Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

What Sajjad saw as he stepped outside was this: Bilal and Ali, his son’s closest friends, driving down the street on a Vespa, Bilal waving the exam results in the air like a victory flag, while Raza hunched down behind Sajjad’s car, hiding out of their sight.

Flying into Karachi at night, the American, Harry — formerly Henry — Burton, looked down on to the brightly lit sprawl of one of the fastest-growing cities in the world and felt the surge of homecoming that accompanies the world’s urban tribes as they enter unfamiliar landscapes of chaos and possibility. This is more like it, he thought, exiting the airport to a pell-mell of cars using their horns in a complicated and unrelenting exchange of messages about power, intention and mistrust. Even the beggar tossing a twenty-five-paisa coin back at him with a sneer made Harry smile.

God, it was good to be away from Islamabad — the bubble in the hills, a town barely two decades old, characterised by government and not history, where everything had the antiseptic air of diplomacy with germs rife beneath the surface. ‘Dull, but pretty’, they’d described it to him beforehand. But pretty wasn’t enough for a man who’d spent his childhood summers in Mussoorie. Harry wanted chaos of his cities and nothing less than beauty of his hill towns. Only on the one occasion he’d driven out of Islamabad into the hill station of Murree, and stood at Kashmir Point looking at snow-capped mountains in the distance with the smell of pine trees all around him, had he felt the gnarly stuff of space and time which separated him from his childhood thin to cobwebs.

Karachi, Karachi, he almost sang out loud as the car with the diplomatic licence plate sped its way through the city. A truck driving on the wrong side of the road veered away from Harry’s car at the last possible moment and he cheered with delight. Six months in Islamabad, without reprieve. How had he managed it? The sacrifices a man makes for his country, Harry thought, saluting his reflection in the tinted window.

But the next afternoon he was somewhat less buoyant — at least mentally so, though physically he couldn’t keep from bouncing up and down on the springless seat of a wedge-shaped auto-rickshaw, while fumes from exhaust pipes entered his pores and traffic crowded so close he could see each bristle on the moustache of the President-General whose face decorated the back of the truck that the rickshaw was stuck behind in the slow crawl through the commercial heart of Karachi. Although it was December the afternoon sun was still hot, and the sea breeze which had been so refreshing just a couple of miles back seemed unable to force its way through the thick fumes. Harry distracted himself with architecture, admiring the loveliness of an enclosed balcony jutting out from a yellow-stone colonial building, its lower half fashioned from delicate woodwork, its upper half coloured glass.

But eventually the rickshaw left behind all colonial remnants, left behind the spacious homes of the elite in which he’d spent all his time on his previous visit to Karachi, and snaked through the streets of a city which had grown too fast for urban planning, everywhere concrete and cement and almost no greenery, thorny acacias overtaking all empty plots of land, except where they’d been cut down to make space for the makeshift jute homes of the poor; and the further from familiarity the rickshaw travelled the more Harry began to fear the circumstances in which he might find the man he sought out.

‘What’s Nazimabad like?’ he’d said two nights earlier, in Islama bad, to a businessman at a party, who he found trying to catch fish with his bare hands in their host’s pond while the armed guards employed to shoot predatory birds looked on uncertainly.

The man had barely glanced up.

‘Muhajir depot,’ he replied. ‘Never been there. Very middle class.’

One of the more perplexing things about Pakistan, Harry had found, was the tendency of the elite to say ‘middle class’ as though it were the most damning of insults. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of ‘Muhajir depot’. He knew ‘muhajir’ was the Urdu word for ‘migrant’ — and, as such, was a word Harry himself identified with, though he also knew that in Pakistan it was used specifically for those who had come to Pakistan from what was now India at Partition. But though he knew the word he wasn’t sure what its connotations were for this businessman of whose ethnic background Harry was utterly unaware. The fact was, Harry had been briefed extensively about the different groups within Afghanistan, could expound at length on the tensions, enmities and alliances between Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, but knew little about any groups in Pakistan other than the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

What he did know was that Karachi was nothing like Islamabad, though it was clear people in Islamabad were mixed in their feelings about how positive a comment this was on the port city.

The businessman by the fish pond had been far from complimentary about it.

‘Nothing but a city of failed aspirations,’ he said.

But a woman standing near by with hair like black water had disagreed.

‘It’s got life,’ she said simply. ‘People wouldn’t be migrating there from every part of the country if all aspirations failed as they approached the sea.’

It was for this comment as much as for her hair that Harry had gone to bed with her; afterwards, there was no pillow talk, and no mention of phone numbers or last names. In truth, there was barely any afterwards. She was dressed and out of his house just minutes after he’d pulled out of her. Harry had never known sex to so intensify his feelings of loneliness.

It was loneliness, he knew, that had brought him here, in search of a past that was as irretrievable as his parents’ marriage or his own childhood. For months now he had ignored his desire to fly to Karachi and knock on the door of a particular house in Nazimabad and now it was the desire to put that desire to rest more than any kind of hope that had finally persuaded him to seek out the first person he’d ever been conscious of loving.

The rickshaw turned into a quiet street of a residential neighbourhood: a more communal area than the parts of Karachi Harry knew — no dividing boundary walls, no gardens and driveways buffering the space between one house and another; instead, there was a long row of homes abutting each other, a single step leading from each doorway to the street. Harry released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding — it wasn’t grand, but there was no whiff of failure or disappointment about the street.

The rickshaw driver turned to look at him as he exhaled heavily and Harry shook his head to say he’d meant nothing. The man quoted the fare to Harry, whose raised eyebrows received the response: ‘If I don’t overcharge an American, everyone will know I work with the CIA.’ Though there was clearly no one else around to see how much he was charging, the cheek of the remark amused Harry enough to pay the full amount.

‘I could be a while.’ He pointed to a tree growing at the front of a house, its roots creasing the road. ‘It might be better if you park in the shade.’

The man nodded.

‘Your Urdu is very good.’

Harry eased himself out of the rickshaw — there was an unpleasant sucking sound as the sweating bald patch on his head detached from the vinyl canopy — and nodded towards house number 17.

‘My first teacher is in there. I’ll tell him you said so.’

The group of boys playing cricket further down the street stopped to watch Harry as he strode across to the door and rang the bell. He looked back at them, amused by the cricket sweaters some of them were wearing in the balmy afternoon.