Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘What else did he say?’ Harry asked.

Raza looked up towards the sky, while his fingers traced constellations in the sand.

‘That the last he heard of Abdullah he was at a camp in Afghanistan which the Russians decimated.’

Harry tried to put aside his feelings of hurt that Raza had sought out this boy without telling him he was doing so.

‘I’m sorry. I know you once considered him a friend. But that was a long time ago.’

‘After my father died, I went to my mother and begged her forgiveness. She said it wasn’t my fault. I could not have known anything like that would happen, there was no part of me that was responsible. And then she said but if you know of any way to get that boy Abdullah out of the camps, you must do it. What happens to him there, that is your responsibility. You made him go when you could have told him not to.’

‘You’re not the reason he became a mujahideen,’ Harry said.

‘Yes, I am. If it hadn’t been for me he would have been driving a truck instead of standing in the path of Russian bombs. And, whatever my mother might have said to the contrary, my father would still be alive.’ In the sand he connected the stars of Orion — belt, bow, knees.

Harry leaned his weight slightly against Raza. He wished more than anything that he had not been the one to tell Raza that Sajjad had gone to the docks looking for him. He would have been willing to live with the blame Raza had cast at him the day they stood over Sajjad’s body if that had spared the younger man — but years ago Raza had decided the responsibility for his father’s death was his alone.

‘Abdullah’s brothers were all mujahideen — he grew up knowing it was his next step the way you knew tenth grade follows ninth grade.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Raza’s voice was tough with anger. ‘I convinced myself of that, too. And I did nothing for Abdullah. I didn’t even stop to think if there was anything I could do for him. Twenty years, I’ve hardly even thought of him.’

‘And you were right to put it out of your mind. God knows I adore your mother, but she doesn’t know the realities of war.’ As soon as the words were out, he stopped, red with shame at what he’d said.

‘When you don’t know the realities of war, that’s when you can put things like this out of your head. But coming here, being in this place, seeing all the young men who have been old men almost their entire lives, it does something to you. It must do something to you, Harry. Don’t you feel any responsibility at all?’

‘Sometimes I listen to these liberals in America and marvel at their ability to trace back all the world’s ills to something America did, or something America didn’t do. You’ve got the disease on a personal rather than a national level. You’re not responsible for Abdullah. And as for your father—’

‘As for my father, he would have wept to know the kind of men you and I have become.’ Raza swept the palm of his hand across the ground and buried the Hunter. ‘How long ago was it that you decided to justify your life by transforming responsibility into a disease?’ He stood up gracefully, the blanket a cast-off chrysalis, and walked away in the direction of the radio broadcasting music from a Pakistani channel.

Good, Harry thought, picking up the blanket and trudging inside. Feeling superior to Harry was Raza’s way of quietening his own conscience. Now he’d stop staring at handprints and searching out a past he’d ignored for twenty years, and get his head back in the game.

When Hiroko Ashraf had arrived in New York three summers ago, the immigration official — a man with a peace sign tattooed on his forearm — looked quizzically from her face to her Pakistani passport, then heaved a great sigh as he opened the passport and saw her place of birth scrawled beneath her husband’s name.

‘It’s OK,’ he said, stamping her passport without asking a single question. ‘You’ll be safe here.’

What surprised her even more than his hand reaching out to squeeze hers was his obliviousness to irony. She did not share it. A week after India’s nuclear tests, with Pakistan’s response in kind looming, she didn’t see the ache in her back as a result of the long plane ride but rather a sign of her birds’ displeasure that she should have chosen this, of all countries, as her place of refuge from a nuclear world.

When she stood in line at the taxi rank, aware that everything was familiar from the movies except the tactile quality of the early-summer air and the run-down look of everything from terminal to taxis to travellers, it occurred to her that Pakistan might have tested its bomb while she was flying from continent to continent. So when the cab drew up and a young man who could have been either Indian or Pakistani got out of the driver’s seat to help her load her luggage, she blurted out instantly, in Urdu, ‘Has Pakistan tested yet?’

The man drew back in surprise, and then started laughing.

‘You speak Urdu!’ he said. ‘No, no. We haven’t tested yet. Not yet. How do you know Urdu?’

‘I’ve lived in Pakistan since ’47,’ she replied, feeling strangely flirtatious. ‘I am Pakistani.’

‘Amazing!’ He held the door open for her. ‘You’re Pakistani, and I’m American. Became a citizen just last week.’ He switched to English to say, ‘Welcome to my country, aunty.’

His name was Omar. He was from Gujranwala, but he’d once been to visit distant relatives in Karachi, in Nazimabad.

‘It’s a good thing you didn’t arrive yesterday,’ he told Hiroko as they drove past boys playing cricket near a large silver globe — a sight enormously cheering to Hiroko. ‘Major cab strike. 98 per cent of yellow-cab drivers took part. 98 per cent!’

She smiled at his tone of voice — she had heard it from many of her former students in 1988 when boys who had once sat at the back of the class were out on the streets, waving the flags of their political party and singing songs of victory. The details of the cab strike remained slightly mysterious to her but through her jet lag, and attempts to keep up with Omar’s rapid-fire delivery, one thing struck her.

‘Many of the cab drivers are Indian, aren’t they?’ Omar nodded at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘And many are Pakistani?’

‘No, no, please,’ Omar said. ‘Don’t ask how it’s possible that we can strike together when our countries are in the middle of planning for the Day of Judgement. It’s what all the journalists ask. Aunty, we are taxi drivers, and we’re protesting unjust new rules. Why should we let those governments who long ago let us down stop us from successfully doing that?’

Hiroko opened the window and let in the New York air, laughing as if she were part of a victory when a turbanned cabbie drew up alongside and reached out to clasp Omar’s hand.

Omar of Gujranwala was the first New Yorker whose number she wrote down in her address book. ‘I work the day shift,’ he said. ‘Any time you know in advance that you need a cab between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., just call me.’ And his smiling ‘Welcome to my country, aunty’ marked the start of her love affair with New York.

A city in which she could hear Urdu, English, Japanese, German all in the space of a few minutes. The miracle of it! Sometimes she rode the subways, overheard conversations her only destination. It was the young Japanese women who intrigued her most of all — their unabashed laughter, their vocabulary peppered with words she didn’t understand, forcing her to recognise that her own Japanese belonged to ‘Grandmother’s generation’. Nothing foreign about foreignness in this city. ‘Like Mary Poppins’ handbag’, Ilse had said to explain how much the little island of Manhattan could hold within it. She felt she had been waiting all her life to arrive here.