Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘You’ll let me wear this tonight? Raza said, his hands gently stroking the arms of the jacket, wondering if his cousin in Dubai had anything this fine.

Sajjad kissed his son’s forehead.

‘It’s yours. A present for my young lawyer. You make me proud.’

Raza took off the jacket, and carefully folded it.

‘I’m not a lawyer yet,’ he said.

‘Only time stands between you and that.’ Sajjad looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. ‘This is the right way. You go to school, you go to college, you pass every exam, you prove what you are capable of and what you know. Then no one can take it away from you.’

‘Yes, Aba,’ Raza said automatically. Every father in this neighbourhood of migrants, each with stories of all they had lost and all they had started to rebuild after Partition, made a similar speech to his son. Perhaps he should be grateful that it was law, not medicine or engineering, that he was expected to spend his life pursuing, but that seemed a difficult thing to be grateful for when there existed a world beyond among the sand dunes where boys like his cousin Altamash who had never even passed his Matric exam could work in hotels with escalators and lifts and marble floors in the em ployee quarters, and earn a salary sufficient to buy everything new and gleaming while still having enough left over to send home for their families.

All those years in which he insisted he was perfectly happy working as general manager in a soap factory, Hiroko thought, looking at her husband, and from the day Raza was born suddenly he couldn’t stop using the word ‘lawyer’. He’d made only one attempt, when they first came to Karachi, to re-enter the legal profession in which he’d always imagined he would one day distinguish himself. The lawyer on whose office door he knocked said he could start the next day — on a clerk’s salary, a pittance of an amount. When Sajjad listed all he could do, all he knew about the law, the man said, ‘You have no qualifications whatsoever.’ Sajjad sat up straight, took the name of the solicitor in Delhi who had offered him a job, and was told that man was dead — no, not Partition riots, a hunting accident. Sajjad spent a single evening holding his head in despair and the following day went to find the newly migrated and well-connected Kamran Ali, in whose car he and Hiroko had driven into their wedding mist in Mussoorie, and came home, proudly beaming, saying, ‘General manager! With a factory of over a hundred workers to oversee!’ as though that was all he had ever wanted from the world.

And it was true, Hiroko knew, that he was content to be in a position of authority, respected and well liked, able to provide for his wife and son, and also in large part for the family of his dissolute brother Iqbal in Lahore. But all those other dreams — for a career that would bring more than mere contentment — had come to rest on Raza’s shoulders now. And if only Raza had admitted he wanted something else, she would have found a way to show Sajjad the damage he was doing. But Raza only ever laughed when she directly confronted him and said, ‘Habeus corpus! A priori! We’ll add Latin to the list of my languages, Ami.’

‘Why must you be so adored,’ Hiroko grumbled to her husband as she picked up the jacket with its overwhelming mothball smell and took it into the courtyard to air out.

‘More adoring than adored,’ he called after her. He rested his hand on Raza’s back and gave him a gentle push. ‘Go, my prince. Go, conquer.’

Raza slung his satchel over his shoulder — inside was the textbook from which he planned to study during the lunch hour between his history and Islamic-studies exam — and kissed his mother on the cheek before heading out on the short walk from his quiet residential street to the commercial road where three other boys from the neighbourhood were already waiting for the bus. It was still early enough for most of the shops to be closed, though the advertisements painted on to steel shutters ensured there was always some kind of commercial life in process. Across the street men were unloading crates of squawking chickens from a van and carrying them into the butcher’s shop, which was located right next to a flower-seller, who carried on a roaring trade despite the stench of blood from next door. If your business is weddings and funerals, the flower-seller liked to say, nothing can stand between you and success — except another flower-seller.

‘Junior!’ one of the boys, Bilal, greeted Raza, his arm looping over his shoulder to bowl an apple core at high velocity between Raza’s legs.

Raza, ready for him, had already taken his textbook out of his satchel, and used it gracefully to flick the apple core on to the dusty pavement, where a crow swooped down and pecked at it.

‘Such a hero our Junior has become,’ Bilal said, affectionately grabbing Raza in a headlock. ‘Look, at him, all slicked-back and ironed.’ The nickname ‘Junior’ had followed Raza around since he was ten and his teachers had decided he should skip a class year and take his place among the eleven-year-olds.

‘Bilal, I ironed that shirt. If you crease it, I’m going to get very angry.’

At the sound of Hiroko’s voice, the boys turned, smiling, standing up straight, all the childhood that was still in their seventeen-year-old faces suddenly apparent. While every other mother in the neighbourhood was ‘aunty’, Hiroko was Mrs Ashraf — their former, and beloved, schoolteacher who only had to threaten disapproval to give rise to both consternation and obedience. When she and Sajjad had moved to this newly constructed neighbourhood in the early fifties and she had taken up a teaching position at the school near their house it was her students who were her first allies — recognising in her a woman who could never be fooled or flattered, but whose smiles of approval or encouragement could transform a day into glory. Through the children she won over the mothers, whose initial reaction towards the Japanese woman with the dresses cinched at the waist was suspicion. And once the mothers had made up their minds, the neighbourhood had made up its mind.

‘You didn’t take money to buy lunch,’ she said to Raza, handing him a five-rupee note. ‘And share with your friends. Now quick, quick, the bus.’

The brightly coloured bus was hurtling down the quiet early-morning street towards them, slowing rather than stopping as it came alongside the boys, who jumped on with cries of accomplishment.

‘Sayonara,’ they all called out to Hiroko as the bus picked up speed again. Or at least, all of them except Raza called it out. He only spoke Japanese within the privacy of his home, not even breaking that rule when his friends delighted in showing off to his mother the one or two Japanese words they’d found in some book, some movie. Why allow the world to know his mind contained words from a country he’d never visited? Weren’t his eyes and his bone structure and his bare-legged mother distancing factors enough? All those years ago when he’d entered a class of older boys, at an age when a year was a significant age gap, his teacher had remarked on how easily he fitted in. He saw no reason to tell her it wasn’t ease that made it possible but a studied awareness — one he’d had from a very young age — of how to downplay his manifest difference.

Hiroko exited the sanctuary of the bookshop with its thick walls and slowly whirring fans into the chaos and furnace-like heat of Saddar. This used to be her favourite part of Karachi in the early days, when almost every one of the yellow-brick colonial buildings housed a café or bookstore, before it became a thoroughfare for buses with their noxious exhaust fumes and the impassioned university students disappeared into a new campus built far away, while the migrants who had crowded in refugee camps within walking distance of here went wheeling into distant satellite towns. Now every time she came here another several bookstores or cafés had disappeared, often replaced by the electronic shops through which her son loved to wander.