Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

As Raza changed into a shalwar kameez, first wiping blood methodically off his body with a wash cloth and the water from Harry’s bedside flask, he retreated to that purely practical section of his mind. Harry had chosen this structure for himself and Raza rather than any of the more spacious ones for a very particular reason — Raza moved his camp bed away from the wall and tapped on the floor until he heard the hollow sound which had confirmed to Harry the theory he’d constructed around the locals’ tales of the vanishing family who had lived here. (‘What about the dead boy?’ Raza had asked. ‘He was just a dead boy,’ Harry replied.)

Raza made his way around the room, picking up whichever items would be of use — a large knapsack, a bottle of mineral water, a torch, granola bars, a key, his Pakistani passport and US green card. What considerable space was left in the knapsack he filled with the vast sums of money Harry kept on hand to buy Afghan loyalty. He hesitated a moment over the photograph of Hiroko, Ilse and Kim in New York, and then decided against it. He wanted nothing on him which would tie him to anyone else. But he took Harry’s bomber jacket — his own was too stained, and the smell might attract wild animals.

The tunnel was narrow and musty, its roof too low for upright walking. Raza thought of Harry in here just weeks earlier, hunched over with his body angled sideways to ease his progress. ‘I feel like Alice in Wonderland stuck in that house,’ he’d groaned and Raza, slight enough to walk through with minimal discomfort, had laughed and said that if ever they really needed to use this tunnel as an escape route he’d go first because there was every likelihood that Harry would get stuck. ‘What then? You’d leave me?’ Harry said, turning to smile at Raza and tripping on a stone — here, here, the torch-light shining on the tunnel wall showed Raza the smear of dried blood from Harry’s temple. Raza wiped tears off his face and pressed them against Harry’s blood. Then, awkwardly — it required him to crane his neck uncomfortably — he pressed his mouth against the moist blood. But it still didn’t seem quite real to him.

It was almost an hour later that he finally emerged on the other side of the tunnel into a roofless structure which smelt faintly of livestock, no sign of habitation around. The scent came from the dun-coloured tarpaulin which Harry had found in a barn filled with goat droppings. Beneath it was a jeep.

Raza pulled off the tarpaulin, unlocked the jeep with the key from Harry’s bedside, and drove out of the derelict barn. Through the darkness he made out the faint outlines of mountains — the border, and Pakistan. He stopped the jeep, consulted his GPS. Pakistan was the obvious destination. Obvious to him, and to Steve. He might just be able to convince the Army guards at the border to phone Captain Sajjad Ashraf and receive assurances that Raza was just another Pakistani who the Americans had turned against after extracting all that was useful from him, but the bigger problem was the bounty hunters who prowled the border area, on the lookout for ‘enemy combatants’.

Raza stepped out of the jeep and unbuttoned the soft top. The stars glittered malevolently. One phone call from Steve — perhaps that call had already been made — and he would enter data banks the world over as a suspected terrorist. His bank accounts frozen. His mother’s phone tapped. His emails and phone logs, his Internet traffic, his credit-card receipts: no longer the markers of his daily life allowing him to wind a path back through a thicket of lovers to the specificity of the 3.13 a.m. call with Margo, the poem forwarded to Aliya, the box of Miami sand couriered to Natalie, but a different kind of evidence entirely. That nothing in the world could possibly show him to be Harry Burton’s murderer seemed barely to matter in the face of all that could be done to his life before that conclusion. If anyone even bothered with a conclusion. He had never felt so sharply the powerlessness of being merely Pakistani.

Perhaps he should go back, back through the tunnel to Steve. Back where he could explain about the cricket ball and Abdullah’s brother, and the Commander — and Kim Burton could verify he had called her to discuss Abdullah. And what would that prove? Only that he wanted to help a man he hadn’t seen in twenty years who ran from the FBI. If Steve was looking for confirmation that Raza’s allegiance belonged to some brotherhood of jihadis he would find it right there, right from Kim Burton’s mouth. He leaned his head against the doorframe with a small pathetic cry.

No, there could be no going back — not to the compound, not to his life. He unzipped the knapsack, tossed out his passport and green card and watched the wind sift fine particles of sand on to the documents that made him legal. For an instant longer he breathed in deeply the desert air, everything around him vast and indifferent, and felt the terror of unbecoming.

Then he returned to the jeep, and plotted his course on the GPS navigation system.

In New York taxi cabs Hiroko always made sure she sat behind the passenger-side seat so the cabbies could turn to look at her as she talked to them about their lives — discussing everything from the disconnection between their families back home and their all-male New York world to every component that went into strike action: leasing and medallions, the TLC and the TWA, the brokers and the garage-owners. Through these conversations she began to understand a great many things about this varied group of migrant workers, including their network of communication — via CB radios, cell-phone networks, holding-lot conversations, driver-welfare organisations, the Taxi Workers’ Alliance.

It was the effectiveness of this network of communication — and Omar from Gujranwala’s willingness to put it in motion on her behalf — which had her walking into the reading room of the New York Public Library four days after Harry Burton died.

As she entered the cavernous reading room made cosy by its many desk lamps, Hiroko found the teacher in her beaming at the sight of all those heads bent over books, some thrum of energy and the turning of pages slipping the room out of the grasp of silence into the comfort of quiet. She walked down the aisle between desks, the chandeliers reflecting their light off the floor, turning it into a bronze river.

Halfway down the room, a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man wearing a thick green sweater was sitting straight-backed in his chair, his fingers resting very lightly on the page of a book. The electric-blue tape which held together the frame of his glasses identified him as the man Hiroko had come to meet.

She sat down in the empty seat beside him. The expectancy of his glance towards her quickly shifted into discomfort, and he stood up, taking the book with him, and moved down to another chair which had empty seats on either side of it.

The old man with crumpled features sitting opposite Hiroko raised his eyebrows at her.

‘Afghan. They don’t like women,’ he said.

Hiroko smiled politely and made her way down the table to one of the empty seats beside the Afghan man with the hazel eyes and the chin several shades lighter than the rest of his face. He ignored her, and carried on looking down at the photograph of lush orchards against a backdrop of mountains in his oversized book.

‘Abdullah. I’m Raza’s mother.’

His instant reaction was to push his chair back from the table with a loud scraping sound his expression one of disbelief. She put her hand on his arm, and he paused, seeing Raza in her features.

‘Raza’s not Hazara. I’m Japanese. And his father was Pakistani. Originally from Delhi. He and I moved to Karachi in ’47.’