Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows

Perhaps this would be the year she’d reveal that it wasn’t the winter flowers for which she waited all year, it was the royal poinciana — or the gulmohar, as the Indians more romantically called it. She envisaged the indignation of the Delhi wives if she were to dismiss the winter flowers of Delhi — which were also the summer flowers of England — in favour of that most brazen of India’s trees, with its red-gold flowers that flamed through the city in the summer, offering up resistance to the glare of the sun and, in so doing, unmasking the winter flowers as cowards.

‘My imagined rebellions get more pathetic by the day,’ she said.

She didn’t expect James to still be there; they had long since fallen out of the habit of staying around to listen to each other’s responses. Even so there was a moment in which she hoped to hear him ask her what she had meant. But James was already making his way slowly down the stairs — his leg still not fully recovered from the fall from a horse two months earlier.

Sajjad was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, and James smiled at the sight of the young man in his perfectly fitted jacket.

‘Which of your poor sisters-in-law was up all night adjusting that to your size?’ he said, hopping down the final two steps and allowing all his weight to fall on the stronger leg.

‘Qudsia.’ Sajjad held up a hand to steady James as he tipped forward on landing.

‘Your younger brother’s wife?’

Sajjad made a noise that sounded like confirmation. In fact, he was the youngest of the brothers but he saw no point in James Burton’s occasional attempts to unfurl the tangle of consonants and relationships that made up his family.

The two men walked across the chequered-tile floor to the verandah where two tables were set up — one with a chessboard, its game already in progress, and the other bare.

On this second table Sajjad deposited the files he’d carried over, while his eyes scanned the back garden for anything feathered.

‘There is a sunbird in your hollyhock, Mr Burton.’

‘Sounds like a rude punchline. Go, wander’ — he waved his hand in the direction of the garden — ‘I’ll look over the excuse for work they’ve sent me this week.’

Sajjad hopped down from the verandah to the grass, ignoring the steps. Elizabeth would see something pointed in that, James knew. She’d think the younger man was attempting to draw attention to the disparity between the elegance of his landing and James’s earlier stumbling descent. But James was pleased with the carelessness with which the Indian felt he could hurl his body from one surface to the other; such a contrast from that studied formality which had marked his earliest interactions with James, eight years earlier.

It was Konrad who had first discovered Sajjad (‘You say that as though he were a continent,’ Elizabeth had remarked once on hearing him articulate the thought.) During his brief stay in Delhi he had come home to James and Elizabeth’s one day, after a morning of taking in the sights, with an absurdly good-looking Indian boy following behind.

‘Can’t you find him a job?’ Konrad had said, striding into the family room, where Henry, just learning to walk, was scrambling over James’s knees. ‘He speaks fine English — once you wrap your ear around the accent — and has no interest in his family’s calligraphy trade.’

‘Konrad, you can’t simply pick up urchins off the street and bring them home,’ James said impatiently, glancing at the boy who stood just inside the doorway, his eyes to the ground.

James saw the boy’s head lift up for a moment, and the expression told him that the Indian’s English was good enough to understand, and be offended by, ‘urchin’. James looked him over more carefully. No, not an urchin — the dirt on his white-muslin clothes was that of someone who had thrown himself to the ground in a wrestling match rather than someone with only a single set of clothing, and the fact that Lala Buksh, James’s bearer, was making no attempt to guide the boy out to wait in the corridor or in the driveway while the ‘sahibs’ discussed his fate was telling. In the year James had been in Delhi he’d learnt enough to know that Lala Buksh could be counted on to serve as divining rod for the hidden currents of social status among Indians.

He summoned the boy closer with a single gesture from his index finger.

‘What can you do?’

Sajjad Ali Ashraf raised his eyes to James’s.

‘I can be priceless,’ he said. At the sound of choked laughter coming from Elizabeth, he reddened. ‘Invaluable,’ he corrected himself. ‘I can be invaluable.’

Who would have thought he’d one day come to see that declaration as understatement, James thought, watching the boy — a man now — pick his way quietly across the grass to the sunbird.

Sajjad lowered himself to a crouch near the ruby hollyhock from which the bird was feeding, the iridescent feathers at its throat winking from crimson to black to emerald as its head dipped and retracted. When he married, he sometimes fantasised, he would leave his family’s home and buy a house, just for himself and his bride, and the central courtyard would be a garden, filled with flowers heavy with nectar and vibrant with colour to summon Delhi’s birds.

The sunbird hovered between Sajjad and the hollyhock for a moment before darting out of sight. Sajjad stopped to wonder who his mother and aunts would pick to be his bride. They had chosen well for two of his brothers, but the third — Sajjad shook his head in contemplation of the sullen, slow-witted creature his brother Iqbal had married. Angling his back so that James Burton couldn’t see what he was doing, Sajjad leaned forward and flicked his tongue into the hollyhock, trying to sample its nectar, but without any success. Well, whoever he was going to marry, Sajjad thought as he stood up and returned to the verandah, it would be soon. His father’s illness and death two years earlier had terminated his mother’s first round of searching, and the second round had proved itself an excessive waste of time — if his sister-in-law’s cousin was going to elope why couldn’t she have done it at the start of the marriage discussions, not when the final preparations were under way? The whole matter had sapped everyone’s spirit, but in the last few weeks the women of his family had started to turn their attention once more to the matter of Sajjad’s future.

Occasionally Sajjad imagined finding a wife for himself, but then he thought of the Burtons.

‘Let’s play chess,’ James said, dismissing the contents of the file with a wave of his hand.

‘The alleys of Dilli are “insidious as a game of chess”.’ Sajjad sat down opposite James, his hand sweeping over the lower half of his face to wipe off any pollen that might have attached itself to his skin. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘Rubbish.’ James passed his handkerchief to Sajjad and gestured to the spot of pollen on the bridge of the other man’s nose. ‘Chess isn’t insidious. It was my move, wasn’t it?’ This question incorporated a joke between the two men, referring back to a time when Sajjad was too conscious of the disparity of their social positions to contradict anything the Englishman said. Now, whenever they played and it was Sajjad’s move first, James would claim the turn for himself.

‘Yes, your move.’ Sajjad brushed his fingers across his nose, and returned the handkerchief to James. He knew how important it was to James to enact these moments of camaraderie which undercut the rigidity of the barriers between them. That it was only in James’s hands to choose when to undercut and when to affirm the barriers was something Sajjad accepted as inevitable and James never even considered.