henry as contrasted to that of the Burton father and son, wondered at life’s ironies and reversals.

  ‘How is your father, Henry?’

  ‘Dad? He’s . . . unyielding – even to death. He had a scare with his heart some months ago, no way he should have survived. Not at his age. But he’s still around – going to lots of parties. He had the sense after my mother left him to marry a woman who loves that sort of thing. Don’t know that she much likes Dad, but she likes his lifestyle. And that’s enough for him. He has his Gentlemen’s Club for companionship.’

  Harry could feel displeasure settle around the courtyard. Of course. He couldn’t say a word against his father, not even among people who were entirely aware of James Burton’s shortcomings – such were the rules of Indian courtesy (he still considered Sajjad an Indian though he’d been in Pakistan long enough to know he should never voice such a thought). ‘My mother’s doing well,’ he said, nodding to Hiroko in acknowledgement of the friendship between the two women, which had continued via letters for over a decade after Partition, before the anarchy of international mail ended it. ‘She’ll be overjoyed to hear I’ve found you. She still has a photograph of you and her together, up on her mantel.’

  Raza hardly knew what to do with himself as Harry took the proffered chair and the offer of tea, and made it clear there was nothing he’d rather do with his evening than spend it with the Ashrafs. Almost more astonishing than the presence of the American was the attitude of Sajjad and Hiroko, who seemed to think it perfectly natural to have him in their courtyard, talking about ‘the Delhi days’. Raza was completely transfixed by everything about Harry Burton – the expansiveness of his gestures, the way he had of suggesting that whatever mundane things Sajjad and Hiroko had to say about their lives were more interesting than anything he could bring to the conversation, the way he pronounced words in both Urdu and English. (‘Naw-shus, Tom-aytoe, Skedule’, Raza repeated to himself as though it were a mantra.)

  When Harry asked if he might have a glass of water, Raza jumped up to get it, and was rewarded as he was entering the kitchen by the American’s voice drifting across the courtyard, saying, ‘He’s a great kid. Do you have a parenting handbook I can borrow?’

  But almost instantly the exaltation left him. Next he would ask, ‘Which class is he in at school? What does he like to study?’ and then his parents would tell him, or, worse, they would feel the need to lie.

  Raza covered his face with his hands and leaned against the kitchen wall. It came upon him with no warning now, this swooping down of complete hopelessness, of despair.

  He had failed the exam again. The second time it was even worse than the first. Even before he walked into the exam hall he’d lost the ability to make sense of words – in the bus on the way to the exam he’d looked at billboards and graffiti and the words all smudged and blurred in front of him. When the examiner said it was time to start he could already feel his heart pounding so hard it seemed impossible it wouldn’t tear out of his chest. And nothing made sense. His hand couldn’t hold his pen. He walked out after five minutes and came straight home, unable to look directly at his parents as they saw him walk in and knew it was too early, much too early, for him to have finished.

  He saw tears in his father’s eyes that day, and for the first time Sajjad Ali Ashraf looked old as he begged his son, ‘Why? Why can’t you do this one little thing? Please, my son. Do this for me.’

  All the neighbourhood boys who had laughed off his first
failure and said it was ‘just a drama, all good heroes need a drama, and it’s only that one paper, you’ll retake it and everything will be fine’, this second time round they didn’t know what to say to him. Conversations stopped when he entered a room. They were just days away from university now, and it was all they dreamt and talked about. He couldn’t bear the kindness with which they tried so hard to speak of other things around him – strained silences entering the space between him and them – and so he stayed mostly at home, and though they occasionally coaxed him out he could tell that it was always a relief – to everyone, including himself – when he left their company.

  He poured water into a tall glass and looked out of the kitchen window, trying to see if the set of Harry Burton’s shoulders revealed he’d just discovered that the ‘great kid’ was the new neighbourhood Donkey.

  There was another exam in a few months. His father was determined he take it. But he knew he would only fail again and insisted no. Something inside him had stopped working, it was as simple as that. He placed the glass carefully down on a tray, wiping away his smudged thumbprint from its surface, and thought, Just this easily everything worthwhile in a life can be erased.

  16

  ‘Not the port. The fish harbour!’

