Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘I am done with the English,’ he had said, and started to consider what he might want to make of his life now that he had been lifted from the sense of obligation that had kept him tied to James Burton long past the point when he saw there would be no advancement in that position. Altamash asked him to help with the calligraphy business for a few weeks, just until he found someone to replace the Nazir brothers who had worked with the family for years and were now on their way to Karachi with dreams of establishing themselves as the finest artisans of language in that British cantonment town with its own dreams about its future in the still-unconfirmed state of Pakistan. His mother urged him to take on the financial side of the business, so Sajjad agreed ‘for a period of six weeks only’. But at the end of the six weeks came the British announcement of 15 August – just over two months away – as the date for the British withdrawal and the creation of the independent states of India and Pakistan. It was hardly a time to consider a future career; everything was turmoil, every day brought news of further atrocities, and relationships that had seemed to be cast in steel disintegrated under the acid question: Are you for India or Pakistan? Even Sajjad couldn’t pretend it no longer touched his life as he felt his nails bite into his palms at tales of the atrocities, and heard his heart beat a farewell tattoo for all those Dilliwallas who said they could not stay.

  And then his mother fell ill, and everything else in the world became backdrop.

  Hands still covering his ears, he looked up at the other men, all yelling and gesticulating now. He loved them all, but – he only just realised this – he did not care too much about disappointing any of them. He looked from one brother to the other in turn, weighing the character of each, and using that assessment to forecast the future: Iqbal would never marry this woman of his if Altamash withheld financial support – but he would drift away from their lives, replacing one mistress with another, and becoming a stranger to his children. Ali Zaman – his brother-in-law, who never committed himself to anything less than wholeheartedly – would move to Pakistan and become a zealous patriot, which would make things tiresome when he’d visit Dilli. Sikandar, whose increased devoutness had taken on an internal, meditative form, would withdraw increasingly into his own world, happiest when the fluidity of his pen shaped Quranic verses into unfurling roses to express the harmony he found in the Holy Book. And Altamash, already equal parts patriarch and poet, would ossify into both these roles, handing out dictums in verse to all those who lived in his household, and accepting everything from his family save diso­ bedience.

  He could not see himself in the household. Not without his mother. She had tempered Iqbal’s excesses, drawn Sikandar out into the world of life and laughter, served as the primary reason why her adoring daughter came from Lucknow to visit twice a year, and with a single glance could reduce Altamash from potentate to child. And for Sajjad, she had been the certainty that no matter how often he circled Delhi he would always return to the world of Dilli.

  But that world itself was departing. Perhaps even his mother wouldn’t have been enough to hold its remnants together. How could he stay amidst the shards? Equally, how could he walk away, alone, when solitude for him had never been more than the anticipation of stepping back into the world of companionship?

  Sajjad stood up, the abruptness of the movement silencing his brothers.

  ‘I am going to ask a Japanese woman to be my wife. If she says yes, we will live in New Delhi, and all of you will be welcome into our home. But I will never go anywhere she is not accepted.’ Extending both arms in front of him, he pushed his brothers aside with a swimmer’s action and walked out into the courtyard, one step, two, and then his heart leapt up inside him and he started running so fast a merchant taking his shoe off at the gate thought the courtyard must be hotter than ever before and so wedged his foot back into the shoe and turned away.

  The merchant was less than halfway down the steps when he was overtaken by the running man, who had paused only long enough to slip on his own shoes and was now charging past stalls and children and venerable old men, disrupting pigeons everywhere he went so they rose up in the sky as he approached, creating a grey-winged trail anyone could have followed from Jama Masjid right up to the Ashraf house.

  And there the man stopped.

  It would be a betrayal of his mother to do what he was contemplating, he knew. But she had told him to keep on living and perhaps if death freed her from convention she would understand that was precisely what he was doing. This place, this moholla, was past already. Soon the ghosts would outnumber the corporeal presences among his intimates. And there was something else. There was a girl who had trusted him enough to undress in front of him and show him the marks of the deepest pain he had ever encountered.

  His hand was on the door, ready to push it open and repeat to the women what he had already told their husbands. But some movement at the corner of his eye – a ginger cat streaking past, calling to mind the colour of Elizabeth Burton’s dress the last time he’d seen her – made him pause.

  What if Hiroko said yes, and they moved to a house constructed without brothers and sisters-in-law and nephews and nieces in mind, and then what happened to the Burtons happened to them?

  They had not been unhappy together when he first entered their lives. Yes, their arguments were frequent, but there had been a lightness to them. Henry had been a shared joy, not territory to argue over. And from time to time the most casual of gestures – his hand on her wrist, her fingers straightening his tie – would suggest a world of physicality which made Sajjad want to get up and leave the room to escape the complex mix of emotion it engendered. And gradually, so gradually it was a form of torture to watch it, he’d seen everything between them fragment.

  There was no one moment at which things went wrong, just a steady accumulation of hurt and misunderstanding. There were arguments about how to raise Henry, about James’s professional life, about Elizabeth’s manner of inhabiting the social role of ‘Mrs Burton’, about the food she served at parties, about when to leave for Mussoorie, about whether or not to send Henry to boarding school, about how far from the boundary wall to plant a certain tree – and all these could have been minor arguments, but weren’t. Time moved them apart from each other; that was the best explanation Sajjad had.

