Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Yes. Why? Can’t women travel alone in India?’

  Elizabeth almost laughed. So much for those demure Japanese women of all the stories she’d heard. Here was one who would squeeze the sun in her fist if she ever got the chance; yes, and tilt her head back to swallow its liquid light. At what point, Elizabeth wondered, had she started to believe there was virtue in living a constrained life? She clicked her heels against the floor in impatience at herself. Virtue really had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Well, there’s no law against it if that’s what you mean.’ James was oddly perturbed by this woman who he couldn’t place. Indians, Germans, the English, even Americans . . . he knew how to look at people and understand the contexts from which they sprang. But this Japanese woman in trousers. What on earth was she all about? ‘But there are rules, and there is common sense. I certainly wouldn’t allow Elizabeth . . .’ He faltered as Hiroko glanced towards Elizabeth to see her reaction to his choice of verb.

  ‘You say you’re a translator? Did you know Konrad in a professional capacity or . . .?’ Elizabeth made a vague gesture that managed to capture her utter ignorance of Konrad’s life in Japan.

  ‘It’s how we met. Through translations for his book. He was . . .’ Hiroko paused. She had not spoken about Konrad to anyone but Yoshi Watanabe, and with Yoshi there was much that didn’t need to be said. So now she had to take a second or two before giving words to the future she had lost. ‘If our world hadn’t ended he would have been my husband.’

  Lala Buksh’s arrival with the tea removed all necessity for an immediate response. James just sat back in his chair, not bothering to hide his disbelief. And Elizabeth thought, I did not know him at all! Nothing in the image she had of her half-brother – a man enclosed in his own mind who viewed other people as irritants distracting from the beauty of a leaf or an idea – allowed her to imagine him holding the attention of a woman as spirited as this. She wondered what marriage meant to the Japanese. Did it involve love? She really couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine Konrad and Hiroko Tanaka in love – and in early love, at that, when everything that matters in the world is distilled into two bodies. She was suddenly aware of James’s physical presence in a way she hadn’t been for a long time.

  Who could resist such an address? James ran the odd sentence through his mind, while nodding at the Japanese woman – what was her name? – as though it was the news of her relationship to Konrad that he was taking in. Could it be that she had come here expecting to stay? Could she possibly imagine they would ask her to stay simply because she claimed to have been Konrad’s fiancée? Although, she hadn’t quite claimed that exactly. He glanced at her hands. No ring.

  ‘Terrible about Konrad,’ he said, realising Elizabeth was not going to be the first to speak. ‘Just an awful business, the whole thing. We hadn’t really been in touch with him for a while, Miss Tan . . .’ He brought his teacup to his mouth to try and obscure his inability to recall the rest of her name. ‘But, of course, we’d like very much to know more about his life in Japan. You must come over for supper while you’re here. Will you be staying in Delhi a while?’

  James, you bastard. Elizabeth felt a rush of protectiveness towards the Japanese woman who had clearly come here because there was nowhere else for her to go. Which was a ridiculous thing to do, of course, but that hardly justified the cutting dismissal with which James had just directed her towards the door.

  But other than a bright spot of red on her cheek, Hiroko showed no sign of perturbation.

  ‘I have some money and no attachments. It means I don’t need to make plans.’ The truth was she had little money – the voyage from Tokyo had cut a swathe through her savings – but she had every confidence that her three languages and glowing references from the Americans would be sufficient to secure employment anywhere in the world. ‘How long I stay depends on how Delhi and I get along.’ She turned to Elizabeth, the slight repositioning of her shoulders dismissing James just as effectively as he’d dismissed her. ‘Could you tell me where I can find a respectable boarding house? I have references from the Americans in Tokyo, and from Yoshi Watanabe, grandson of Peter Fuller from Shropshire.’

  Whether it was simple curiosity, a feeling of sympathy, or a desire to offend James, Elizabeth didn’t know, but she found herself saying, ‘Why don’t you stay here for a few days while we sort out further arrangements. Your luggage?’

