Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

Elizabeth Burton, who had been woken at dawn by self-loathing, heard the shouts as she was about to sit down at her writing desk. Racing forward, she threw open the shutters to the verandah just in time to see Hiroko in a state of partial undress, yelling and pummelling Sajjad, whose trousers did nothing to hide his erection.

There was nowhere in the world more beautiful than Mus soorie, Elizabeth Burton thought, standing at the top of her garden slope, watching either mist or cloud cling to the white peaks of the Himalayas in the distance while the scent of pine forests drifted down from the top of the hill on which the Burton cottage nestled. What a pity beauty could be so meaningless.

Although, she conceded, walking towards the old oak tree, however bad things were here they would have been worse in Delhi with the stifling June heat — even worse than usual this year, she’d read in the paper this morning. And other than that heat, well, yes, other than that heat there was that matter of Sajjad. As much as she shared James’s dismay about the just-announced British decision to pull out of India by mid-August instead of the following year — a decision which effectively put an end to any chance of a semblance of order to Partition — there was a part of her which hoped that by some miracle Sajjad would choose Pakistan and be gone from all their lives by the time they returned to Delhi in October. Even though they’d only be there long enough to pack up and leave India there was still so much that could happen — oh, why hide from the truth: the thought of seeing Sajjad again embarrassed her.

It still made her queasy to recall that morning in April when she’d stumbled on to that awful scene between Hiroko and Sajjad. She’d leapt to the worst possible conclusion — she would be the first to acknowledge it — and yelled such horrible things at Sajjad as she ordered him out of her house. She still had no memory of how Hiroko had reacted, had only been slightly aware at the time that the girl was fumbling to button her blouse as Sajjad almost tripped over his feet in leaving.

Once he was gone, Elizabeth had tried to speak gently to Hiroko, but the younger woman had burst into tears and locked herself in her bathroom, from where she refused to respond to Elizabeth’s requests — which soon became demands — that she open the door.

Elizabeth had finally gone upstairs to wake James, who had miraculously slept through all the shouting.

‘If he’s tried to do what I think you’re not going to stop me from sending the police after him,’ she’d said, shaking James awake. Her husband looked at her with a confusion that would have been comical under most circumstances. ‘Sajjad. Your blue-eyed boy. I just found him downstairs with Hiroko.’

‘The verandah’s getting too hot for their lessons,’ James said sleepily, pulling himself into a seated position. ‘I should tell them to use my study.’

‘She was practically naked, fighting to keep him off her. Stop blinking at me, James. He was quite visibly aroused. Do you want me to draw you a diagram?’

With a curse she’d never heard from him before, James was on his feet, reaching for his dressing gown and bellowing, ‘Sajjad!’

‘He’s gone. I threw him out.’

‘I’ll chase him down in the car.’ He slammed the flat of his hand against the door to push it open, the sound of flesh smacking wood violent and painful. Elizabeth’s hands lifted in self-defence to shield her face.

Sajjad. He had practically lived in this house. And it had never once crossed her mind that he could be any kind of threat, not in that way. Before the thought was done she knew she’d made some terrible mistake.

‘James!’ she called out.

At the same moment James re-entered the room.

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Elizabeth, how is it possible?’

She went over and took his hand, reminded of the moment when they’d been told that Henry had thrown a rock at a native girl and blinded her in one eye. It turned out later to have been another Henry — Henry Williams, a thuggish child even at five — and James and Elizabeth both believed they had passed some parenting test when they’d refused to accept their son was responsible.

Hand in hand they walked downstairs, where Hiroko was exiting her room to find them.

‘I’m sorry. It was my fault. I undid my buttons. I made him look at me. He was only trying to be kind. Please. I tried to tell him things I wasn’t ready to tell anyone. I’m sorry. I’ll leave your house. Please don’t punish him. I’m so sorry.’

There was much in there Elizabeth didn’t understand, but she did understand enough to know what must be done.

‘We’ll all leave together. It’s time to go to Mussoorie for the summer. Pack quickly, Hiroko. We’ll leave by the next train. James, will you send Lala Buksh to Sajjad’s house with his severance pay. Make sure he tells Sajjad that you’ll give him a reference for whatever employment he finds next.’

And so here they were — in Mussoorie, most beautiful and romantic of India’s hill stations. She stopped again to look at the extraordinary view; soon the monsoons would cause much of the vista to disappear amidst rain and mist, so while she could she intended to gaze and gaze at all the beauty on offer in this demi-paradise. She didn’t know how she would have survived India without Mussoorie, where the official air of Delhi was cast off (or rather, sent off to Simla, the summer capital of the Raj) and the rides to Gun Hill, the picnics by waterfalls, the dances at the Savoy all made the world a kind of dream, even during the war years. She had expected — or perhaps just hoped — that Mussoorie would have the same revivifying effect on Hiroko as it always did on her, but if anything the joie de vivre and romance of the place seemed only to draw her further into whatever self-enclosed space she had entered that day in Delhi.

Elizabeth stood at the base of the oak tree, and looked up at Hiroko, curled on a branch with her back against the trunk, her white linen trousers ripped at the shin from a previous scramble up to this favoured spot. Elizabeth still didn’t know which of their neighbours had subsequently hung this rope ladder from the branch on which Hiroko liked to sit, though she suspected it was Kamran Ali, who had the cottage next door.

‘I’m coming up,’ Elizabeth said, and began to ascend the rope ladder.

Hiroko felt the slight dip of the branch as Elizabeth pulled herself up from the final rung and dangled both legs off one side of the branch, but she said nothing, just continued to look out over the ridges of hills, carpeted with forests and flowers and cottages. On one of the few occasions she’d given in to Elizabeth’s pleas to leave the Burton property she’d met a retired English general on the Mall, who said she must recognise so much of the flora here — Mussoorie was just south of the Sino-Japanese phytogeographical (‘I mean, pertaining to floral life’) region. That evening he’d sent his driver over to the Burton cottage with an abundance of flowers from the surrounding hills, and it was not just their familiarity that made her want to weep but the fact that she did not know their Japanese names, and there was no one she could turn to for that information.

Each day, sitting in this tree, eyes drifting over Mussoorie’s trees and flowers, some as familiar as the texture of tatami beneath her feet, she strung together different memories of Nagasaki as though they were rosary beads: the faint sound of her father preparing paint on his ink stone, the deepening purple of a sky studded by clusters and constellations of light in an evening filled with the familiar tones of her neighbours’ voices, the schoolchildren rising to their feet as she entered the classroom, the walks along the Oura with Konrad, dreaming of all that would be possible after the war.