Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

The one she most missed was Jimmy’s Coffee Shop with the art deco stairs leading up to the ‘family section’ with lurid green walls where, for years, she used to meet a group of Japanese women on the first Saturday of each month at 5 p.m. Those monthly meetings had started in early ’48 when she and Sajjad were still living in the refugee camps, not so far from here, and he had come running to find her one evening and said he’d met a Japanese woman, her husband worked at the Embassy, she was sitting in one of the cafés waiting for Sajjad to bring Hiroko to meet her. Through her, Hiroko met the other Japanese wives in Karachi, and entered their weekly gatherings at Jimmy’s — it had meant a lot, more than she would have guessed, to have the promise of an evening every week to sit and laugh in Japanese. She never told any of them about the birds on her back, though. Considering it now, she decided the day she knew her life had tilted into feeling ‘at home’ in Karachi was when she found she was able to tell her neighbourhood friends that she had lived through the bombing of Nagasaki, while still insisting to the Japanese women that, although she grew up there, she was in Tokyo when the bomb fell.

The ripple ice cream at that café — she closed her eyes to remember it — was particularly wonderful. But really, the heart went out of those meetings when the capital shifted to Islamabad in 1960, taking the Japanese Embassy with it. The café stopped reserving the entire family section for them, though the meetings continued — Hiroko’s participation becoming more sporadic after Raza was born — until the demolition of the café a few years ago brought an end to the weekly gatherings altogether. She found herself mourning the loss, even though in the last years prior to Jimmy’s closing she had attended the meetings mainly from a sense of obligation — she had become the fount of wisdom about all things Karachi-related for the group.

She wondered sometimes near the end if she seemed as foreign to the newer members of the group as they did to her — so Japanese! she sometimes caught herself thinking. The only person she could really talk to about this was the one Pakistani member of the group — Rehana, who had spent twenty years in Tokyo before her Japanese husband had come to Karachi to set up an automobile plant. Rehana had grown up in the hills of Abbottabad, and said Karachi might be part of the same country as her childhood home but it was still as foreign to her as Tokyo, ‘but I’m at home in the idea of foreignness.’ When Hiroko heard her say that she knew she’d found a friend. But now Rehana was back in Abbottabad — she had moved there two years ago when her husband died — and months could go by without Hiroko going to the Japan Cultural Centre and meeting other past members of the group, though there were several for whom she retained an affection.

As she retained an affection for Saddar, despite the electronics shops and the loss of Jimmy’s, she thought, looking around. There was one world at street-level — frenzied, jostling, entirely in the now: pavement vendors, large glass display windows, neon signs, gaping manholes, rapid-fire bargaining, brakes and horns and throaty engine sounds, the rush, the thrum of urban life — and then, overhead, if you stood still, shoulders squared against the passers-by, and looked at the arched windows, the cupolas, the intricate carvings, there was another world of buildings constructed in the belief that life moved at a different pace, more elegant, more pompous.

She was entirely happy for the pomposity to be displaced, but there was something else seeping into the atmosphere, worse than electronic shops, which made her uneasy. A few minutes earlier she’d picked up a copy of War and Peace to replace her battered copy, shaking her head in fond exasperation at the memory of her son telling her time and again that eventually he’d learn Russian and then he’d read it, when a man standing beside her — the air of ordinariness about him — said, ‘You mustn’t read their books. They are the enemies of Islam.’

After the man left, the bookseller apologised.

‘Strange times we’re in,’ he said. ‘The other day a group of young men with fresh beards came in and started to pull all the books off their shelves, looking at the covers for which were unIslamic.’

‘What makes a cover unIslamic?’ Hiroko asked.

‘Portraiture,’ the man replied. ‘Particularly of women. Fortunately, there was a policeman walking past who saw what they were doing and came and stopped them. But I don’t know what’s happening in this country.’

‘It won’t last,’ Hiroko assured him. When any of her friends in the staff room complained of this new wave of aggressive religion which was beginning to surface in some of their students she always told them that compared to the boys she’d first taught who dreamt of kamikaze flights these Karachi boys with their strange fervour for a world of rigidity were just posturing youths. And in any case, nothing could supplant cricket as their true system of worship.

Ignoring the crippled beggar who had dashed crazily across the street in his wheeled crate to get to the foreigner in whom he saw the possibility of compassion long since erased from locals, she looked around for her son. He was late, which was unlike him, but everything in Raza had been a little bit strange these last weeks since he finished his exams. She couldn’t explain to Sajjad exactly what disturbed her, beyond saying there was a falseness about their boy as he threw himself into enjoying the time before college, talking loudly and excitedly about the law, boasting that when the exam results came out his name would be at the top of the list — he who’d always been so circumspect about his successes. She found herself thinking that she shouldn’t have agreed when the teachers suggested he skip a class — intellectually he was ready for it, but there was so much growing up to be done in the year between sixteen and seventeen and she wondered if he was yet ready for the next stage of life.

‘Ma!’ Raza pulled up in Sajjad’s car, extending his torso through the window to take the heavy bag of books out of her hands, impervious to the car horns behind him.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I forgot my other shopping inside. Go round the block and come back.’ Without waiting for a response she darted back into the shop.

Raza continued sitting where he was, taking a strangely masochistic pleasure in the humid stillness which made sweat stains bloom on his shirt. As the beeping of horns grew more insistent he gestured to the cars behind to go round, even though there was no room for them to manoeuvre. The crippled beggar raised a hand in supplication towards the open car window but Raza’s indifferent ‘Forgive me’ — the words a matter of custom, rather than meaning — convinced him that nothing would be gained by staying here. As the man wheeled away, Raza’s hand rested briefly on the afternoon newspaper on the dashboard, its reflection in the windscreen revealing columns of names — the exam results. Grimacing, he picked up the newspaper and slid it beneath the mat on which his feet were resting. Almost immediately, he changed his mind and returned it to the dashboard.

At least it had finally happened. No more lying, no more pretence. By the time he arrived home he knew all the boys in the neighbourhood would have seen the newspaper. Who would be the first of them, he wondered, to stop scanning the lists of candidates who had ‘passed’ and realise that it wasn’t just an error that prevented him from finding Raza’s name where it should be?

And when they asked him what had happened, urged him to appeal to the Board because obviously it was a mistake, it couldn’t be anything else, right, Junior, right, even total idiots got the 33 per cent required to pass — what would he say then? How could he explain to anyone — when he didn’t understand himself — what had happened the final day of the exams when he sat down to the Islamic-studies paper?