  ‘I left it with the man outside.’ Hiroko tried to reconcile Konrad’s bitter comments about Ilse, the sister who had made him feel so unwelcome in Delhi, with this woman of warmth and hospitality. ‘But, please, I don’t want to impose.’

  ‘Elizabeth, a word.’ James stood up, and moved indoors. After a pause long enough only to contain within it a glance of reassurance, Elizabeth followed.

  Hiroko pressed her fingers just beneath her shoulder blade. From Tokyo to here she had found momentum in momentum. She had not thought of destination so much as departure, wheeling through the world with the awful freedom of someone with no one to answer to. She had become, in fact, a figure out of myth. The character who loses everything and is born anew in blood. In the stories these characters were always reduced to a single element: vengeance or justice. All other components of personality and past shrugged off.

  Hiroko had once spent an entire afternoon looking at a picture of Harry Truman. She did not know how to want to hurt the bespectacled man, though she suspected she would feel a certain satisfaction if someone dropped a bomb on him; as for justice, it seemed an insult to the dead to think there could be any such thing. It was a fear of reduction rather than any kind of quest that had forced her away from Japan. Already she had started to feel that word ‘hibakusha’ start to consume her life. To the Japanese she was nothing beyond an explosion-affected person; that was her defining feature. And to the Americans . . . well, she was not interested in being anything to the Americans any more. She pushed herself up from the chair, her arms wrapped across her chest, and walked down into the garden. Some days she could feel the dead on her back, pressing down beneath her shoulder blades with demands she could make no sense of but knew she was failing to meet.

  She ran her knuckles across the bark of a tree. The faint sound of skin on bark was oddly comforting. It reminded her of something . . . something from Nagasaki, but she couldn’t remember what.

  Sajjad walked out into the garden from James’s study. The Burtons had started arguing outside the study door – they knew nothing about this woman (said James), they couldn’t simply turn Konrad’s intended on to the street (said Elizabeth), she was clearly lying about her relationship to Konrad (James), it would take little effort to telegram that friend of Konrad – Yoshi What’s-his-name – and ask him about her, so why not just do that instead of being so unpleasant (Elizabeth), oh, I’m unpleasant, am I (James). Sajjad hated their arguments – not the fact of the arguments themselves but the sense both of the Burtons conveyed of restraining themselves, even at their most barbed, from saying what was most true and most hurtful until the unsaid words filled up the room and made Sajjad want to run away to his home, where even Allah was berated soundly and in ringing tones for all His shortcomings.

  Surprisingly, the Burtons’ voices did not carry into the garden. So the newcomer, he saw, was entirely unaware of them. Unaware of all the world, it seemed, as she rubbed the back of her hand determinedly against the tree-bark with its knots and nodules.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, suddenly appalled by how fragile she looked in the sunlight. She seemed not to hear him, so he ran across the grass to her, just as the blood started to well up beneath her broken skin, and pulled her hand away.

  Lala Buksh walked out in time to see Sajjad’s hand encircle Hiroko’s wrist.

  Trouble, he thought.

  3

  ‘I don’t think it’s going to work out with the girl we were considering as your bride,’ Khadija Ashraf said, lowering herself on to the divan in the courtyard on which Sajjad was sitting, cros
s-legged, while sipping his morning cup of tea in the pre-dawn moments of in between.

  Sajjad put an arm around his mother and whispered, ‘While the others are still asleep, you can admit it. You don’t think any of the girls in Dilli are good enough for you favourite son.’

  Khadija Ashraf leaned back against the bolster-cushion after sweeping away the leaves that had fallen on it from the almond tree, and shook her head in exasperation at Sajjad’s seeming indifference.

  ‘This Muslim League nonsense about a new country is disrupting everything.’

  ‘Back to that, again? Mohammed Ali Jinnah is starting to supplant Allah as the chief accused for all the problems of your life. There’s a kind of devotion in that which exceeds even that of the most diehard Muslim League supporters.’

