Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

Pakistan, 1982–3

Hiroko Ashraf watched the patch of brightness slide across the dining table towards her son, Raza, whose attention was firmly fixed on the crossword his mother had set for him. The sunlight bumped up against Raza’s arm, which was curled around the crossword in the defensive posture of the smartest boy in class who is accustomed to everyone around trying to copy answers from his exam papers. Its gentle nudging failing to convince Raza to move his arm, the sunlight crept up on to his shoulders from where it could peep down at the grid with its Japanese and Urdu clues and German and English solutions.

Hiroko blinked once, twice, and the image was gone. In place of the young boy whose two chief delights were multilingual crosswords and stories told by his mother in which everything familiar — birds, furniture, sunlight, crumbs, everything — acquired character and role there was a sixteen-year-old tracing his finger over pictures from glossy magazines advertising the various electronic gadgets his cousin in the Gulf claimed to own. (‘Doesn’t he own a camera?’ Sajjad had said. ‘Why can’t he send you photographs of his fancy VCR and his fancy answering machine and his fancy car instead of clippings from magazines you can buy in Urdu Bazaar? God knows if he’s even left the country — he’s Iqbal’s son, after all.’)

Strange, Hiroko thought, that through more than five decades she had never allowed nostalgia to take up more than the most fleeting of residencies in her life, despite all that glittered in her memory — the walks through Nagasaki with Konrad, the ease of life in the Burton household, the Istanbul days of discovering love with Sajjad — but since adolescence had suctioned Raza away from his younger self she’d learnt the desire to walk behind time. A demure Japanese woman at the end of the day, she thought to herself, and then smiled, with a touch of self-satisfaction, at the ridiculousness of the idea.

Raza looked up, found his mother watching him and realised that the glossy pictures he’d pasted inside his textbook when his father first insisted he had to spend at least six hours a day studying for his exams were clearly visible to her. He hid his embarrassment in a noise of discontentment before walking out into the courtyard.

These days it was impossible to know from moment to moment who would emerge from the form of her son: a sweet, loving boy or a glowering creature of silences and outbursts. She could recall it quite clearly, the moment when the latter had announced his presence — three years ago, when she’d asked her thirteen-year-old son why none of his friends had come to visit in the last few weeks. ‘I can’t ask any of my friends home,’ he had yelled, the sound so unexpected Sajjad had run into the room. ‘With you walking around, showing your legs. Why can’t you be more Pakistani?’ Afterwards, she and Sajjad hadn’t known whether to howl with laughter or with tears to think that their son’s teenage rebellion was asserting itself through nationalism. For a while, though, she had packed away her dresses and taken to wearing shalwar kameezes at home, though previously they were garments she reserved for funerals and other ceremonies with a religious component; Sajjad said nothing, only gave her the slightly wounded look of a man who realises his wife is willing to make concessions for her son which she would never have made for him. But a few months later, when Raza said her kameezes were too tight, she returned to the dresses.

Hiroko put down her newspaper, and was about to call out a reminder to Raza that it was Chota’s day off and he needed to clear up after himself when she was distracted by the sudden chittering of the sparrows which had been feeding from the earthenware seed-filled plate that hung from the neem tree in the courtyard. She looked out of the window and saw Raza standing beneath the tree, looking up at the sky while lazily brushing his teeth with the twig he’d just snapped off. Hiroko smiled. There was a freshness to April’s early-morning breeze, her son was almost done with his exams and could soon return to the world of cricket and dreaming which gave him such pleasure, and tomorrow she would have lunch with a friend from the Japan Cultural Centre and perhaps hear of some translation work, which would allow her to buy that painting of Old Delhi for Sajjad’s sixtieth birthday.

She turned her eyes from the courtyard to the wall across the room from her, just above the dining table. Most houses in the neighbourhood had living-room walls covered in framed photographs, paintings, vast reproductions of beautiful landscapes or (among the more devout) scenes of worshippers at the Ka’aba. But Hiroko had always insisted that a room could only have one work of art as its focal point. For twenty-five years that focal point in this room had been a sumi-e painting of two foxes nestling together which Sajjad had commissioned for the price of an ice-cream soda and a brightly coloured hairbrush, from the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of Hiroko’s friends at the Cultural Centre; it had been his tenth-anniversary gift to her. She wrinkled her nose affection ately at the foxes — she would move them into the bedroom if the Delhi painting arrived.

Thirty-five years of married life! And her husband about to turn sixty. She wasn’t so far behind herself. She tried out the word ‘old’ in her various languages, but they only made her giggle. No, she didn’t feel old at all — and certainly didn’t think of Sajjad that way. And yet, something separated both of them by an incalculable distance from the young couple who had arrived in Karachi at the end of ’47 so uncertain of tomorrow. Time hasn’t aged us, it has contented us, she thought, nodding to herself. Contentment — at twenty, she would have scorned the word. What was it she dreamed of then? A world full of silk clothes, and no duties. She considered the gap between the words ‘duties’ and ‘dutiful’ — nearly four decades after Nagasaki she still had no time for the latter, but the former had become entwined with the word ‘family’, the word ‘love’.

The door to the adjoining room rattled open. Sajjad came yawning into the living room, and bent down to pick up the newspaper his wife had discarded, brushing his thumb across the mole on her cheek as he did so. The action was ritual, one that had started the first morning they had woken up together — in a ship on its way from Bombay to Istanbul. ‘Just checking that the beetle hasn’t flown away,’ he’d said when she asked him what he was doing.

‘Isn’t Raza awake yet?’ he said, walking over to the dining table, where he poured milky tea into his cup from a thermos and used the sleeve of his kurta to soak up the drops that spilled on to the plastic table-covering, drawing a half-hearted sound of exasperation from Hiroko. That sound — like Sajjad’s shake of the head as he unscrewed the thermos cap — was a remnant of once passionate fights. For Hiroko, fastidiousness was synonymous with good manners. For Sajjad, a steaming-hot cup of tea brought to a man first thing in the morning by a woman of the family was a basic component of the intricate system of courtesies that made up the life of a household.

Sometimes when Hiroko looked back on the first years of marriage what she saw most clearly was a series of negotiations — between his notion of a home as a social space and her idea of it as a private retreat; between his belief that she would be welcomed by the people they lived among if she wore their clothes, celebrated their religious holidays, and her insistence that they would see it as false and had to learn to accept her on her own terms; between his determination that a man should provide for his wife and her determination to teach; between his desire for ease and her instinct towards rebellion. It was clear to her that the success of their marriage was based on their mutual ability to abide by the results of those negotiations with no bitterness over who had lost more ground in individual encounters. And also, Sajjad added, taking her hand, when she once told him this, it helped that they found each other better company than anyone else in the world. Other things helped, too, Hiroko whispered back, late at night.