Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

When she told him what Salma had said his first instinct was to laugh. The stories a boy told to try and impress a girl! And Salma was certainly the kind of girl a boy would want to impress. Older than Raza, but even so. He’d have to tell the boy off soundly when he came back from wherever he was, of course — unacceptable to worry Hiroko so much. But he felt vindicated — years ago he’d told Hiroko there was more than a touch of his brother Iqbal in Raza and this certainly proved him right. Hiroko had disagreed sharply, calling him an ungenerous father, refusing to accept that of all his brothers he loved Iqbal the most despite knowing him to be the most flawed of all the Ashrafs.

But then — as Hiroko seized him by the back of his head, shocking him into thinking his wife was about to kiss him here, on the street, in public — everything in Raza’s behaviour which had mildly puzzled him the last few weeks coalesced into a single explanation. All the interest in Afghanistan! He’d bought a map of the country, asked Sajjad questions about the war there, paid close attention to every news item about it, though previously cricket had been the only current event that interested him. The truth didn’t just seem inescapable, it also seemed so obvious Sajjad marvelled at how it was possible he hadn’t realised earlier that his son had been making plans that delighted him in the way that only very foolish plans could delight a young man of Raza’s temperament.

Very gently, Sajjad disengaged his wife’s grip on his skull.

‘I’ll find him,’ he said.

‘How? He could be anywhere.’

Sajjad touched the mole on her cheek in a promise, and stepped back into his car.

‘I’m going to the fish harbour. Someone there must know this boy. I’ll find a way to call you from there. See if Salma knows anything else.’

Hiroko watched him drive away and then felt a hand on her arm.

‘That’s all I know,’ Salma said. ‘I’m sorry. I think I’m responsible for this.’

It was impossible to be angry with Salma when she revealed all she had said to Raza in the conversation about marriage. Impossible even to be angry at Qaisra, her dear friend, from whom Salma must have picked up those comments about Raza being ‘deformed’. All Hiroko could think was: the bomb. In the first years after Nagasaki she had dreams in which she awoke to find the tattoos gone from her skin, and knew the birds were inside her now, their beaks dripping venom into her bloodstream, their charred wings engulfing her organs.

But then her daughter died, and the dreams stopped. The birds had their prey.

They had returned though when she was pregnant with Raza — dreams angrier, more frightening than ever before, and she’d wake from them to feel a fluttering in her womb. But then Raza was born, ten-fingered and ten-toed, all limbs intact and functioning, and she had thought he’d been spared, the birds were done with her.

She had not imagined the birds could fly outwards and enter the mind of this girl, and from her mind enter Raza’s heart. She had never truly understood her son’s need for belonging, the anger with which he twisted away from comments about his foreign looks — in truth, she had thought that anger little more than an affectation in a boy so hungry to possess the languages of different tribes, different nations — but she knew intimately the stigma of being defined by the bomb. Hibakusha. It remained the most hated word in her vocabulary. And the most powerful. To escape the word she had boarded a ship to India. India! To enter the home of a couple she’d never met, a world of which she knew nothing.

She waved off Salma’s words, whatever they were — why didn’t the silly girl just stop talking — and walked down the street towards her home. He was her son. Her son. Like her, so intent on escape that nothing seemed impossible except staying put. She pushed open the door of her house, stepped into the vestibule and paused at the entry into the courtyard. The shadows of the neem tree fell exactly where she knew they would fall at this time of the morning; the emptied flowerbed surrounding the tree told her Sajjad had cleared away the remnants of the spring flowers and was preparing to plant zinnias — and so summer had truly begun. And the zinnias would bring butterflies. Somewhere during the course of the decades she had settled into this place, learnt to anticipate — not merely to react to — its lengthening days, its shifting shadows.

She walked swiftly across the baking courtyard into Raza’s room, and lay down with her head on his pillow. How often had Raza heard the story of his mother’s great adventure — from Tokyo to Bombay! Bombay to Delhi! She never told him what an act of desperation that voyage was, had always wanted to seem fearless, above all. Fearless and transmutable, able to slip from skin to skin, city to city. Why tell him of the momentum of a bomb blast that threw her into a world in which everything was unfamiliar, Nagasaki itself become more unknown than Delhi? Nothing in the world more unrecognisable than her father as he died. But she had always wanted Raza to know as little of all this as possible. So the story of Hiroko Ashraf’s youth was not the story of the bomb, but of the voyage after it.

‘Weren’t you scared?’ Raza had asked once of her arrival in India.

She’d smiled and said, ‘No,’ laughing at the look of wonder on her son’s face. It was true enough. She hadn’t been afraid. But only because she didn’t allow herself to think of anything beyond the next stage of the journey.

And now her son was proving himself her son, and nothing could keep her from seeing everything that might happen next, and next, and next.

She lay with her arms around his pillow until she drifted to sleep. In her dream, Raza was speaking to an Afghan boy but the boy, although an Afghan boy, was also her ex-student, Joseph, the kamikaze pilot. ‘Maybe I won’t join the Air Force,’ Joseph, who was also the Afghan boy, said. Raza sneered. ‘Scared, little boy?’ Joseph stood up taller, unfurling his black wings, and when he opened his mouth desiccated cherry blossom cascaded out, blank eting the dry soil of Afghanistan.

The camp was more than an hour’s drive from wherever they were before, on a mountain plateau which could only be reached via a dirt road that snaked from Pakistan into Afghanistan and back again. The single point of entry made it easy to guard against such inconveniences as occurred at the camp where Abdullah’s eldest brother had trained — a group of tribesmen taking a short cut stumbled upon the camp, which had to be moved to a new location the next day.

The driver of the jeep — a man whose face was all beard and nose — pointed in the direction of a narrow path winding along the mountain and said one of the Arab training camps was along there. He spat out the word ‘Arab’ as if it were a curse.

‘But don’t worry,’ he said, turning to Raza with a smile that was unexpectedly boyish. ‘Where we’re going, it’s all Pashtun. You might be treated a little roughly at first — there are men in there who aren’t happy about a Hazara entering our camp. But don’t worry — you’re an Afghan and a Muslim and a friend of Abdullah’s. You’ll earn their trust.’ He cuffed Abdullah, who smiled in return, and Raza understood only then that this was Abdullah’s brother.

Raza heard the camp before he saw it. At first he thought he was listening to the sea — he recalled illustrated geography books with pictures of fossilised fishbones discovered on icy summits — but then the roaring got louder and became gunfire.

‘How are you supposed to keep this location secret?’ he yelled above the noise.

Abdullah’s brother Ismail shrugged.