Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘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.