Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

Hiroko wasn’t fooled, but she saw that it wasn’t just the memory of his father that he wanted to escape but also the presence of her own grief, which sharpened his guilt with its every expression. That made it impossible for her to demand that he stay.

Was that the moment he walked in one direction and his conscience in another, Raza wondered, or was it earlier when he urged a boy towards a training camp filled with militants?

He lowered the tinted-glass windows of the Humvee — though this was expressly against company rules — and ejected the rap CD from the player, replacing it with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Sometimes the walls shake, sometimes the doors tremble. Raza looked out at the landscape speeding past in which it was impossible to separate rock from rubble. Something metal glinted at him from the rubble and he imagined a watch, still keeping time on a wrist without a pulse.

In his decade in Dubai, prior to Harry re-entering his life, he sought out as many nationalities as possible, acquiring language with the zeal of a collector — Bengali and Tamil from the hotel staff; Arabic from the receptionists; Swahili from the in-house jazz band; French from Claudia — the most consistent of his many lovers; Farsi from the couple who ran the restaurant at the corner of his street; Russian from the two hookers who lived in the apartment next door to his studio and knew they could use their spare key to slip into his bed after their clients had left, seeking comfort or laughter or platonic embraces; and beyond this, a smattering of words from all over the globe. The more languages you learned, he discovered, the more you found overlap: ‘Qahweh’ in Arabic, ‘gehve’ in Farsi, ‘café’ in French, ‘coffee’ in English, ‘kohi’ in Japanese.

But he stayed away from the Afghans. To take even a word from them seemed an act of theft.

He raised the window and everything became mercifully unreal. No brilliant blueness of the sky forcing him to recall Abdullah who said the winter sky over Afghanistan was different from anything ‘those Karachiwallas’ could believe possible.

Hours later, Raza jumped down from his Humvee, blinking away the darkness of the tinted-glass enclosure. He was in a broad pass through the great mud-and-pebble mountains which had once stirred mythic creatures in his imagination. But instead of gunfire echoing through the silence there was the noise of commerce instead. Tea shacks and taxis, donkey carts piled high with wares of one kind or another, boys selling bottles of mineral water and cheap plastic sunglasses. Raza watched a van unload a group of men who walked forward about twenty feet, got into another van and drove off. Somewhere in that twenty-foot expanse Afghanistan became Pakistan. The Pakistani soldiers on the far side of the expanse didn’t seem particularly interested in checking the papers of any of the Pathans who went back and forth, but as Raza approached one of them put up a hand, palm pressed almost against Raza’s face.

‘So you let Afghans into Pakistan without any trouble, but you stop a Pakistani who’s coming home,’ Raza said in Urdu. ‘Strange world this has become. Go, tell Captain Ashraf his brother’s here.’

He walked back to the Afghan side and sipped a cup of tea as he sat on his haunches with the other men, feeling slightly foolish for being the only man out of uniform who was wearing trousers rather than a shalwar. Within a few minutes he saw Captain Sajjad Ashraf approach — he was the youngest by far of Iqbal’s sons, and as Raza watched him strut forward, beating the air around him with a stick, he wondered if Hussein in Dubai really thought it was worth it: all those years of working in hotel kitchens so that this Sajjad could be given the education his brothers never had, and with it prospects they could only dream about in all the years their father was whoring and gambling away all the family money.

Raza stepped forward to meet his cousin, but when Sajjad stopped he did too. Raza was the elder — by almost a decade — he should be the one who was approached.

His cousin smiled across the distance between them.

‘If I come towards you the Pakistan Army will have invaded Afghanistan.’

Raza rolled his eyes, and walked forward.

‘Welcome home,’ Sajjad said, embracing him perfunctorily. ‘You look well. The American military must be looking after you.’

‘I’m not with. ’ He stopped, and shrugged away the rest of the sentence. The line between working for the American military and working for a private military company contracted to the American military was so fine he knew he would only look foolish for trying to delineate it. ‘How are things with you? How’s Hussein? Everyone else?’

‘Fine, everyone’s fine. Hussein and Altamash have expanded their business — they’re opening a third supermarket next month.’

Raza smiled at that. His life in Dubai had grown very separate to that of Hussein and their other cousin Altamash from Delhi, as his language skills and unPakistani looks had moved him swiftly from the kitchens where his cousins worked (so much for all Hussein’s letters about his high-flying life among the sand dunes) on a path upward to the ‘gold-star reception desk’ at a five-star hotel, but any guilt he felt about that separateness was put to rest the day he gave his cousins the initial down payment for their first tiny store with his sign-on bonus from Arkwright and Glenn.

‘I’ve just sent my wife and children to Dubai to stay with them,’ Sajjad continued. ‘Safest option with the way things are now. Bastard Indians.’ He swiped the air with his stick. ‘They never miss an opportunity. Well, let them try to take us on.’

‘What’ll happen when they try,’ Raza mocked. ‘You going to scare them away with your big stick?’

Sajjad scowled — his face instantly transforming into that of the youngest member of a family who spends his life bullied and teased by those older than him. ‘We’ve got better weapons than sticks, Raza bhai.’

‘The nuclear option?’ Raza said steadily. ‘My mother has been worrying about that. I told her no one’s that crazy.’

Sajjad looked thoughtful.

‘Here is our problem. India is so big. How can we ever destroy their missile launchers, the nuclear installations in the south, in the east? Our planes would be shot down before they got that far, our missiles can’t travel that distance. India, on the other hand, can take out our launchers, no problem. And then we’re left with nuclear weapons and no way to deliver them.’

Deliver. It sounded so polite.

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘With only one option. The instant the war starts, before the bastards have time to take out our launchers, we must launch our missiles. Our biggest missiles. Right into the mouth of their government in Dilli. Cause such havoc that they turn around and run, and never ever think of even looking us in the eye again.’

‘Dilli?’

‘Yes. Dilli.’

The earth shook beneath Raza’s feet and for a moment he believed Sajjad Ali Ashraf would rise out of it and pull the man who shared his name down into the grave with him — but it was only the rumbling of a van making its way along the mountain pass. Suddenly able to see the absurdity of it all, Raza started to laugh.

‘And you’re sharing this classified strategic information with a man who works with the United States military.’

‘You’re my cousin,’ said Sajjad, looking wounded. ‘What? What are you smiling at?’

‘This strategy of yours. Ours. We’re crazier than you are. We could push that button at the slightest provocation so don’t even slightly provoke us.’ He switched to English. ‘Not MAD, but madder. Are you hoping I’ll pass this on to the Indians via the Pentagon?’