Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

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.

‘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.