Burnt Shadows (14 page)

       
Hiroko could only stare at Elizabeth. ‘Intensity of passion’? This Englishwoman was crazy.

       
But what if she wasn’t?

       
Hiroko reached back to a place between burns where he had touched her. He had wanted her. Despite the birds. The blood rushed to her cheeks as she finally understood the strange lift of the fabric of his trousers. He had wanted her and she . . . she had wanted him to go on touching her. Everywhere. She covered her face with her hands, and Elizabeth saw that the woman beside her was just a child.

       
‘Hiroko, it’s impossible.’

       
Hiroko spread her fingers apart to glare through them at Elizabeth.

       
‘Your marriage has just made you bitter. And resentful.’

       
It was a relief finally to be held accountable.

       
‘Perhaps. It’s certainly true that I’m jealous of Sajjad. I’m jealous of the fact that everyone I love loves him more than me, and I resent the fact that I’m the only person in the world whose love he’s never been interested in. There, I’ve said it.’

       
Hiroko raised her eyebrows, unsure what to make of this.

       
‘Is that a relief?’

       
‘God, yes.’ Elizabeth cupped her hands over her mouth and exhaled deeply. ‘God in heaven, yes it is. Oh.’ She crossed her hands over her chest. ‘My goodness. What strange things we humans are.’

       
Hiroko couldn’t help but laugh.

       
‘Don’t implicate all of us in this. Your strangeness is entirely your own.’

       
They were friends again now. Elizabeth moved closer to Hiroko on the branch.

       
‘What I’ve said doesn’t change the fact that you don’t belong in his world.’

       
Hiroko was silent for a long time.

       
‘I don’t belong in your world either.’ She tilted her head thoughtfully, and stopped being a girl. ‘You just gave me something valuable. The belief that there are worthwhile things still to be found. All I’ve been doing all this while is thinking of losses. So much lost. I keep thinking of Nagasaki. You said to me once that Delhi must seem so strange and unfamiliar, but nothing in the world could ever be more unfamiliar than my home that day. That unspeakable day. Literally unspeakable. I don’t know the words in any language . . . My father, Ilse. I saw him in the last seconds of his life, and I thought he was something unhuman. He was covered in scales. No skin, no hair, no clothes, just scales. No one, no one in the world should ever have to see their father covered in scales.’

       
Elizabeth gripped Hiroko’s hand and brought it to her lips.

       
‘And the thing is, I still don’t understand. Why did they have to do it? Why a second bomb? Even the first is beyond anything I can . . . but a second. You do that, and see what you’ve done, and then you do it again. How is that . . .? Do you know they were going to bomb Kokura that day instead? But it was cloudy so they had to turn around to their second target – Nagasaki. And it was cloudy there, too. I remember the clouds that day so well. They almost gave up. So close to giving up, and then they saw a break in the cloud. And boom.’ She said the ‘boom’ so softly it was little more than an exhalation.

       
‘I always planned on leaving Nagasaki, you know. I was never sentimental about it. But until you see a place you’ve known your whole life reduced to ash you don’t realise how much we crave familiarity. Do you see those flowers on that hillside, Ilse? I want to know their names in Japanese. I want to hear Japanese. I want tea that tastes the way tea should taste in my understanding of tea. I want to look like the people around me. I want people to disapprove when I break the rules and not simply to think that I don’t know better. I want doors to slide open instead of swinging open. I want all those things that never meant anything, that still wouldn’t mean anything if I hadn’t lost them. You see, I know that. I know that but it doesn’t stop my wanting them. I want to see Urakami Cathedral. I used to think it ruined the view, never liked it. But now I want to see Urakami Cathedral, I want to hear its bells ringing. I want to smell cherry blossom burning. I want to feel my body move with the motion of being on a street-car. I want to live between hills and sea. I want to eat kasutera.’

