Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘The echoes make it impossible to know where it’s coming from.’ He parked the jeep and pointed to a winding pathway. ‘Follow that down. I’ll be back later.’ He reached into the back seat, picked up two grey-brown pieces of cloth and tossed one each at Abdullah and Raza. ‘That’s half your essential supply. The other half — your guns — they’ll give you when you get there.’

‘What’s this for?’ Raza said to Abdullah as the jeep reversed at great speed down the track. He held the square of cloth by a corner and it unfolded into a rectangle the height of a tall man.

‘For everything,’ Abdullah replied. ‘Don’t Hazaras have pattusis?’ He walked towards the mountain path, a rapid motion of his hand urging Raza along. ‘It’s your blanket to sleep under, your shawl to keep you warm, your camouflage in the mountains and desert, your stretcher when you’re wounded, your blindfold to tie over the eyes of the untrustworthy, your tourniquet, your prayer mat. If you’re killed in battle you’ll be buried in your bloodied pattusi — the mujahideen don’t need their bodies washed and purified before burial. We are already guaranteed heaven.’ He smiled at Raza over his shoulder. ‘But heaven will wait for us. No need to rush towards it, brother, so don’t step so close to the edge of the path.’

Raza hopped back and pressed himself against the mountain. He hadn’t realised how close he had strayed to the edge of the path in his intent perusal of the scene on the plateau below — the cluster of tents, the unexpected livestock, the men with light shining from their bodies. The creatures of this planet are part angel, he found himself thinking, before a closer view revealed each one of the men carried a Kalashnikov which reflected the sun’s rays.

By the time they reached the plateau — as hot and still as an oven — Raza thought he might faint. It was not just the exertion of mountain-walking and the intensity of the sun which made his lips turn white and set his brain rotating. How could a man escape such a place? Even if he climbed back up the path undetected, where would he go from there? What had he been thinking? He had been so buoyed by months of living a lie that he thought he could control everything, and suddenly his own stupidity and arrogance was breathing hot on his face. He sat down — collapsed, really — on a rock, paying little attention to the men who came to welcome Abdullah and look questioningly at him.

He wanted his parents. He wanted his bed, and the familiarity of the streets in which he’d grown up. For no reason he could explain, he wanted a mango.

One of the men prodded him with his foot.

‘Practising blending in with the scenery, my rock?’ he said in a tone that was not unkind, just amused.

Raza looked up at the man’s green eyes, which were examining him with interest, and all the stories he’d heard in his Muhajir neighbourhood about the proclivities of Afghan men for delicate-featured boys rushed back at him and immobilised him further.

‘Doesn’t he speak Pashto?’ the man said, turning to Abdullah.

Abdullah slapped the back of Raza’s head.

‘Pashto is the only Afghan language he’ll speak.’ He related the tale of Raza Hazara and the vow he had made to put a warrior’s mission between himself and his mother tongue. Raza, listening, tried to remember how to become the Hazara — he pictured himself raising a Kalashnikov to his shoulder, but in the midst of these men for whom a Kalashnikov was something familiar enough to be casual with he saw his own posturing for what it was.

Abdullah bent down, a hand gripping Raza’s shoulder.

‘If you cry, I’ll kill you,’ he whispered.

Raza looked up at Abdullah, at the green-eyed man, at the mountains and the sky. Everything was shifting. He pressed his hands against the ground, felt sharp-edged stones cut into his skin as he propelled his body into a prone position, head pillowed against the rock on which he’d been sitting. His vision grew white at the edges and only the quickness of his breath kept him from throwing up. He had never known anything like this heat, this terror.

The voices around him were coming and going, staccato. Perhaps he wasn’t here but in his room at home where the ceiling fan whirred and then juddered on each of its rotations, the juddering breaking up the flow of sounds that came in from the courtyard, causing approximately every third syllable of his parents’ conversation to be lost.

Warm water splashed on his face and his eyes flickered open to see the green-eyed man pouring something out of a bottle into his palm and gently tilting his hand so the water slipped from it towards Raza. Abdullah kicked him again and the green-eyed man said something that Raza didn’t understand because the ceiling fan was on again. And everything was slipping from his vision except those green eyes.

Uncle Harry , Raza thought, and then the green eyes closed and there was only darkness.

When he regained consciousness, he found he’d been moved; his pattusi was a pillow and the mountain itself a provider of shade. There was a bottle of water next to him and he drank greedily, propped up on one elbow, before lying down and falling asleep, every emotion pushed to the side by exhaustion; his body finally registered the toll of days of sleeping in the cramped cab of the truck or on a bed of Kalashnikovs in the container portion, woken up by sharp braking or breakneck turns before he could reach the point of dreaming.

Later, much later, there was a sandal knocking against his ribs. Abdullah seemed to have decided that the only way to separate himself from the shame of this fainting creature was to treat Raza as though he were an animal.

Raza was awoken by the first kick but kept his eyes closed. When the second kick landed, his hand grabbed Abdullah’s foot and, twisting it, knocked the younger boy to the ground. Abdullah scrambled to his feet, but it was too late by then — three mujahideen sitting near by, chewing their niswaar and entering a pleasant intoxication, were already laughing at him.

‘Your friend has given you a bonus lesson for the day,’ one of the men said. ‘Never assume a man is incapable of striking back simply because his eyes are closed.’

Abdullah walked away without responding, and now it was something other than exhaustion that made Raza curl himself up and retreat into the safety of sleep again.

The next time, it was the green-eyed man who woke him up, shaking him by the shoulders and pointing towards the setting sun. Raza sat up, not understanding.

‘You’ve slept through two prayer times already,’ the man said. ‘Come, stand up. You may not be a Pashtun, but you’re still a man. Enough of this.’

Raza clambered to his feet, which was not easy to do with all the heaviness that seemed to weigh on each limb and on his heart. He watched the man pick up a fistful of dirt and rub it over his hands and arms before scrubbing his face with it. Camouflage, Raza thought.

‘We’re like the first Muslims, in the deserts of Arabia,’ the man said, running his hands through his hair, and Raza saw he was performing his ablutions.

Nodding, Raza mimicked the man’s actions, trying not to think of his mother putting aside a pile of ash for him each day when he had worked in the soap factory. He had not realised, until now, that it was a gesture of love. No, he couldn’t think of Hiroko. Or of Sajjad. To do so was to feel loneliness rise within him, stronger than terror.

When Raza had finished scrubbing his feet, the green-eyed man gestured him towards the prayer space — next to one leafless tree with branches the colour of the men’s pattusis — where all the occupants of the camp were lining up in rows. Guns hung, like metallic fruit, from the tree’s branches. Raza saw that most of the men were younger than he was, some younger than Abdullah even. The setting sun dulled all the sharp edges of the world, everything aglow or in shadows. It was cooler now, and silent. All at once, Raza saw the beauty in the moment and it was with a true sense of reverence, such as he had never felt before, that he laid his pattusi on the ground and stepped on to it. Abdullah turned to look at him and the two boys nodded and smiled shyly at each other as though they were both on their way to meet their future brides and recognised something of their own emotions — the tangle of exhilaration and fear — in each other’s eyes. Raza Hazara woke up, looked upon the world, and found it extraordinary.