  So what was to prevent time doing the same to him and Hiroko, leaving them in a house without other allies to turn to, other relatives to fill up the silence with laughter?

  When his brothers returned home, several minutes later, they found Sajjad standing in front of the doorway, his fingers tracing bird shapes into the wood.

  ‘Of us all you loved our mother most,’ Altamash said, putting an arm around his brother’s shoulder. ‘It’s no wonder her death has made you feel so adrift. Come. Cling on to your family.’ He rapped sharply on the door and when it opened he led an unprotesting Sajjad inside, assured the crisis had passed and need never be mentioned again.

  10

  ‘Ilse! You can’t kill that spider. It’s beloved by the Muslims. Konrad told me the story one day on Megane-Bashi – Spectacles Bridge. It’s called that because when the tide is high the two archways of the bridge are reflected in the water, creating an image of a pair of glasses.’

  ‘That’s where the silver fish leapt from his heart into yours.’

  ‘Yes. Oh, I’ve told you that already. Have I told you about the spider? How it wove its web – quick as lightning – over the mouth of the cave where Mohammed and his friend were hiding when they fled from Mecca, and so convinced their pursuers that no one had entered the cave in a long time.’

  ‘What a charming little story. Where did Konrad pick that up?’

  There was a pause, and then Hiroko said, her voice strange, ‘From Sajjad.’

  James had been about to enter the family room of the cottage – had hesitated outside the doorway only because the two women were talking in German and it sometimes seemed rude to force the conversation back into English
just by the fact of his presence – but when he heard the word ‘Sajjad’ he turned and let himself out of the front door, grabbing his raincoat on the way.

  Outside, there was a break in the monsoon rain for the first time in days, but that did nothing to improve the visibility. Mist shrouded Mussoorie, making it impossible to know if the mass at the end of the garden was a tree or just a particularly intense gathering of condensation. Thick enough to chew on, James thought, recalling his Scottish grandmother’s description of highland mist around her childhood home. He imagined himself as an old man, living in the Highlands in a futile attempt to recapture the Mussoorie summers.

  Now it was only weeks away, their departure from India. He supposed Hiroko would come with them to England. He prodded the wet grass with his shoe. That seemed to be the assumption under which everyone was operating. Well, why not? She could make Elizabeth laugh, which was a talent that he had once possessed without knowing it was a talent.

  James walked around the house, shoes leaving imprints in the sodden garden, until he was near the window that looked into the family room. What would Elizabeth see of him if she looked out? The man she had married, or an intense gathering of condensation? No one would ever imagine he could think of himself in these terms, he knew, not even Elizabeth. Well, the truth of it was he rarely did. But since Sajjad had gone – been sent away, brought it on himself, of course, but even so – well, he’d just been feeling wrong about the world.

  He would never see Sajjad again. This thought kept coming back to him, its insistence an irritation. He kept telling himself that it was the way things had ended which caused him these feelings of regret. Remorse, even. But in moments of real honesty when he heard his wife and Hiroko laughing together, something more than language acting as a barrier between him and them, he knew simply that he missed Sajjad’s company. And that was ridiculous, of course it was.

  ‘James Burton.’

  And now I’m hearing voices, James thought.

  ‘James Burton!’

  James turned. Walking through the mist towards him was Sajjad, dressed as he had been the first time James saw him, and never since, in white-muslin kurta pyjama. A large umbrella was tucked under his arm, leaving a wet imprint down one side of his body.

  ‘My dear fellow.’ James stepped forward, extending his hand. Sajjad looked at it in confusion, and James laughed and clasped the other man’s shoulder. ‘Didn’t bring a chessboard with you, I suppose.’

  Sajjad pulled away.

  ‘I’m not here to return to my duties.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ James’s hand was suspended mid-air in the posture of gripping Sajjad’s shoulder, and he looked at it curiously as if not sure what to do with it. Sajjad regarded him in pity, unable to keep up the attacking attitude he had talked himself into, and placed his own hand over the Englishman’s to push it back down.

  ‘I just read A Passage to India,’ James said. ‘Ridiculous book. What a disgrace of an ending. The Englishman and the Indian want to embrace, but the earth and the sky and the horses don’t want it, so they are kept apart.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve read the book.’

  ‘It’s not about the earth and the sky and the horses, is it, Sajjad?’

  ‘No, Mr Burton.’

  ‘I don’t mind “James”, you know.’ Sajjad rolled his shoulders forward, in one of his ways of indicating he’d heard a comment without actually responding to it. ‘I’m sorry for what Elizabeth said to you. And so is she. You must know we both realised she had been wrong even before Hiroko told us what happened.’

  ‘No, sir, I didn’t know that. And you have not communicated with me these last months to tell me so.’

  ‘I thought you would have understood that from the message we had Lala Buksh deliver.’

