Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘Yes, he’s awake.’ She sat down beside Sajjad, and touched his arm. ‘Now, don’t give him a lecture about taking his foot off the pedal before the finishing line. You know it’ll just upset him.’

‘I promised you already, didn’t I? When do I break my promises to you?’ He dipped a tissue in water and ran it along her hairline. Since Hiroko’s hair had started to turn white it was always possible to know if she’d read the morning papers or not by glancing at her roots. Smudges of newsprint attested to her habit of running her fingers along her hairline while reading.

‘You shouldn’t do it for me. You should do it for him,’ she said quietly.

Sajjad sat back and sipped his tea. He sometimes wondered how different his relationship with his son might have been if the boy had been born earlier. He would have been well into adulthood by now, settled and earning a good income, and Sajjad would be spared his attacks of panic about both Raza and Hiroko’s financial future each time he felt the slightest twinge in his chest or woke up with a pain that hadn’t been there the night before. But after her miscarriage in 1948 Hiroko learnt fear in imagining what her radiation-exposed body would do to any children she tried to bear, and nothing Sajjad could say would change her mind about it. But at the age of forty-one she found herself pregnant. And Sajjad suddenly found himself counting the years towards his retirement with mounting panic, though until then he had viewed his finances with the careless air of a man of property (the house they lived in was paid for with Elizabeth Burton’s diamonds), with no children, a reasonable pension plan and a wife who earned a useful supplementary income from teaching.

Strange and unpredictable, the alleyways that open up into alleyways as a man makes his way through the world, Sajjad thought, dipping a piece of bread into his tea and chewing thoughtfully on the sodden mass. At the start of 1947, he had believed that by the year’s end he’d be married to a woman who he would learn to appreciate after signing a marriage contract that bound his life to hers; this woman, he knew, would be chosen for him in large part for her ability to meld into the world in which he had grown up. And that world, the world of his moholla, would be the world of the rest of his life, and his children’s lives and their children’s lives afterwards.

If he had known then that he and Dilli would be lost to each other by the autumn — because of a woman he had chosen against his family’s wishes — he would have wept, recited Ghalib’s verses lamenting the great poet’s departure from Delhi, cursed the injustice and foolishness of passion, and made lists of all the sights and sounds and daily texture of Dilli life that he was certain would haunt him for ever, making every other place in the world a wilderness of loss. He would not ever have believed that he would come to think of Karachi as home, and that his bitterest regret about his separation from Dilli would be the absence of safety nets that the joint-family system had once provided.

But now even that regret was easing. Raza was sixteen and already sitting for his Inter exams, a year younger than all the other neighbourhood boys — Sajjad glanced appreciatively at his wife, who he had always credited as being directly responsible for Raza’s quick mind — and soon now he would enter law college, just a few steps away from an assured income, a bright future, of which any father would be proud. And then, Sajjad promised himself, he would stop being so demanding of his son — insistent on results and achievements, impatient with his more frivolous side — and allow himself the luxury of simply relaxing into Raza’s company.

‘There he is,’ Sajjad said, standing up, as Raza re-entered the living area, his grey trousers and white shirt perfectly ironed and his hair slicked back in recognition that this was the final day on which he’d wear his school uniform. Usually the hair fell over his eyes, and kept his face hidden from the world. Now the surprise of his mother’s eyes and cheekbones ceding ground to his father’s nose and mouth was plainly evident, beautifully so. ‘I had forgotten how nice you look when you clean yourself up.’ At Hiroko’s sound of exasperation he said, ‘What? That’s a compliment.’

‘I should go,’ Raza said. ‘I don’t want to be late for the exam.’

‘Wait, wait. Are you going out celebrating with your friends tonight?’

Raza shook his head.

‘Most of them still have one or two papers left. We’ll go out on Friday.’

‘Then tonight I’m taking us out for Chinese,’ Sajjad said expansively, looking at Hiroko to catch her smile of pleasure. ‘And you can wear this — here, I don’t want to wait until tonight to give it to you.’ He gestured his son over to the steel trunk which doubled as a table, carefully removed the flower-patterned cloth that covered it, and opened it to release a smell of mothballs into the room. ‘Should have aired it,’ Sajjad muttered as he took out something wrapped in thin tissue, and gestured for his son to come closer. ‘Here.’ He stood up, holding out a beige cashmere jacket to Raza. ‘It’s from Savile Row.’

‘Is that in Delhi?’ Raza asked, touching the sleeve of the jacket.

‘London.’

Hiroko saw Raza’s hands lift away from the jacket. He checked his palms for dirt, holding them up against the sunlight before allowing his fingers to drift back down on to the cashmere in slow, gentle caresses.

Hiroko smiled to see Sajjad help their son into the jacket he’d been wearing the first time she had seen him.

‘My lords,’ she said, with a trace of amusement, ‘I hate to be the one to say this, but winter is over.’

‘Oh, practical Ashraf! The restaurant will be air-conditioned. Raza can put it on when he gets inside.’ Sajjad brushed nothing off Raza’s lapel, feeling the need for an excuse to touch his son. It was in Hiroko’s company that he felt his love for Raza most powerfully — it was indivisible from his love for his wife. Those first years of married life which Hiroko recalled as ‘negotiations’ — he was still startled sometimes by the language of practicality which she could bring to situations of intimacy — he remembered quite differently. Always, in the beginning, the fear of losing her. She was a woman who had learnt that she could leave everything behind, and survive. And some nights he’d wake to find her looking steadily at him, and believe that she was imagining — practising — life without him. For him, the loss of home had a quite different effect — it made him believe he only survived it because he had her. Would survive anything if he had her; would lose everything if he lost her. All those ‘negotiations’ — he would have given in to her on each one if he didn’t know she would disdain him for it. So behind every negotiation was his own calculation of where to give in, where to hold his ground in order to keep her love and respect.

His fear of her leaving subsided over the years, but didn’t disappear entirely until the day Raza was born and he entered the hospital room to see his wife holding their child in her arms with a look of terror which said she had been handed something she could never leave behind, never survive the loss of. And then she looked at Sajjad, differently from ever before, and he knew she was tethered to their marriage by the tiny, wailing creature.

When, years later, he’d confessed all this, she’d teased him. ‘So if we’d had a child right away, you’d have been a tyrannical husband instead of the generous, accommodating man I’ve lived with all these years?’ But she never denied she used to imagine a life without him or — when he elaborated on his fears — that the new life would have been in the company of Elizabeth Burton, now Ilse Weiss, whose every letter in the first years implored Hiroko to come and stay with her in New York, while never mentioning Sajjad.