Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘I spoke to Harry yesterday,’ Ilse said. She gave her granddaughter a slightly disapproving look. ‘It does work to call him, you know. You shouldn’t always wait for him to make the effort.’ When there was no response to this other than a shrug she addressed herself to Hiroko. ‘They’re both fine. He didn’t say where they are, but there’s no need for you to start thinking they’re in India or Pakistan. They could very well be on their way back to Miami.’ That was where their company’s head office was, but a few weeks ago they’d both said they were travelling on a year-end junket to see various clients in different parts of the globe, and satellite phones would be the only way to contact them until further notice. Only Hiroko had believed this line.

Hiroko’s nod lacked all conviction.

‘I’ve tried calling Sajjad to ask him what’s going on along the border, but I can’t get through to him.’

‘Perhaps you need a better medium. Sajjad’s been dead for years. Oh Hiroko, you can’t go senile before me. You promised.’

I wish I were old, Kim thought, watching the two women. Really old. Old enough to have left everything troublesome behind — careers, lovers, regrets. Fathers. Mothers. Were you ever old enough for that?

Hiroko patted Ilse’s arm.

‘I don’t mean my Sajjad. His nephew — Iqbal’s youngest son.’

‘Iqbal? Oh yes. The dissolute brother. I saw him once — he came to Bungle Oh! to tell Sajjad their father had died. It was winter — he wore a fabulous cloak. I suppose you’ve told me a dozen times who his son is, but you’ll have to repeat it.’

Sometimes when presented with the increasing acuity of Ilse’s recollection of the past Hiroko wondered if her own memory would undergo a slow dissolve, executed with perfect linearity, so that she would recede backwards through her life until there was nothing after the bomb in her remembrances — nothing of survival except the evidence of her body, so incredibly intact other than the charred tattoos between her shoulders and waist.

She made a quick gesture of impatience with her fingers.

‘He’s the one in the Army.’

‘Oh yes. Indian Army?’

‘Pakistan Army, Ilse. Sikandar’s the one who stayed in India, not Iqbal.’

‘Well, I’m just glad you’re here, not there.’

Hiroko didn’t answer. Today she felt acutely her initial unease about living in this luxurious apartment — if you were this high up, you should be in the hills. Abbottabad, that hill station with its echoes of Mussoorie, had become home in the years after Sajjad’s death. Within a year of his funeral she had sold the house, taken early retirement from the school, and accepted the offer from her old friend Rehana — who had lived in Tokyo and Karachi before widowhood returned her to her childhood home — to come and live with her in the hills of Abbottabad, away from the chaos of a city which was so emptied of joy without Sajjad and Raza that to live in it was to live in regret.

In Abbottabad, she had discovered she was a woman of hills and greenery, a woman content to walk for hours through stretches of silent valleys, with only a German shepherd — she called him Kyubi — for company and protection. But then India tested its nuclear bomb, and around her almost everyone said Pakistan must do the same, there was no real option (the only voices of exception came from a retired general who lived down the road from her, the journalist who always asked her to edit his columns, and the woman who came twice a week to cook and clean who said non-violence was the only solution). So she picked up the phone to call Ilse Weiss in New York, and said she was going to stay with Raza, now in Miami, and perhaps she’d stop in New York along the way. Somehow that stop had extended into three years, through a combination of Ilse’s insistence and Raza’s lack thereof.

‘Raza did email yesterday,’ Hiroko said abruptly. ‘Not to say where he was. Just to cancel his visit. It doesn’t fit his schedule.’ She caught and held Kim’s look of sympathy. They both knew what it was to be an easily erased entry in the cluttered schedule of a beloved relative. Though how it had happened with her and her boy she still didn’t know. Somewhere she had failed, terribly.

‘What a pity,’ Ilse said unconvincingly.

‘I’ve told you before. You don’t have to pretend. I know you don’t like my son any more than you liked his father.’

‘Oh, I’m sure I was a little in love with Sajjad. Don’t you think? He was terribly good-looking, and I was always quite shallow about that sort of thing.’

Hiroko, laughing, clasped Ilse’s hand in hers.

‘I’m so glad you’re my friend, Ilse Weiss.’

I really, really wish I were old, Kim thought, watching the two of them.

‘Kon! Kon-man! Hey, Razor!’

Raza Konrad swivelled sharply in the direction of the voice, prepared for a challenge. But all he saw was a smiling young American tanning on a beach towel, his body an assortment of puffed-up muscles bisected by black shorts so tiny they could have been inked in by an underzealous censor. The American could hardly have presented a sharper contrast to Raza with his slight frame concealing its wiriness beneath button-down shirt and trousers, and his guarded expression.

‘Throw me a can of beer from the icebox,’ the man said, running the flat of his palm over his close-cropped hair, and wiping the sweat on the edge of the towel. ‘And have one yourself.’

Raza paused a moment to test the sentence for insults — was it merely a friendly offer, or did it presume that Raza needed permission from this boy to take what he wanted from the icebox? The tanning man continued to smile; Raza shrugged and reached into the icebox, which was only a few steps away from him. The chill against his fingers was welcoming, and he plucked out a nugget of ice, sliding it along his throat and face. By the time he was close enough to the tanning man to toss the can of beer at him the ice had melted.

‘This time next year this place will be a five-star resort,’ the man said, gesturing expansively around the mud compound with its high walls and gun towers. He tapped the side of his head. ‘I’ve got a plan. You want in?’

Raza shook his head and continued to walk in the direction of the armoured juggernaut which he wasn’t supposed to take out of the compound without clearance. Well, there was no one here for him to get clearance from — everyone out hunting down terror, other than the tanning boy, whose sprained ankle was keeping him away from active duty, and the cooks, cleaners and other assortment of Third Country Nationals (a group from which Raza had always been exempted by virtue of payscale rather than passport). He would have preferred the jeep — open-aired and therefore less of a challenge to men with guns — but he didn’t want to commandeer the only vehicle available to the TCNs. Though around here he didn’t know where they might want to drive to. Perhaps ‘away’ was destination enough, he considered, as he drove the Humvee out with a roar into the dusty plains of Afghanistan.

That was how he had felt — what was it? Nearly nineteen years ago — after his father died. Simply to be out of the spaces which Sajjad Ali Ashraf had filled with his laughter and his embraces. So when his cousin Hussein — Iqbal’s eldest son — called from Dubai to condole over Sajjad’s death and mentioned that should Raza need a job there was an opening at the hotel in which he worked there was no hesitation in Raza as he said yes.

Hiroko had been furious. University, she told her son. You will go to university as your father wanted.

I have to provide for us now, Raza said, trying to play the part of the son who puts aside his own desires for the sake of his responsibilities as head of the family.