       
Want
. Elizabeth heard the repetition of the word and knew what religious conversion must feel like.
Want
. She remembered that, dimly. Somewhere.
Want
. At what point had her life become an accumulation of things she didn’t want? She didn’t want Henry to be away. She didn’t want to be married to a man she no longer knew how to talk to. She didn’t want to keep hidden the fact that at times during the war – and especially when Berlin was firebombed – she had felt entirely German. She didn’t want to agree that the British had come to the end of a good innings. She didn’t want to go back to London and live under the shadow of her meddling mother-in-law. She didn’t want to make James unhappy through her inability to be the woman he had thought she would turn into, given time and instruction. She didn’t want to be undesired. She didn’t want her future to look anything like her present. She gripped the branch, feeling suddenly dizzy, and tried to concentrate on what Hiroko was saying.

       
‘But should I tell you what I don’t want? I don’t want to go back to Nagasaki. Or to Japan. I don’t want to hide these burns on my back, but I don’t want people to judge me by them either. Hibakusha. I hate that word. It reduces you to the bomb. Every atom of you. So now I have to find something different to want, Elizabeth. And I’m sorry – you’ve been so kind, so incredibly generous – but moving to London with you and James, that’s not it. That’s not what I want.’

       
‘What do you want?’

       
‘I don’t know. Maybe . . . Sajjad.’ She said it as though testing the statement.

       
As gently as her voice would allow, and despite everything she had just been thinking about her own life, Elizabeth said, ‘You must find a way to let go of that. His family  . . .’

       
Those last two words sank into Hiroko’s stomach with a terrible weight.

       
‘I know. You’re right. I know.’ She closed her eyes and rested her head on her knees.

9

The morning after they buried Khadija Ashraf her four sons and son-in-law walked single file across the courtyard of the Jama Masjid, following behind an old man who drizzled water on to the ground from a bucket to cool the baking stones. The old man was an ascetic Sufi who for years now had been watering the sandstone for the recently bereaved who walked across the courtyard. Every evening he scraped the dead skin off his soles to ensure his own feet would not become hardened against the pain of the burning ground – he would have to endure, then overcome, suffering through purely spiritual paths. Khadija Ashraf had always disapproved of such thinking. ‘It’s the Christians who believe we were put on earth to suffer. But Muslims know that Allah – the Beneficent, the Merciful – forgave Adam and Eve their temptation.’ And then she pointed an accusing finger at the sky. ‘And so you should have – it was you, not the Snake, who tempted them by making a fruit forbidden.’

       
Who is this God of the Ascetics who wants to be reached through deprivation? Sajjad repeated his mother’s words to himself, his lips moving soundlessly.

       
With her dying breath, Khadija Ashraf had whispered in his ear the ritual salutation from elder to younger – ‘Keep on living’ – and now the only way in which he could bear her loss was to believe some part of her soul had entered him with that breath and now nestled against his heart. That he didn’t really believe such things in no way prevented him from taking comfort in the thought. In some way, he knew, she was within him – airing her opinions, chiding him, making him laugh.

       
Without a word, he turned away from the water-dappled path and veered towards the pillared corridor that ran along the perimeter of the courtyard. Stepping through an archway into the corridor, he received the coolness of the shaded stone with gratitude. He heard his eldest brother, Altamash, call out to him, but merely responded with a wave of his fingers to indicate they should go on alone, and wrapped his arm around a pillar, his fingers strumming its ridges as he looked towards the Red Fort. Dilli. My Dilli. But today it was absence, not belonging, that the Old City echoed back at him.

       
‘Sajjad, come home with us.’ It was his brother-in-law speaking. ‘Your sister and I will be leaving this afternoon, and there are things we have to talk about before we go.’

       
‘I’ll be there soon,’ he replied, not looking back at the men of his family who stood behind his back like a phalanx of guards.

       
‘If there are things to talk about, talk about them now,’ his brother Iqbal said. ‘I’m going to say goodbye when we leave here. I’m engaged for the rest of the day.’

       
‘I told your sister we’d talk about it when the whole family is gathered. Can’t you delay your business, Iqbal?’

       
‘No.’

       
Altamash made a noise of disgust. For years now it had been common knowledge in the moholla that Iqbal had taken one of the Old City’s courtesans as his mistress.

       
‘You think we don’t all know what your business is? You have no shame. The one promise you made to our mother was that you would always come home to your wife before midnight, and the first night she is gone from us you stay out until dawn.’