  His mother straightened the lines of her gharara, and refused to smile. She’d taken a great deal of care in opening the formalities for the marriage negotiations between Sajjad and Mir Yousuf’s daughter, Sheherbano, and all had seemed to be going well until Sheherbano’s father had suddenly declared that of course this new nation would be a reality, and of course he would move there, and he would naturally expect his son-in-law to follow a similar course of action. Why the man didn’t just leave the marriage talks to the women Khadija Ashraf couldn’t understand, but the damage had been done. A new line of questioning had opened up, and it turned out the girl had herself declared that if there were pro-Pakistan processions in Delhi such as had been held in Lahore she would be proud to emulate the thirteen-year-old Fatima Sughra who had pulled down the Union Jack from the Punjab Secretariat building and replaced it with a green Muslim League flag, which she had stitched from her own dupatta. Whether the girl was wearing another dupatta at the time of this shameless act Khadija Ashraf didn’t know, and was afraid to ask.

  ‘Ammi Jaan—’ Sajjad said, trying hard to find the words that would make his point without wounding his mother. ‘Once I marry the girl she will enter our home; I will not become part of her household. Whether her father wants me to move somewhere else or not is irrelevant. And, as for the other matter . . . you’ve always said I’ll need a wife with a strong will, otherwise I’ll get bored.’

  ‘I have a strong will. It doesn’t make my dupatta fall off my head.’

  ‘I want a modern wife.’ It came out abruptly and unexpectedly, prompted by his imagination already falling in love with the girl who would dream of flying her dupatta in place of a Union Jack. Sajjad had no political allegiances, but many narrative preferences – in the stories of history two of his favourite characters were the Rani of Jhansi and Razia of the Mamluk Dynasty: powerful women who led troops and sat in council with men. And it was his mother who had told him their stories and made him fall in love with those images of womanhood.

  ‘Modern?’ His mother repeated the English word with disgust, and Sajjad tried not to imagine the Burtons laughing at her pronunciation: ‘Maa-dern’. ‘Do they tell you that’s what they are, your English? Modern? These are words created only to cut you off from your people and your past.’

  Sajjad shifted away from his mother. The idea that anything could cut him off from Dilli was not just absurd but insulting, and he knew his mother was aware of this.

  ‘Modern India will start the day the English leave. Or perhaps it started the day we used their language to tell them to go home.’ Faintly, he wondered if he really believed this. ‘No, modernism does not belong to the English. The opposite, in fact. They’ve reached the end of their history. They’ll go back to their cold island and spend the next ten generations dreaming of everything they’ve lost.’

  ‘They sound like the Muslims of India.’

  Sajjad stood up, laughing.

  ‘When I’m married, Ammi Jaan, you’re still the one I want to have my morning cup of tea with.’ He kissed her forehead, picked up his book and wiped away the ring of tea from its cover as he made his way to the vestibule.

  Just as he was opening the heavy wooden door his brother Altamash came yawning out of one of the rooms off the courtyard and said, ‘What’s the little Englishman doing awake at this hour? Sunrise stroll with the Viceroy?’

  Sajjad ignored the comment and stepped out, taking his bicycle with him. As though the soft dhuk! of the door closing were a signal, the muezzin of Jama Masjid began the call to prayer. Sajjad turned his head and glanced up towards the mosque, just a few minutes’ walk away, its marble domes and minarets almost two-dimensional in appearance. He recalled sitting on his father’s shoulder one Delhi night, at the base of the sandstone steps that led up to the mosque, his vision given over entirely to the mosque and the darkness of the sky behind it. His father had told him that the Emperor Shah Jahan had come here one night with scissors that had belonged to the Prophet, and cut through the sky; in the morning when the people of Dilli woke up, the Jama Masjid was in their midst, revealing a glimpse of heaven’s architecture.

  It had been weeks since Sajjad had last climbed those sandstone steps and walked across the pigeon-filled courtyard for Friday prayers. Pakistan was all anyone could talk about now, with the Imam and the most conservative members of the congregation arguing that you could not divide the Ummah, there was no place for nations in the brotherhood of Muslims; and the Muslim League supporters arguing back that it was already clear from the behav­ iour of the Hindus that they would not agree to share any power with the Muslims in a post-Raj India, and hadn’t the descendants of the Mughals, the Lodhis, the Tughlaqs, fallen far enough already; and the Congress supporters insisting theirs was not a Hindu party but an Indian one, and what did the people of Dilli have in common with the feudals of the Punjab who would dominate this Pakistan? And so it went on and on, and in each group Sajjad found those who made complete sense and in each group also those whose opinions made him want to scatter seeds over the speakers so the pigeons would swoop down and stop their words with a tumult of feathers.

