Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows

How strange, she thinks, as she idly knots the sleeves of the kimono around her body, just below her breasts.

She walks over to the window out of which she tried to catch a glimpse of Konrad as he walked away and looks down the slope, searching for clues. Houses, trees, people gathering outside, asking each other questions, people shaking their heads, sniffing at the air.

Then.

Hiroko leans out of the window, forgetting she is almost entirely naked. Something is wrong with her eyes. They see perfectly until the bottom of the slope and then they cannot see. Instead they are inventing sights. Fire and smoke and, through the smoke, nothing. Through the smoke, land that looks the way her back feels where it has no feeling. She touches the something else on her back. Her fingers can feel her back but her back cannot feel her fingers. Charred silk, seared flesh. How is this possible? Urakami Valley has become her flesh. Her flesh has become Urakami Valley. She runs her thumb over what was once skin. It is bumped and raw, lifeless.

So much to learn. The touch of dead flesh. The smell — she has just located where the acrid smell comes from — of dead flesh. The sound of fire — who knew fire roared so angrily, ran so quickly? It is running up the slopes now; soon if will catch her. Not just her back, all of her will be Urakami Valley. Diamond from carbon — she briefly imagines herself a diamond, all of Nagasaki a diamond cutting open the earth, falling through to hell. She is leaning further out, looking through the smoke for the spires of Urakami Cathedral, when she hears her neighbour’s scream.

Hiroko looks down, sees a reptile crawling up the path towards her house. She understands now. The earth has already opened up, disgorged hell. Her neighbour’s daughter is running towards the reptile with a bamboo spear in hand — her grip incorrect. The reptile raises its head and the girl drops the spear, calls out Hiroko’s father’s name. Why does she expect him to help? Hiroko wonders, as the girl keeps chanting, ‘Tanaka-san, Tanaka-san,’ hands gripping the sides of her face as she stares at the reptile.

The only light is from the fires. Her neighbour is calling her name, somewhere close. The neighbour is inside the house, her footsteps on the stairs. Where is Urakami Cathedral? Hiroko bats at the air with her hands, trying to clear away whatever separates the spires from her sight. Where is the Cathedral? Where is Konrad?

Why is she falling?

‘There. See? There.’

‘How can you be sure it’s him?’

‘No one else in Nagasaki could cast such a long shadow.’

Delhi, 1947

Sajjad Ali Ashraf had his eyes fixed on the sky as he cycled parallel to the Yamuna River, trying to locate the exact celestial point at which Dilli became Delhi. Dilli: his city, warren of ‘by-lanes and alleys, insidious as a game of chess’, the rhythmically beating heart of cultural India (he wasn’t merely dismissive of opposing views, he was inclined to believe they were only made in jest), the place to which his ancestors had come from Turkey over seven centuries earlier to join the armies of the Mamluk King, Qutb-ud-din Aibak.

And then — Sajjad almost tipped over as his feet on the pedals turned recalcitrant, as they were apt to do when his attention was elsewhere — there was Delhi: city of the Raj, where every Englishman’s bungalow had lush gardens, lined with red flowerpots. That was the end of Sajjad’s ruminations on British India. Flowerpots: it summed it all up. No trees growing in courtyards for the English, no rooms clustered around those courtyards; instead, separations and demarcations. Sajjad smiled. That was it. That would be the subject of today’s discussion with James Burton. Not flowerpots, but separations. Of course, almost all the wisdom he polished and honed in his mind on his morning journey into Delhi remained unspoken. But even so, as James Burton said, the readiness was all.

On the matter of separations. Sajjad looked up again, but this time stopped the bicycle as he did so, and hopped off it. Yes, there, there was the boundary of Dilli and Delhi. There, where the sky emptied — no kites dipping towards each other, strings lined with glass; and only the occasional pigeon from amidst the flocks released to whirl in the air above the rooftops of the Old City where Sajjad’s family had lived for generations.

I am like those occasional pigeons, Sajjad thought. At home in Dilli but breaking free of the rest of my flock to investigate the air of Delhi. He mounted the bicycle again, and wondered if there was a couplet to be written about pigeons and the Indians who worked for the English. Almost immediately he was impatient with the thought. He had no talent for verse, and it was only when in Delhi that he spoke fervently of the culture of poetry he had grown up with; in Dilli itself, while his brothers and sisters-in-law and aunts and cousins and mother traded couplets with each other, his mind would occupy itself with thoughts of the chess games which he and James Burton carried over from one day to the next as though they were stories of sultans and djinns. If he was to be honest, he missed the days when it was legal documents rather than chess games which occupied his thoughts each morning, but one day they would return to that — no doubt, no doubt. James Burton had promised him.

A few minutes later he was in the Burton property in Civil Lines, walking up the driveway lined with flowerpots. He paused by the Bentley to check his reflection in its window and when all he saw was the car’s interior he moved undaunted to the bonnet, which reflected his image gleamingly back at him. He paid little attention to those aspects of his appearance that made his mother blow prayers over him to cast off the Evil Eye — the fine yet abundant hair, the perfectly proportioned features (except, at certain angles, the nose), the neat moustache, the fair skin of his Turkish ancestors, the confident air of a man of twenty-four who has never known failure — and instead fixed his attention on the beige cashmere jacket from Savile Row, running his hands along its length with sensuous pleasure.

‘The peacock is here,’ Elizabeth Burton said, watching from her bedroom window and believing it was the slimness of his torso rather than the softness of the fabric he was admiring. She saw Sajjad bring the sleeve of his jacket to his lips — so embarrassingly pink and fleshy — and her eyes flitted away from him impatiently.

‘Say something?’ James asked from the doorway.

‘I wish you wouldn’t give him your clothes,’ Elizabeth said without turning towards James. ‘He’s started looking at everything you wear as if it’s his property; did you see how upset he was yesterday when you spilt ink on your shirt?’

‘Discarded clothes as metaphor for the end of Empire. That’s an interesting one. I don’t care how he looks at my shirt so long as he allows me to choose the moment at which it becomes his.’

Elizabeth leaned her cheek against the open window shutters, and James watched her for a moment — the copper hair falling sleekly just above her shoulders, the statuesque figure, the sensuous droop of her eyelids. At thirty-seven she wasn’t fading, just sharpening her edges. Trying to remember the last time they made love, he recalled instead the furious passion that had consumed their nights in the aftermath of Konrad’s death, and the relief he knew they had both felt when it ebbed away. (‘So this must be what sex feels like for animals,’ she had said one night during that crazed period while James was still inside her. He had been unable to meet her eye in daylight for the rest of the weekend.)

Elizabeth picked up her cup of tea from the windowsill and felt as though she’d posed herself for a portrait, The Colonial Wife Looks upon her Garden . It was worth looking upon, she conceded. The February sun had none of the antagonism that characterised it in later months, and the garden had responded to its benevolence with a burst of colour. Elizabeth made a mental checklist as she looked from one end of the front garden to the other: verbenas, dog flowers, larkspur, roses, sweet peas, phlox. And those were just the flowers at the far end, against the boundary wall. In colonial Delhi, gardens were to the wives what cricket was to the husbands — when conversation became tense, stilted, awkward, it would retreat to Bradman or gladioli. And February, when the chrysanthemums gave way to roses, was the very peak of the gardening year. All those interminable ladies’ lunches!