  ‘I understood that the English might acknowledge their mistakes in order to maintain the illusion of their fairness and sense of justice, but they will not actually apologise for those mistakes when they are perpetrated on an Indian.’

  James stepped back.

  ‘When did you and I become the Englishman and the Indian rather than James and Sajjad?’

  ‘You’re right. It’s not a question of nation. It’s one of class. You would have apologised if I’d been to Oxford.’

  ‘I was embarrassed, Sajjad, don’t you understand that? So was she. And dammit, man, you should have known better than to stand watching a woman while she undresses. You’re not without blame in this situation, whatever Hiroko might say. How could I have asked you back into the house with her still living there? And how could I apologise in any meaningful way if I wasn’t willing to ask you back? God dammit.’ He swiped his hands viciously at a climbing plant, and his fingers made painful contact with the brick wall behind it.

  Sajjad flinched as if he’d been wounded, a gesture that escaped neither man.

  ‘Why are you here, if not to play chess?’ James said quietly, trying to ignore the throbbing of his fingertips.

  ‘My mother is dead.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Sajjad, truly.’

  ‘It changes everything.’

  ‘You can’t mean Hiroko?’

  ‘Will you prevent me from seeing her?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then I would like to see her.’

  ‘I’m here.’ The words were spoken in Urdu. James looked over Sajjad’s shoulder to see Elizabeth and Hiroko standing there.

  ‘We’ve been here since E. M. Forster,’ Elizabeth said, walking up to James. ‘You’re really not very observant. Come on – let’s do something about your hand.’ She tugged on his sleeve, and led him inside, stopping only to give Sajjad a look of unfettered apology, which he received with a nod that said the matter was closed, though not forgotten, between them.

  When the door shut behind the couple, Hiroko walked up to Sajjad, her eyes as intent upon his face as his were upon hers. She took his wrist between her thumb and finger, as he had taken hers the day she arrived in Delhi.

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘One illness paved the way to another. The final one was pneumonia.’ His hand rested on hers, as she continued to hold his wrist. ‘The last time we met . . . I never meant to suggest the bomb wasn’t a terrible thing.’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t.’ She let go of his wrist and walked away a few steps before turning to face him again. ‘So you’re here to see me. Because your mother is dead.’

  ‘I’m here to see you. My mother . . . yes, it’s true. I wouldn’t have come if she’d been alive.’

  She had imagined him coming for her, countless times these last few weeks, even though she believed it impossible. But never like this.

  ‘What’s the matter? Did her death disrupt your marriage plans? Have you rushed here in search of the first available woman to make your tea for you in the morning and massage your head with oil at night?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have to come all the way from Dilli to Mussoorie to find the first available woman.’

  ‘You’re impossibly vain,’ she said, turning away from him and walking towards the oak tree at the end of the garden.

  ‘Stay, please. Please. Stay.’

  She stopped, her back still towards him, and waited for him to walk up to her.

  ‘I grew up believing in continuity, Hiroko.’ His voice was more sombre than she’d ever heard. ‘I grew up honouring it.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. The calligraphy trade would have been continuity for you. Not a life of playing chess with an Englishman.’

  ‘I have uncles and cousins who work for the English. It’s what we do during the day. It’s employment. And then we come home, and take off our shirts and trousers, replace them with kurta pyjama and become men of our moholla again. That’s our true world.’

  ‘I see. So I’ve never seen you in your true world?’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’ He lifted a hand into the space between them. ‘And I’ve never seen you in yours.’

  ‘Mine doesn�
�t exist any more.’

  ‘Neither does mine. I don’t only mean because of my mother. This Pakistan, it’s taking my friends, my sister, it’s taking the familiarity from the streets of Dilli. Thousands are leaving, thousands more will leave. What am I holding on to? Just kite-strings attached to air at either end.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘I have to learn how to live in a new world. With new rules. As you have had to do. No, as you are doing. Perhaps it would be less lonely for both of us to have a companion. Some constancy is comforting during change.’

  The wet grass had seeped up through her shoes. She was cold and irritated and there was too much in him she didn’t understand.

  ‘I could never live the life your sisters-in-law accept.’

  That was her version of goodbye. But Sajjad saw in it an offer.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling with a delight she couldn’t understand. ‘There are other options, of course. There’s New Delhi. Both a world apart from the Old City and just a few minutes away by bicycle. A great city must always present you with options, and Dilli-Delhi is the greatest of cities. I’ve been thinking of moving there, you know.’

  ‘Have you?’ She was very confused now.

  ‘Yes, I’m going to buy a house, just a small house. One of those modern ones. And I’m going to work with a law firm. I went there just a few days ago, to speak to a solicitor I know. I can start whenever I want.’ The solicitor, an Indian, had formerly worked at James’s law firm, and when he left to join another practice he told Sajjad to come and see him if he ever needed employment. Time we stopped letting the English take the credit for all the work we do, he said when Sajjad went to his office earlier in the week. You’re not actually qualified, but we’ll find a way to take care of that. You know more about the law than any of these fresh-faced boys with their newly inked law degrees. It’s a disgrace how James Burton has squandered your talents.