Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘Well, you tell her not to marry him then.’

But it was already too late for that. If Kamran Ali in the cottage next door had gone out to his garage he would have seen that the MG in which he’d been giving Hiroko driving lessons was gone.

‘Where are we going?’ Sajjad had said, earlier in the day, getting into the passenger seat after he’d pushed the car far enough away from the cottages for Hiroko to turn on the engine without being heard. ‘And to repeat my question yet again, if he doesn’t mind you using his car why couldn’t you start it up in the garage?’

‘We’re going to get married,’ Hiroko replied, which successfully removed the other question from Sajjad’s mind. ‘What do we need? A mosque?’

‘We’ll have to have a civil ceremony,’ he said, since pulling her into his arms didn’t seem a wise option while she was so intent on pushing knobs and levers on the dashboard. ‘By Muslim law, I can’t marry out of my religion unless you’re a Jew or a Christian. You aren’t, are you?’

‘No.’ She finally found the switch she wanted and turned on the headlights. The more brightly coloured flowers were starting to splash colour in the mist, but it was still far from clear on the road ahead. ‘How does one become a Muslim?’

‘One repeats the Kalma — la ilaha ilallah Muhammadur rasool Allah — three times.’

‘Say that slower.’ As the car headed down the hill, speeding up, the flowers appeared increasingly blurred in their frenzy to burst out of the surrounding greyness.

‘Why?’

‘So I can repeat it three times.’

Sajjad was silent for a while. ‘Don’t you at least want to know what it means?’ he said at last.

‘No. I’m not saying it because I believe it. I’m saying it because I see no reason to make things more difficult for you with your family than is necessary.’

Again he was silent, and this time she began to worry.

‘Have I offended your beliefs?’

‘I’m just surprised by your practicality.’ He touched her arm. ‘And grateful for it.’

By the time they found a mosque she was a Muslim.

And by the time James had asked for the seventh time, ‘Where do you think they are?’ Hiroko was taking her husband’s hand and leading him into a secluded grove with springy turf squelching beneath their bare feet, a blanket over Sajjad’s shoulder. (Hiroko’s remarkable practicality had made her stop to procure it on the way from the mosque, though her reason for doing so had only just made itself known to Sajjad.)

By the eighth time James asked the question, Sajjad and Hiroko’s clothes were hanging from a tree branch, the breeze scattering tiny yellow flowers over them.

By the ninth, Sajjad was trying to recover his voice to explain to Hiroko that certain parts of the male anatomy were best left unsqueezed.

By the tenth, Hiroko’s head was tucked under Sajjad’s chin, her quick breath ruffling his chest hair as his hands traced the outline of her burns.

By the eleventh, they were lying on the blanket, and Hiroko was about to give up her search for a word in any of four languages to describe the pleasure of sliding rainwater off a leaf into Sajjad’s belly button and then curling her tongue into the dip. (‘The pleasure is nectarous,’ Sajjad said, and though she couldn’t feel it she knew he touched one of her birds as he said it, and the words and gesture together made her kiss his mouth.)

By the twelfth, she was beginning to think the pain meant he didn’t know what he was doing, and was on the verge of telling him so.

By the thirteenth, a silver fox came to investigate the sounds, and then streaked away, running through a narrow beam of sunlight as it departed, convincing Sajjad that at that moment of climax he had seen a burst of starlight.

By the fourteenth, Hiroko, who had seen the fox for what it really was, rested her head on Sajjad’s arm and told him the Japanese word for fox was ‘kitsune’ — a figure prominent in myth. The oldest and wisest of the kitsune are kyubi — nine-tailed — and the colour of their fur is silver or gold. With a flick of just one of their tails they can start a monsoon shower, she said. So let’s presume the break in the rainfall is a sign of our kyubi’s favour. Our kyubi, he asked? Yes, I think we’ve found ourselves a guide and guardian.

By the fifteenth, she demanded to know why he had shifted down to rest his head on her thigh, thereby depriving her of his arm as pillow. So he showed her, and she stopped complaining.

By the sixteenth, they discovered the branch on which they’d hung their clothes was wet, and it only made them laugh.

By the seventeenth, they were on their way to the Burton cottage, where they had decided Hiroko would stay while Sajjad returned to Delhi and found a place for them to live. The mist had lifted entirely and Sajjad, who had never seen mountains before, believed the Himalayan peaks were surrounded by quick-flowing rivers of snow until Hiroko said, ‘Don’t be silly, husband, they’re clouds.’

Lamentation will not follow, Sajjad thought, putting his arm around Hiroko’s shoulders. The exaltation is too great. No sorrow could ever match this joy.

Sajjad stood on the banks of the Bosporus, and wondered how he could have ever thought the mosques of Istanbul beautiful. Now it was clear: the buildings were too squat, their minarets too narrow. The Bosporus itself was a strait, not a river; it should have been a river. And the written language — in Roman script! How could a nation choose to discard the grace of Arabic lettering (generations of Ashraf calligraphers wept in their graves at the thought). No, nothing here conformed to his aesthetic; even the crumbling decay of this once grand city did not have the right tempo, the right texture, the right quality of sighing.

James Burton. It was all his fault they were here.

He had been so convincing that evening when Sajjad and Hiroko walked into the Burton cottage, Sajjad desperately self-conscious because of the wet patches on his clothes, and said they were married. It was obvious the Burtons had expected the news, if not the timing of it. Elizabeth had at least pretended some happiness, but James had taken Sajjad by the arm and walked him outside.

‘You can’t take her to Delhi,’ he’d said. And then he’d begun to speak in his lawyer’s tones, as Sajjad hadn’t heard him do for a very long time. Here were the reasons, he said. He talked about the likely increase of violence leading up to, and leading on from, Partition. The communal make-up of Delhi he laid out in great detail. His own thoughts on the nature of violence and its effects on the most seemingly rational of human beings. The actions that desperation or rage or self-defence could provoke. He asked Sajjad questions starting with ‘What would you do if. ’, asking the younger man to consider his possible responses to a range of violations — personal, religious, communal, familial. And when Sajjad was crouching on the ground, head in his hands, he had bent down, hand on Sajjad’s shoulder, and delivered his coup de grâce: ‘And after all Hiroko has had to endure, do you want to add to her suffering?’

Sajjad looked up, a supplicant before a man of wisdom.

‘But what other option do I have?’

James held out his hand and pulled Sajjad to his feet. This last act he would perform before leaving this place, these people. This final act of benevolent rule, against the tide of the Empire’s blood-soaked departure from India.

‘There’s an old general in Mussoorie who wants to give you a wedding present.’

It had been Elizabeth’s idea. There was no point telling Hiroko not to marry Sajjad, she’d told James; instead a way must be found to keep them away from Delhi ‘until all the Partition nonsense clears up’. She’d joined him in pacing for a while, and then cried out ‘Istanbul!’ and reached for the telephone. She placed a call to the General who had stopped Hiroko on the Mall to talk about flowers. His first wife, who had died many years earlier, had been Japanese and Elizabeth saw no reason to do anything other than take advantage of the old man’s sentimentality in regard to the figure of his lost love.