Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

Later, when Elizabeth repeated all this to James, in Sajjad’s hearing, he shook his head and said, ‘I hope your curiosity is satisfied. But don’t you think we should simply let her forget all that now?’ And since then the Burtons had never asked a question about Japan, or allowed her a moment of contemplation that could lead to memory.

Sajjad considered all this as Hiroko’s gaze turned inwards, then sat back in his chair, looking out at the garden, and let her be.

Hiroko watched the shadows thrown on to the ruins of Hauz Khas, around which an elaborate moonlit picnic was in progress. The ruins were just ruins, shadows just distorted impressions created by the interplay of light and dark. So even this had come to pass: a collapsing structure, the silhouette of a man falling upon it, did not impair her ability to turn with a polite smile to hear the question posed by the woman beside her.

‘How are your Urdu lessons coming along?’

Hiroko couldn’t recall the name of the Englishwoman who asked the question, though she knew her husband was on the Viceregal staff and that she had the finest jacaranda trees in New Delhi.

‘Very well, thank you. It’s been three weeks and we’ve finally accepted that I can only make a “k” sound using the roof of my mouth, not the back of it. It has drenched Sajjad in sorrow, but sorrow is inescapable with Urdu so he’s not blaming me.’

‘Sajjad? Oh, James’s dogsbody. Is that what he said, “sorrow is inescapable with Urdu”? They make the oddest claims, don’t they?’

Dogsbody? Hiroko bit into a piece of roast chicken to give her mouth something to do other than retort. She didn’t know how to behave around these people — the rich and powerful, a number of whom had asked her about the samurai way of life and thought she was being charmingly self-effacing when she said the closest she had come to the warrior world was her days as a worker at the munitions factory. Two years after the war they could accept an ally of Hitler sooner than they could accept someone of a different class, she thought, and wished she had entered India in a manner that would have allowed her into the houses of those who lived in Delhi’s equivalent of Urakami. And yet, that was unfair to the Burtons and at least partially untrue. The soft sheets, the abundance of mealtimes, the dizzyingly coloured dresses Elizabeth had passed on to her, the vastness of the Burton library, the kindness of the Burtons themselves. she was more than grateful for all these things, and all too conscious that they were hers by generosity, not by right.

‘Why are you wasting your time with Urdu?’ Kamran Ali, one of the Indian Oxbridge set, lowered his bulky frame on to the picnic blanket beside Hiroko. ‘Language of mercenaries and marauders. Do you know the word “Urdu” has the same root as “horde”? Now, Latin. That’s a language worth learning.’ He held up his empty glass and a liveried bearer stepped forward to fill it. ‘Vini, vidi, vino,’ Kamran Ali said, and the Englishwoman next to Hiroko laughed and drew him into the conversation about the odd utterances of one’s Indian staff.

Hiroko felt someone touch her elbow and looked up to find Elizabeth there.

‘Elizabeth, are you joining us?’ the Lady of Jacaranda said without making any attempt to shift and make space.

‘Thank you, no, Violet. The air’s much too stifling here.’ She paused for just a moment before adding, ‘I mean, because of those—’ She waved her hand in the direction of the six-foot-high sticks with flames billowing from their tips which lit up the picnic area.

Hiroko stood up with a mumbled excuse, caught between amusement and sadness at the acerbity of Elizabeth’s interactions with these dull but harmless creatures. As the two women started to walk away from the gathering, James, watching them from a distance, saw the light shimmer off Elizabeth’s emerald-studded necklace — he’d placed it around her throat for the first time in a world burnished so bright with love that the green gems had seemed dull by comparison. In a rare imaginative burst he saw Hiroko and Elizabeth as the twin slim gold chains of the necklace, progressing side by side except when some gleaming interruption (the Viceroy, the wife of one of James’s clients, the Nawab of Somewhere) prompted them to diverge for a while, assured that they would meet on the other side. James believed Elizabeth was solicitous of her foreign guest in establishing this pattern, never realising how much it counted for his wife finally to find herself a friend and ally.

Occasionally these last few weeks she had even found herself looking forward to going out when Hiroko agreed to accompany them to whatever social gathering was taking place that evening (there was never an evening without a social gathering).

‘Sorry to wander off for so long. I wouldn’t have heard the end of it from James if I hadn’t spent some time discussing themes for the Easter Ball with the Harridan. Her husband looks poised to further justify James’s chess-playing lifestyle.’

Hiroko had already learnt that it was best to keep quiet when either of the Burtons spoke about the other, but she determined right then to find a way past Sajjad’s barrier of loyal silence in all matters related to James Burton and find out why exactly a solicitor could be allowed to sit on his verandah, drinking tea and occasionally moving chess pieces around a board, without anyone raising the slightest objection. The rich! Ridiculous! she found herself thinking and shook her head about all that didn’t change no matter where in the world you went.

The truth of it was that since the very start of his legal career James’s foremost, and unparalleled, ability had been the charm, social connections and air of command which combined to convince clients and — more importantly — prospective clients that James Burton was a man to rely on. He brought those in need of legal counsel to the offices of Burton, Hopkins and Price and once they were there he left all those with particularly thorny problems in the hands of his colleagues, who were able enough to ensure that the clients did not regret their choices. Since he’d broken his leg he had been unable to navigate the stairs up to the third-floor law offices but he’d been unflagging in his social obligations, making adept use of the sympathy his injury garnered to the betterment of his practice.

Once a week Sajjad went to the office and brought back work with which James could occupy himself, but everyone understood that was little more than a façade; though the leg was considerably healed no one had bothered to enquire when he could return to work, so it seemed foolish for James to broach the subject himself. Just as it had seemed foolish to broach the subject of returning to the upstairs bedroom when he found himself able to manage the stairs. The difference in the two situations was that he didn’t particularly want to return to the office.

Only Hiroko’s collapse on her second day in Delhi had finally restored James to the marital bed; she had to be moved to the downstairs room and Elizabeth had told Lala Buksh to transfer James’s belongings ‘upstairs’. The command was vague enough for James to wonder if she meant ‘the upstairs guest bedroom’ but Lala Buksh had not interpreted it that way, much to James’s relief. On their first night in the same bed after a space of over two months it had seemed far too pointed to do anything other than make love, but it had been an awkward, unsatisfying business, the awfulness of the whole thing made worse by James patting Elizabeth on the head just before turning away to curl against his pillow as, long ago, he used to curl against his wife. In the middle of the night he’d woken up to find his body aching with demands; as silently as possible he’d taken care of his needs, thinking of Elizabeth as he did so, though she, lying awake yet immobile next to him, was convinced that wasn’t so.