  The rickshaw driver – Sher Mohammed – swerved at the sound of Harry’s barked instructions from the back seat.

  ‘Sorry, sorry. Forgot. Too early. My brain is still asleep.’

  Not the most reassuring statement to hear from the man in the driver’s seat, but then again Harry had already decided that Sher Mohammed navigated the streets with a mixture of intuition and Providence. In the crush of midday he at least acknowledged certain traffic rules, but in the early morning he drove through the almost deserted streets with the air of a man who does not conceive the possibility of other vehicles impeding his progress, treating ‘right of way’ as an unassailable personal liberty which he carried with him through every intersection and traffic light.

  Harry pulled his shawl tight around himself as the rickshaw hurtled onwards, wind whistling through it. So Karachi actually could get cold, he thought, watching his breath steam in the dawn air.

  When they arrived at the entrance to the fish harbour, Sajjad and Raza were already there in Sajjad’s car, Raza slumped against his father’s shoulder, asleep.

  ‘Wake up, my prince.’ Sajjad rubbed his knuckles on the top of Raza’s head, and his son’s eyes flickered open, closed, and he mumbled ‘Fish’ before falling asleep again. Carefully – as once Harry had seen him handle an egg that had fallen out of a nest miraculously intact – Sajjad eased his son off his shoulder and positioned him as comfortably as possible against the passenger-side door. ‘We’ll wake him for breakfast,’ he said, stepping out of the car, looking out of place in a thick woollen sweater and open-toed shoes. ‘This gives us a chance to talk, Henry Baba.’ He looked down at Harry’s shoes, shook his head, climbed back into the car and emerged holding up the rubber-soled shoes he’d taken off Raza’s feet. ‘Wear these,’ he said.

  Harry’s toes curled over the edge of Raza’s shoes, reminding him incongruously of Billy, his cat – from his early days in America – who used to perch on the very edge of the stoop waiting for him to return from school. He wriggled his toes, and the cat batted the air with its paw.

  ‘Believe me, you’ll be glad you’re wearing them,’ Sajjad said, taking Harry’s arm and leading him towards the harbour.

  Perhaps it was the memory of the cat, which regarded all forms of insect life as prey, that did it – when Harry walked through the rusty gates and the harbour came into view all he could think was that the swarm of wooden sailing boats with their riggings painting chaos against the sky looked like grasshoppers lying on their backs, waving their insect limbs in the breeze. There were hundreds of them – in peeling paint of blues and whites and greens – lined all the way along the dock and stacked against each other four, five, six ships deep.

  ‘Breathe through your mouth until we get to the market,’ Sajjad recommended, walking swiftly towards the boats.

  ‘Why?’ Harry said, and then he caught a whiff of a smell so overpowering it made him imagine a fish-monster the size of a house, sliced open to rot for years in the baking sun.

  ‘Come, come.’ Sajjad caught his arm and pulled him along, in through another gate. ‘Now you can use your nose again.’

  They had entered a bazaar of seafood, all wares too fresh for any unpleasant odour. All along the cement ground, beds of ice with fish laid out on them. Men with wheelbarrows were tipping ice-chips on to the ground to replace what was melting, while other men pushed past holding baskets of fish listing with the weight of their contents. And water everywhere you stepped – not the overflow of the sea as Harry had first thought, but liquefied ice. It was barely dawn, but the activity was already frenzied. Harry caught hold of Sajjad’s elbow, as the latter moved forward along the aisle between the two rows of fish. Snapper and salmon and cauldrons of flounder. Sharks. Eels. Huge great whiskered things with dinosaur-era jaws.

  Sajjad stopped to haggle with a fish-seller who jokingly tried to steer him away from the tuna and towards a fish the size of a man.

  ‘What am I going to do with that? Sleep with it?’ Sajjad laughed.

  A man approached Harry, holding a little shark in his hand, his fingers waggling the fin.

  ‘For sex,’ he said, in English.

  ‘Not necessary,’ Harry replied in Urdu, and everyone around him laughed approvingly.

  ‘Where are you from?’ the man with the shark asked.

  ‘America. You? Karachi?’