  Someone in the distance called Sajjad’s name – it was the retired Professor from Aligarh University who had taught his sister and him English during their childhood while his brothers preferred to learn calligraphy from their father – but though he usually went out of his way to greet the old man this time he pretended not to hear and started pedalling through the labyrinthine streets, all springing into wakefulness with the azan, eschewing the long route via the river to head straight through Kashmiri Gate into Civil Lines.

  She had said, ‘However early you arrive, I’ll be awake.’ He didn’t really expect her to be dressed and ready at this hour, but the invitation – or was it a challenge? – seemed a good excuse to fulfil a long-held desire to see the Burton garden at dawn. He imagined himself sitting out on the verandah, watching the flowers emerge from the night’s shadow while everyone in the house slept.

  But Hiroko Tanaka was already sitting on the verandah as Sajjad was entering Delhi, pulling a shawl across her thin shoulders as she sipped a cup of jasmine tea, grateful to be regarding the world from a vertical position. It had not been so for most of these two weeks in Delhi. The first night in the Burton house she had slept in the guest room upstairs, too tired to wander out unassisted and find a place to live but determined that the next day she would leave this house where there was nothing of Konrad to be found except a notion, gleaned from a single day in the company of Elizabeth Burton, of what his features might have looked like if his life had been unhappy.

  But the next day she had stepped out of bed feeling as though she were on a violently rocking boat and had barely made it down the stairs before collapsing on the floor. When she recovered consciousness she was in the bedroom on the ground floor, which was filled with the scent of James’s aftershave.

  The Burton family physician, Dr Agarkar, arrived within minutes and diagnosed an infection, probably picked up during her journey over to Delhi; nothing that rest and medication couldn’t sort out.

  ‘You’ll be fine in, oh, a week or ten days,’ he’d said and Hiroko, even in her enfeebled state, had wh
ispered, ‘Do you know somewhere I can go?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’ Elizabeth’s voice was both stern and kind. ‘You’ll stay here. There’s no further conversation to be had about this.’

  Later, as Dr Agarkar was leaving, Hiroko heard James talking to him in the hallway.

  ‘Yes, a telegram came from that Watanabe fellow – Julian Fuller’s cousin in Nagasaki. Did you know Julian – he was here in, oh, ’34 or ’35. Company man. Uncle married a Jap. Anyway, turns out there really was something between her and Konrad. And she’s lost everyone, the telegram said. Everyone. Poor girl. I feel such a brute.’

  ‘So she’s staying with you while she’s in Delhi?’

  ‘I suppose, yes. At least until she gets better. After that, well, I don’t know. We’ll see how we get on. Might do Elizabeth some good to have someone to mother again. Did your wife get like this when Ravi went to Eton?’

  Hiroko was asleep before the doctor answered. When she woke up, Elizabeth was sitting by her bed, her slumped shoulders suggesting she’d been there a while. Hiroko smiled, Elizabeth smiled back, and then Hiroko was asleep again.

  Two days later, Hiroko was finally awake long enough to start feeling bored.

  ‘I’ll read to you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Any preferences?’

  ‘Evelyn Waugh.’

  ‘Really? How strange.’

  ‘That’s what Konrad said. He said Waugh is for readers who know the English and understand what’s being satirised. And I told him that maybe the books are better when you don’t know it’s satire and just think it’s comedy.’

  Elizabeth considered this.

  ‘You’re probably right. I find him much too cruel. And almost unbearably sad.’

  Hiroko’s fingers moved just slightly so they were almost touching Elizabeth’s hand as it rested on the coverlet. It was a gesture so astutely poised between discretion and sympathy that Elizabeth found herself imagining a life in which Konrad had brought Hiroko into this house as a sister-in-law.