       
‘She is threatening to go to Pakistan,’ Iqbal said. They didn’t need to ask who ‘she’ was. ‘I told her last night I will do whatever I must to keep her here.’

       
Sajjad turned around.

       
‘You threatened this woman you claim to love?’

       
‘I didn’t threaten her. I promised to marry her.’

       
With a curse, Altamash caught his brother by the arm.

       
‘Did you forget you have a wife?’

       
‘I’m allowed a second wife.’

       
‘Yes, if you treat them both as equals and receive your first wife’s permission.’ Sikandar, the quietest and most devout of the brothers, spoke up. ‘We all know neither of these things will happen.’

       
‘Even the Prophet had a favourite wife,’ Iqbal said, pulling away from Altamash. ‘And if my wife doesn’t give me permission to marry again I will happily divorce her.’

       
Altamash caught hold of Iqbal again.

       
‘You have one wife and she will remain a sister to all your brothers no matter how badly you behave. We will never accept this other woman. We will never accept any children you have by her. You will not be welcome in our home with her. And we will no longer pay any of the debts she has made you accumulate. How long before she returns to the only life she has ever known when she discovers her husband is a pauper with no ability beyond that of extravagance?’

       
Iqbal turned to his brother-in-law.

       
‘You won’t be so unkind to me, will you, brother? You’ll let us come and live with you in Lucknow?’

       
‘No, I can’t. Don’t look at me with those eyes, Iqbal. I don’t approve of what you want to do. And besides—’ He looked away from the brothers.

       
‘Besides what? You planning to move to Pakistan, too?’ Altamash didn’t even look at his brother-in-law as he said it, his eyes focused on conveying contempt to Iqbal.

       
‘Yes.’

       
Sajjad let out a huge sigh and sat down on the low barrier that ran between pillars. Bending forward, he covered his ears with his hands to try and shut out the shouting. Everything was collapsing now.

       
Less than three months ago he had touched Hiroko’s skin – a moment he now recognised as one of pure exaltation. But exaltation was always the bugle cry that awoke lamentation – hadn’t he read enough poetry to know that? That his hand touching her back was the greatest moment of physical intimacy that would ever exist between them he would have borne without bitterness; though it stopped far short of his desire, he knew that was both necessary and inevitable. Even now he couldn’t imagine a circumstance in which there would have been another outcome. The unexpected pain and resentment didn’t come from Hiroko but from the Burtons’ dismissal of him. When Lala Buksh came to Sajjad with money and an offer of a reference he understood that Hiroko had told them that he was not an ‘animal’, a ‘rapist’. Even as some part of him wanted to fall to its knees in relief, another part looked at the too generous severance pay and understood it meant he would never receive any form of apology beyond this. That it was Elizabeth not James who owed him the apology was not something he stopped to consider – despite their differences the Burtons still functioned in many ways as a unit, and if one half of the unit could not acknowledge the injustice done to him then it fell to the other half to do so.

       
‘I am done with the English,’ he had said, and started to consider what he might want to make of his life now that he had been lifted from the sense of obligation that had kept him tied to James Burton long past the point when he saw there would be no advancement in that position. Altamash asked him to help with the calligraphy business for a few weeks, just until he found someone to replace the Nazir brothers who had worked with the family for years and were now on their way to Karachi with dreams of establishing themselves as the finest artisans of language in that British cantonment town with its own dreams about its future in the still-unconfirmed state of Pakistan. His mother urged him to take on the financial side of the business, so Sajjad agreed ‘for a period of six weeks only’. But at the end of the six weeks came the British announcement of 15 August – just over two months away – as the date for the British withdrawal and the creation of the independent states of India and Pakistan. It was hardly a time to consider a future career; everything was turmoil, every day brought news of further atrocities, and relationships that had seemed to be cast in steel disintegrated under the acid question: Are you for India or Pakistan? Even Sajjad couldn’t pretend it no longer touched his life as he felt his nails bite into his palms at tales of the atrocities, and heard his heart beat a farewell tattoo for all those Dilliwallas who said they could not stay.