Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

The pen made a swooping motion as though leading up to some great burst of resolve, and then just before the nib touched the page it veered off to the other letter.

Dearest Henry.

She pressed the nib against the page and wrote firmly:

Of course you’re coming home this summer. Yes, there’s trouble in the Punjab but Delhi is perfectly safe, and Mussoorie as peaceful as ever. Your grandmother really shouldn’t worry so much.

Your father has been boasting to everyone about your bowling average. We’re both delighted to hear of your continued successes.

She stopped, and put down the pen. Why was it that the more Henry settled into boarding school the more formal his letters to her, and hers back to him, became? And why had she ever agreed to let James send him off to England? She batted away a fly with the hand holding the pen and a spray of ink appeared on the wall opposite her. The stigmata of the blue-blooded, she thought, moving the framed picture of Henry so that it covered the speckling.

It’s the done thing. That’s what James had said to begin and end every argument about Henry and boarding school. But in the end she’d had her own reasons for agreeing to send him away. The looming end of Empire meant they would all have to leave India before long; better to wean Henry away from it — summers in India, the rest of the year in England — than sever the tie in one abrupt motion. She glanced over at the latticed door. It still rankled that her boy had thrown his arms around Sajjad and wept, declaring, ‘I’ll miss you most,’ when the time for his departure had come. Though it was ridiculous of James to insist it was jealousy about her son’s affections that made her dislike Sajjad — she had disliked him from the start. Instinct, that was all.

‘Is the lesson still going on?’

James’s aftershave entered the room, followed by the man himself.

‘Well, they’re out there talking in Urdu. I don’t know if it’s a lesson or just chit-chat. You nicked yourself shaving.’

‘Hmmmm. ’ James touched his finger to the cut on his jaw. ‘They seem to start earlier and go on later each day.’

The combination of the dab of blood and the look of discontentment made him appear unusually vulnerable. Elizabeth piv oted out of her chair and walked over to him, feeling the word ‘wife’ slip around her shoulders with a feather-light touch.

‘You’re the one who employs him, you know. You have every right to tell him if you’re unhappy with the way he’s utilising his time.’ She ran her finger along his jaw, wiping off the blood, and then absent-mindedly put the finger in her mouth.

‘Vampire,’ James said, smiling, the atmosphere in that moment light between them as it hadn’t been in a long time.

Elizabeth looked at his jaw. There was still a spot of blood there. For a moment all she wanted to do was lean in and place her mouth against his skin, feel the tingle of aftershave against her lips and hear him sigh in satisfaction and relief as he used to do during their early married life when some expression of physical desire was Elizabeth’s signal that whatever squabble had sprung up between them was now ended. But he was already wiping away what remained of the blood and stepping past her to glance at the letters on her writing desk.

Willie, Liebling —

James ran his fingers beneath the endearment, the paper dark ening where he touched it with hands that had been less than thoroughly dried after his shave. ‘Liebling’ appeared underlined, and struck both of them as an accusation. She used to refer to him by that endearment — in the days when German was her language of intimacy. Which went first, he wondered? German or intimacy? How was it possible that he didn’t know?

‘Is Hiroko to stay with us indefinitely?’ he said abruptly.

‘Keep your voice down, James!’

‘I don’t mean I want her to go.’ He picked up the pens in the pen-holder, one by one, and then replaced them again. He really should write a letter to Henry, but Elizabeth’s detailed weekly missives to their son left nothing for James to add. ‘You clearly enjoy having her around.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No, I do. The house doesn’t feel quite so empty any more.’

James touched the blue dot on the wall, just behind Henry’s photograph, and made a sharp noise of protest when the ink transferred itself to his hand. Honestly, Elizabeth. The wall had just been repainted. He could see by the perceptible shift in her stance that she was preparing for another fight, and the mere thought of it exhausted him.

‘I’m just wondering what I should. we should be doing for Hiroko. Should we be introducing her to young men? British, or Indian? The whole Japanese thing makes it a little awkward. Should we find out if there are Japs in Delhi somewhere?’

‘She doesn’t seem much interested in that sort of thing. I broached the subject once — she said, “the bomb marked me for spinsterhood.” ’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Oh, James. Don’t be so dense. Her head is still filled with dreams of Konrad. No one can compete with that.’

‘More to Konrad than we thought, wasn’t there?’

‘Yes. I think there was much more to Konrad than we thought.’ She sat down at her writing desk again, and James situated himself on the sofa that allowed him to look at her profile while she wrote, calling out for Lala Buksh as he did so.

His voice reached Sajjad and Hiroko outside.

‘Time for chess?’ Hiroko said, and Sajjad placed a finger over his lips and shook his head conspiratorially.

‘We’re in the middle of a game which he knows he’s going to lose. I don’t think he’s in any hurry to continue with it,’ he said, smiling. Hiroko tried to smile in return but it faltered almost on inception so that all Sajjad saw was a quiver of her lips. He looked at her in concern. Something was wrong today. He had been trying all morning to engage her with his stories but her responses had been at the very brink of politeness.

Hiroko glanced over at the closed doors leading into the house.

‘It would have been Konrad’s birthday today, Sajjad, and she doesn’t even know that.’

Sajjad had never known how to bring up the subject of Nagasaki and Konrad with her, though the more time he spent in her company the more he wished simply to find a way of indicating that such sorrow should not come to anyone in the world, and particularly not to a woman so deserving of happiness.

‘Can I tell you how I met him?’ Sajjad said. ‘Yes? It was in Dilli, in 1939. It was summer. And so hot. The sun is possessive of this city in the summer — it wants all its beauty to itself, so it chases everyone away. The rich to their hill stations, the rest of us to darkened rooms, or under trees where the shade marks the edges of the sun’s territory. I was on my way to the calligraphy shop, where my brothers were waiting for me. And then I saw an Englishman. In Dilli, in my moholla. Not in Chandni Chowk, or at the Red Fort, but just walking through the streets lined with doorways.’

‘Not an Englishman. Konrad!’ Hiroko leaned forward, her cheek resting on her palm, seeing it so clearly.

‘Yes. I had never spoken to an Englishman, never even considered it, but something in that one’s face made me go up to him. He was standing by the side of the road, sniffing the air. It was summer, and the air was drenched in the scent of mangoes. “Sahib, are you lost?” I said. He didn’t understand I was speaking English. So I repeated it. And he said, very slowly, as if he thought I might have as much trouble with his accent as he did with mine, “Can you explain this smell to me?” I didn’t understand what he meant. It never occurred to me he wouldn’t know the smell of mangoes. I decided he was looking for a story, the way my nephews and nieces do. So I said, “Some god has walked, sweating, through here.” He held out his hand and shook mine, and said, “That’s the best thing I’ve heard since I came to Delhi. I’m Konrad.” Just like that. “I’m Konrad.” And I never went to the calligraphy shop. We walked through Dilli, defying the sun for the rest of the morning, and at the end of it he brought me here and asked Mr Burton to give me a job. And this is my life now. I’m here now, in this place, talking to you because Konrad Weiss liked the way I explained the scent of mangoes.’ He finished speaking and worried that the story had been more about him than Konrad. But Hiroko was smiling at last, and that felt like victory.