Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sajjad said. ‘And if you take this attitude I won’t give you the information you want. It wasn’t easy to get it, you know.’

Raza put out a hand, caught his cousin by the elbow.

‘Sorry. Please tell me. What did you discover?’

The name and telephone number of a man in Kabul; that was all Sajjad had for him. In 1983, this man had been the Commander at the camp where Raza had spent that terrible afternoon.

‘I was only able to find out which camp it was because the ISI have a record of Raza Ashraf from Karachi who the Americans sent to that camp,’ Sajjad said, grudging in his admiration for the wild adventure of Raza’s youth.

‘Does the ISI have a record of whether anyone in the camp was told anything about me? My name, what the ISI believed I was doing there?’

Sajjad shook his head.

‘It’s unlikely. The ISI doesn’t give out information to anyone unless it’s necessary. Certainly not to the Afghans. But I wouldn’t get too hopeful about this man in Kabul. Even if he remembers your friend Abdullah — Raza bhai, what are the chances he’s alive?’

And even if he is, then what? Raza thought as he drove back to base. What if he’s become one of them — the black-turbanned men who banned everything of joy, blasted ancient prophets out of mountain-faces. Abdullah, he couldn’t help remember, had talked of the carvings along the road to Peshawar as the work of infidels. And women — Abdullah at fourteen knew exactly what a woman’s place in the world was, and it was nothing that Hiroko’s son could understand. Then it hadn’t really mattered, to be honest — but now, just two weeks in this country and the sight of women shrouded as though they were the walking dead made him want to scream. In Miami as in Dubai it was women who kept his life from becoming that of a drone — sex the habitat in which he was most at home, its balance of intimacy and transience perfectly suited to his temperament. He fell in love, briefly but intensely, with all the women who invited him into their beds, never seeing that what he truly loved was the version of himself which manifested itself in their company — a version comprised of his father’s lightness and his mother’s boldness.

At sunset, he was driving past a mosque, and the sky-blue beauty of its dome made him get out of his Humvee and prostrate himself on the ground as the muezzin’s call wheeled across the plain. The sound was drowned out by the whup-whup of a chopper, which swooped closer to the ground to investigate the stationary Humvee. Raza jumped up, waved at the pilot, and stepped back into the vehicle just as a group of elderly men came out of the mosque to see what was happening.

‘Sorry for the interruption,’ Raza said in Pashto, leaning out of the window, but the men only looked accusingly from the American vehicle to the man whose features suggested tribes unfriendly to the Pashtuns. One of the men unslung a Kalashnikov from his shoulder — Raza remembered Abdullah lifting a piece of cloth like a magician to reveal the gleaming gun beneath — and another said, ‘Go away from here.’

Last time I’m travelling in this beast, Raza thought as he drew up to the compound, waving away the warnings of the Sri Lankan guard who had witnessed Harry’s fury when he discovered the Humvee was missing.

‘Who came in the chopper?’ he asked.

‘American.’ The man shrugged, as if to say anyone else would have travelled by road.

‘Did I ever tell you I was so determined when I arrived in New York to cast off the shackles and constraints of life as Mrs Burton that I swore to myself I wouldn’t be shocked by anything in my cousin Willie’s life — even though he kept sending me letters before my arrival warning me that his social circle was not what I was used to?’ Ilse burrowed down into the sofa cushions, arms wrapped around a cushion resting on her stomach.

So many late nights in Delhi had unfolded just like this: Ilse in this very position on the living-room sofa, Hiroko sitting in an armchair beside her sipping a cup of jasmine tea, chatter going back and forth between them. Then, as now, Hiroko always pretended the stories she’d already heard were new to her because she enjoyed the animation with which Ilse retold her favourite anecdotes.

‘So my very second day in New York I walked into the kitchen in Willie’s flat in the middle of the night to get some water, and there he was with this beautiful young man — naked! — doing something I had never seen done before, not even in a photograph. And I had so steeled myself to take everything in my stride that I said, “Don’t mind me,” and walked right past them to the fridge. Poor Willie almost fainted with embarrassment, and the young man caught a bus back home to Iowa the next morning and never returned!’

‘Well, no wonder I stopped getting your letters in Karachi all those years ago,’ Hiroko laughed. ‘If you were writing things like that the censors must have been framing them on their office walls!’

‘Oh I was so desperately in need of all that liberation,’ Ilse said, kicking her foot up in the air. ‘New York after the war. It was the most wonderful madness. I kept wishing you were here with me.’

‘I was where I wanted to be,’ Hiroko said quietly.

Ilse reached out her arm and caught Hiroko’s wrist.

‘I do know that. I used to wish it for my sake, not yours.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Well, all right. Maybe a little for yours. I place much too high a premium on material comforts, always have. I don’t have your stoical Japanese spirit.’

‘You talk such incredible nonsense,’ Hiroko said, with as much affection as asperity.

The flung-open front door, the sound of Kim’s voice shouting out Ilse’s name, sucked all tranquillity from the room.

‘Dad, have you heard from Dad? I can’t get hold of him.’

‘Kim, what’s the matter?’ Ilse tried to sit up, but her body was too ensconced in the sofa cushions and she only managed to raise her head a little before it, too, fell back, to her sharp cry of impatience.

‘Haven’t you heard the news? A man tried to light a bomb inside his shoe on a flight. To Miami. And I can’t get hold of Dad.’ She pulled Ilse upright as she spoke, and thought senility might have finally caught up with her grandmother when Ilse’s only response was to pat her cheek as if she was a child who had just lost her favourite toy.

‘There are hundreds of flights to Miami every day, and your father is almost never on any of them,’ she said.

‘And everyone on the plane is fine,’ Hiroko added. ‘Other than that stupid man. Was he still wearing the shoe while trying to set it on fire? The news report didn’t make that clear.’

Kim looked from Ilse to Hiroko, not believing how unconcerned they were.

‘It was a plane,’ she said. ‘Another suicide attack on a plane.’

‘Come here.’ Ilse pulled her down on to the sofa, and put her arm around her. ‘Stop doing what you’re doing. Stop trying to imagine precisely what would happen to a plane mid-air if a bomb went off inside it.’

Kim closed her eyes.

‘I’m not trying to imagine it, Gran. I can’t help imagining it.’ She had trained to be a structural engineer because she’d always wanted to know how to keep things from falling, from breaking apart. Only these last months had she seen how much she’d had to learn about falling, about breaking, in order to do it.

‘Let’s try getting hold of your father,’ Ilse said, dialling Harry’s satphone number. He answered almost immediately.

‘Have you been in the vicinity of any flammable loafers today?’ Ilse asked.

‘What?’ Harry shouted over the roar of something that sounded like helicopters. ‘You mean that shoe guy on the flight? No, of course not. Is that why Kim called? I’ve just got to my phone and seen three missed calls from her.’