Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

At a certain point, when it seemed to Raza that his eyes would never see anything but sand outside the window, something extraordinary happened. The convoy passed a group of nomads making their way across the desert on foot. And there they were — finally, miraculously: women.

Faces uncovered, arms laden with bangles, clothes bright. He always thought they had to be beautiful — those women of fairy tale who distracted princes on mythic quests with a single smile. Now he saw it was enough for them to simply be.

‘Stop,’ he said to the driver, but of course no one did, and within seconds the landscape was sand again.

But just that glimpse moved Raza into a profound melancholy — no, not melancholy. It was uljhan he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and disquiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word. He thought of the man whose name he was still unable to consider entirely as his own: his mother’s German fiancé who entered a new country, its language alien to him, and set about knowing it. That Konrad, he knew, would have found a way to make the convoy stop. He would have seen the desert as something other than a shore without a sea. He would not have spent more than a month in Afghanistan and remained so entirely separate from it.

Raza didn’t know that even as he was thinking this he was nearing the edge of Afghanistan. The pickup climbed a sand dune, and on the other side there was a habitation of sand-coloured structures.

‘You’ll get out here,’ the guard said. He pointed to the men who were watching the convoy approach. ‘They’ll take you now.’ The guard had answered all Raza’s questions with monosyllables and shrugs but now he looked at him with compassion. ‘Just remember, it will end. And the next stage will end.’

By early morning the next day, Raza was repeating those words to himself as though they were a prayer to ward off insanity.

He was in another pickup — one with a covered rear compartment — though this one was decades and several evolutionary steps behind the gleaming blue desert racers; it bore a comforting resemblance to the pickup in which the Pathan driver had ferried Raza and the other neighbourhood boys to and from school. Then he used to laugh at the other boys squeezed together on the two parallel benches that ran the length of the rear compartment while he was in the front learning Pashto from the driver, a tiny window between the driver and passenger seat allowing him to look back at the other boys, who made obscene gestures in his direction without malice. If he’d only stayed in the back of the pickup with them, he now thought, he would never have learnt Pashto, never have talked to Abdullah, never set off everything that led him to be sitting in a cardboard box at the back of a pickup while young Pathan boys bowled cabbages towards him.

‘Vegetables can cross the border without paperwork, so you must become a vegetable,’ one of the men from the sand-coloured houses had explained to Raza. So here he was trying to contain his panic as the cabbages piled up in the back of the pickup, reaching his knees, his chest, his eyes.

‘I’ll suffocate in here,’ he called out.

‘You’ll be the first,’ replied a voice that seemed to find this notion intriguing.

For most of the journey he stood, stooped beneath the canopy, hemmed in by chest-high cabbages. But as the border approached the driver rapped sharply on the partition that divided them and with long, deep breaths Raza lowered himself into the cardboard box. Within seconds, with the motion of the pickup, the cabbages had rolled over him, cutting off light and air. And so, in the company of cabbages — breathing in cabbage air, pressed in by cabbage weight — Raza reached Iran.

Time had never moved so slowly as in the dark dankness of cabbages. The pickup seemed to stop for a long time before the border guards approached. The cabbages muffled all sound except that of his heart.

When the pickup moved again, Raza still dared not stand up. He had been firmly instructed to wait for the driver to signal an all-clear. But there was so little air.

Finally the driver stopped the pickup and rapped again on the partition. Raza burst out of the cabbages, displacing the ones that were covering him with such energy they went thud-thudding against the canopy, and gulped in great mouthfuls of air. While the driver watched him, laughing, he clambered into the space between the cabbages and the canopy and, like a swimmer, propelled himself outwards.

‘Had fun?’ the driver asked, taking Raza’s hand and helping him down to the ground. ‘Cabbage soup for dinner!’

After Ruby Eye’s guards, Ahmed the driver was a joy to sit with. His family were nomads, he explained, as he drove Raza south towards the coast. But drought and war had brought an end to the lifestyle his family had known for centuries, and now they had grudgingly settled near the border and become drivers if they were lucky, stone-pickers if they weren’t.

‘The landmines are the worst,’ he said, while Raza was still trying to work out whether ‘stone-pickers’ was a Pashto euphemism. ‘Once we used to travel in large groups for protection. Then we started to move in groups of three or four so if anyone steps on a powerful mine it can only have so much impact and others following behind will see the bodies — or the birds swarming around — and know to avoid that place.’ He smiled jauntily as he said this, and Raza didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but was glad just for the camaraderie.

He wanted to ask Ahmed the driver, Where — or what — is home for your people? But though he knew how to ask where someone was from, or where they lived, the word for ‘home’ in Pashto eluded him. As he tried to think of ways to explain it, the meaning receded.

He was so caught up in talking to Ahmed that it took him a while to understand why Iran felt so strange, despite its topographic similarity to Afghanistan.

‘No war,’ he said near sunset to Ahmed, when he finally understood.

Ahmed nodded, for once forbearing from jokes. He didn’t need to ask what this statement was doing in the middle of a conversation about poisonous snakes in Dasht-e-Margo — the Desert of Death — which Raza had travelled across in the pickup truck without knowing its name.

They stopped for the night in a hotel, where Raza amazed Ahmed with his command of Farsi, and set off again the next morning. They’d hardly gone any distance when a car drew up alongside them filled with women wearing headscarves and dark glasses, calling to Raza’s mind all those Hollywood actresses of the fifties who Harry had loved. For a few seconds the car and pickup travelled alongside, Ahmed shouting out questions to the women, which Raza translated with a disarming smile: ‘Which of you will marry me, which will marry my friend?’ ‘Why are you travelling by road, don’t angels fly?’ The women shouting back in response, ‘We don’t want husbands who smell of cabbages. Women are superior to angels, why are you insulting us!’, all the while looking at Raza. All too soon they turned off the road with waves and air-kisses, leaving Ahmed to clutch his heart while Raza mumbled, ‘I think I love Iran.’

He had begun to think the worst part of the journey was over, was already starting to think of the cabbages as his test of fire, and for the first time since Harry died he felt a certain lightening within. They’d left the desert behind by now, and at his first glimpse of the sea Raza hollered in delight. Karachi, Dubai, Miami — all seaside cities, though until he saw the Iran coast he didn’t know that had any meaning for him.

But the closer they drew to the coast, the quieter Ahmed became.

‘Why don’t you just stay here,’ he said, by the time they were close enough to the docks to smell the sea air. ‘If you’re running from the Americans, Iran is a good place to be. You even speak the language. And the women are beautiful — and Shia, like you Hazara.’