Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘No reason,’ Harry replied in German while casting Sajjad a glance meant to convey that there was no conspiracy here. ‘If you read the world in five languages you’re probably better off without classrooms boxing in your thoughts to fit the latest fashionable mode of thinking.’

Sajjad watched his son straighten, smile and widen his stance into something that was almost a swagger and, recalling the ease of his early relationship with Henry as contrasted to that of the Burton father and son, wondered at life’s ironies and reversals.

‘How is your father, Henry?’

‘Dad? He’s. unyielding — even to death. He had a scare with his heart some months ago, no way he should have survived. Not at his age. But he’s still around — going to lots of parties. He had the sense after my mother left him to marry a woman who loves that sort of thing. Don’t know that she much likes Dad, but she likes his lifestyle. And that’s enough for him. He has his Gentlemen’s Club for companionship.’

Harry could feel displeasure settle around the courtyard. Of course. He couldn’t say a word against his father, not even among people who were entirely aware of James Burton’s shortcomings — such were the rules of Indian courtesy (he still considered Sajjad an Indian though he’d been in Pakistan long enough to know he should never voice such a thought). ‘My mother’s doing well,’ he said, nodding to Hiroko in acknowledgement of the friendship between the two women, which had continued via letters for over a decade after Partition, before the anarchy of international mail ended it. ‘She’ll be overjoyed to hear I’ve found you. She still has a photograph of you and her together, up on her mantel.’

Raza hardly knew what to do with himself as Harry took the proffered chair and the offer of tea, and made it clear there was nothing he’d rather do with his evening than spend it with the Ashrafs. Almost more astonishing than the presence of the American was the attitude of Sajjad and Hiroko, who seemed to think it perfectly natural to have him in their courtyard, talking about ‘the Delhi days’. Raza was completely transfixed by everything about Harry Burton — the expansiveness of his gestures, the way he had of suggesting that whatever mundane things Sajjad and Hiroko had to say about their lives were more interesting than anything he could bring to the conversation, the way he pronounced words in both Urdu and English. (‘Naw-shus, Tom-aytoe, Skedule’, Raza repeated to himself as though it were a mantra.)

When Harry asked if he might have a glass of water, Raza jumped up to get it, and was rewarded as he was entering the kitchen by the American’s voice drifting across the courtyard, saying, ‘He’s a great kid. Do you have a parenting handbook I can borrow?’

But almost instantly the exaltation left him. Next he would ask, ‘Which class is he in at school? What does he like to study?’ and then his parents would tell him, or, worse, they would feel the need to lie.

Raza covered his face with his hands and leaned against the kitchen wall. It came upon him with no warning now, this swooping down of complete hopelessness, of despair.

He had failed the exam again. The second time it was even worse than the first. Even before he walked into the exam hall he’d lost the ability to make sense of words — in the bus on the way to the exam he’d looked at billboards and graffiti and the words all smudged and blurred in front of him. When the examiner said it was time to start he could already feel his heart pounding so hard it seemed impossible it wouldn’t tear out of his chest. And nothing made sense. His hand couldn’t hold his pen. He walked out after five minutes and came straight home, unable to look directly at his parents as they saw him walk in and knew it was too early, much too early, for him to have finished.

He saw tears in his father’s eyes that day, and for the first time Sajjad Ali Ashraf looked old as he begged his son, ‘Why? Why can’t you do this one little thing? Please, my son. Do this for me.’

All the neighbourhood boys who had laughed off his first failure and said it was ‘just a drama, all good heroes need a drama, and it’s only that one paper, you’ll retake it and everything will be fine’, this second time round they didn’t know what to say to him. Conversations stopped when he entered a room. They were just days away from university now, and it was all they dreamt and talked about. He couldn’t bear the kindness with which they tried so hard to speak of other things around him — strained silences entering the space between him and them — and so he stayed mostly at home, and though they occasionally coaxed him out he could tell that it was always a relief — to everyone, including himself — when he left their company.

He poured water into a tall glass and looked out of the kitchen window, trying to see if the set of Harry Burton’s shoulders revealed he’d just discovered that the ‘great kid’ was the new neighbourhood Donkey.

There was another exam in a few months. His father was determined he take it. But he knew he would only fail again and insisted no. Something inside him had stopped working, it was as simple as that. He placed the glass carefully down on a tray, wiping away his smudged thumbprint from its surface, and thought, Just this easily everything worthwhile in a life can be erased.

‘Not the port. The fish harbour!’

The rickshaw driver — Sher Mohammed — swerved at the sound of Harry’s barked instructions from the back seat.

‘Sorry, sorry. Forgot. Too early. My brain is still asleep.’

Not the most reassuring statement to hear from the man in the driver’s seat, but then again Harry had already decided that Sher Mohammed navigated the streets with a mixture of intuition and Providence. In the crush of midday he at least acknowledged certain traffic rules, but in the early morning he drove through the almost deserted streets with the air of a man who does not conceive the possibility of other vehicles impeding his progress, treating ‘right of way’ as an unassailable personal liberty which he carried with him through every intersection and traffic light.

Harry pulled his shawl tight around himself as the rickshaw hurtled onwards, wind whistling through it. So Karachi actually could get cold, he thought, watching his breath steam in the dawn air.

When they arrived at the entrance to the fish harbour, Sajjad and Raza were already there in Sajjad’s car, Raza slumped against his father’s shoulder, asleep.

‘Wake up, my prince.’ Sajjad rubbed his knuckles on the top of Raza’s head, and his son’s eyes flickered open, closed, and he mumbled ‘Fish’ before falling asleep again. Carefully — as once Harry had seen him handle an egg that had fallen out of a nest miraculously intact — Sajjad eased his son off his shoulder and positioned him as comfortably as possible against the passenger-side door. ‘We’ll wake him for breakfast,’ he said, stepping out of the car, looking out of place in a thick woollen sweater and open-toed shoes. ‘This gives us a chance to talk, Henry Baba.’ He looked down at Harry’s shoes, shook his head, climbed back into the car and emerged holding up the rubber-soled shoes he’d taken off Raza’s feet. ‘Wear these,’ he said.

Harry’s toes curled over the edge of Raza’s shoes, reminding him incongruously of Billy, his cat — from his early days in America — who used to perch on the very edge of the stoop waiting for him to return from school. He wriggled his toes, and the cat batted the air with its paw.

‘Believe me, you’ll be glad you’re wearing them,’ Sajjad said, taking Harry’s arm and leading him towards the harbour.

Perhaps it was the memory of the cat, which regarded all forms of insect life as prey, that did it — when Harry walked through the rusty gates and the harbour came into view all he could think was that the swarm of wooden sailing boats with their riggings painting chaos against the sky looked like grasshoppers lying on their backs, waving their insect limbs in the breeze. There were hundreds of them — in peeling paint of blues and whites and greens — lined all the way along the dock and stacked against each other four, five, six ships deep.