  ‘No, Mianwali.’ The man gestured around him. ‘People here are from every nation within Pakistan. Baloch, Pathan, Sindhi. Hindu, Sikh even. Everyone. Even an American can come and sell fish here if he wants.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Harry grinned. He loved the way every Pakistani became a tour guide at the sight of a foreigner. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

  Sajjad, overhearing the conversation, caught hold of a fisherboy and directed Harry’s attention to him, taking control of the tour.

  ‘But these are the original inhabitants of Karachi. The Makranis. They’re descended from African slaves. See?’ He pointed to the boy’s hair and features in a way that made the American deeply uncomfortable but clearly didn’t bother the boy in the least. ‘This coastline was along the slave route – not your slave route, of course. The Eastern one.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it my slave route.’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Sajjad said dismissively, letting go of the boy with a pat on the head. ‘What I’m saying is, this is a city of comings and goings – even before Partition. These days it’s the Afghans. Why sit in refugee camps when you can come to Karachi?’ He bent over a beautifully arranged circular pile of pink-hued fish and prodded one’s flesh. ‘What are you laughing at, Henry Burton?’

  ‘You, Sajjad. You used to talk about Delhi as if it were the only city worth belonging to – and now listen to you, speaking with such pride about a place you would have mocked once for its lack of history and aesthetics and poetic heritage.’

  Sajjad stopped smiling, picked up a pebble of ice and wiped his finger on it.

  ‘Dilli is Dilli,’ he said. He stepped slightly to one side, in between a display of barracuda and a crate filled with crabs, so that he was slightly apart from the press of buyers and sellers. ‘My first love. I would never have left it willingly. But those bastards didn’t let me go home.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said miserably, though he wasn’t entirely sure why he felt so culpable. ‘What happened to all your brothers? Did they stay there?’

  ‘My oldest brother, Altamash, was killed in the Partition riots,’ Sajjad said, nodding as he spoke as though confirming to himself, all these years later, that such a thing really was true. ‘I was in Istanbul; no one told me. They were waiting for me to come home. And my brother Iqbal left for Lahore. He said he couldn’t stay in the city th
at had murdered Altamash. He left behind his wife and his children – they tried to follow him but they were on one of those trains. The ones that arrived with the dead as their cargo.’

  ‘Christ, Sajjad. I had no idea. There was one more brother, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, Sikandar. He stayed. But because two of us were in Pakistan, our house was declared evacuee property. Maybe Sikandar could have fought to retain a portion of it, but he was never a man for practicalities. So he moved out – with his family and Altamash’s family, and they live in such sad conditions I can’t bear to visit them. So I almost never go.’ He said this so cheerfully it was almost heartless, but Harry knew enough migrants to recognise a survival strategy when he heard it. ‘You know, for a long time I blamed your father.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Everything.’ Sajjad smiled.

  ‘Yeah. I do that myself. Something about him makes it so easy. You don’t blame him any more?’

  ‘Now I say this is my life, I must live it.’

  ‘Muslim fatalism?’

  ‘No, no. Pakistani resignation. It’s a completely different thing.’ He made a gesture of enquiry at the man whose catch he’d been inspecting and the bargaining started again. Harry caught the eye of a fisherman smoking a cigarette, and the fisherman inclined his head in Harry’s direction in a knowing fashion. Harry wasn’t sure if something beyond a greeting was being signalled. How many of the men in this harbour, he wondered, were involved in smuggling arms bought by the CIA and transported by the ISI from the Karachi docks to the training camps along the border?

  There was a certain freedom about being in Karachi, and knowing no local assets other than Sher Mohammed. A certain freedom, also, in being known to no one – though, of course, every Pakistani assumed that all Americans in their country were CIA operatives. Harry looked at Sajjad, who now had two blue polythene bags dangling off his wrists, fish squashed inside the packaging, one glassy eye pressed against the thin blue material, reminding Harry of an early-winter frost and a garden pond with fish frozen beneath a skin of ice. He wondered if the reason none of the Ashrafs had asked him any details about his position as consular officer at the Embassy was that they suspected it was a CIA cover. Absurdly, it bothered him to think he might be suspected of lying by the family with whom he had spent part of each of the last three weekends. He was already beginning to regret the spring thaw in Afghanistan when things would pick up pace in America’s proxy war and there would be few opportunities for casual leave.