Burnt Shadows (17 page)

       
By the eighth time James asked the question, Sajjad and Hiroko’s clothes were hanging from a tree branch, the breeze scattering tiny yellow flowers over them.

       
By the ninth, Sajjad was trying to recover his voice to explain to Hiroko that certain parts of the male anatomy were best left unsqueezed.

       
By the tenth, Hiroko’s head was tucked under Sajjad’s chin, her quick breath ruffling his chest hair as his hands traced the outline of her burns.

       
By the eleventh, they were lying on the blanket, and Hiroko was about to give up her search for a word in any of four languages to describe the pleasure of sliding rainwater off a leaf into Sajjad’s belly button and then curling her tongue into the dip. (‘The pleasure is nectarous,’ Sajjad said, and though she couldn’t feel it she knew he touched one of her birds as he said it, and the words and gesture together made her kiss his mouth.)

       
By the twelfth, she was beginning to think the pain meant he didn’t know what he was doing, and was on the verge of telling him so.

       
By the thirteenth, a silver fox came to investigate the sounds, and then streaked away, running through a narrow beam of sunlight as it departed, convincing Sajjad that at that moment of climax he had seen a burst of starlight.

       
By the fourteenth, Hiroko, who had seen the fox for what it really was, rested her head on Sajjad’s arm and told him the Japanese word for fox was ‘kitsune’ – a figure prominent in myth. The oldest and wisest of the kitsune are kyubi – nine-tailed – and the colour of their fur is silver or gold. With a flick of just one of their tails they can start a monsoon shower, she said. So let’s presume the break in the rainfall is a sign of our kyubi’s favour. Our kyubi, he asked? Yes, I think we’ve found ourselves a guide and guardian.

       
By the fifteenth, she demanded to know why he had shifted down to rest his head on her thigh, thereby depriving her of his arm as pillow. So he showed her, and she stopped complaining.

       
By the sixteenth, they discovered the branch on which they’d hung their clothes was wet, and it only made them laugh.

       
By the seventeenth, they were on their way to the Burton cottage, where they had decided Hiroko would stay while Sajjad returned to Delhi and found a place for them to live. The mist had lifted entirely and Sajjad, who had never seen mountains before, believed the Himalayan peaks were surrounded by quick-flowing rivers of snow until Hiroko said, ‘Don’t be silly, husband, they’re clouds.’

       
Lamentation will not follow, Sajjad thought, putting his arm around Hiroko’s shoulders. The exaltation is too great. No sorrow could ever match this joy.

12

Sajjad stood on the banks of the Bosporus, and wondered how he could have ever thought the mosques of Istanbul beautiful. Now it was clear: the buildings were too squat, their minarets too narrow. The Bosporus itself was a strait, not a river; it should have been a river. And the written language – in Roman script! How could a nation choose to discard the grace of Arabic lettering (generations of Ashraf calligraphers wept in their graves at the thought). No, nothing here conformed to his aesthetic; even the crumbling decay of this once grand city did not have the right tempo, the right texture, the right quality of sighing.

       
James Burton. It was all his fault they were here.

       
He had been so convincing that evening when Sajjad and Hiroko walked into the Burton cottage, Sajjad desperately self-conscious because of the wet patches on his clothes, and said they were married. It was obvious the Burtons had expected the news, if not the timing of it. Elizabeth had at least pretended some happiness, but James had taken Sajjad by the arm and walked him outside.

       
‘You can’t take her to Delhi,’ he’d said. And then he’d begun to speak in his lawyer’s tones, as Sajjad hadn’t heard him do for a very long time. Here were the reasons, he said. He talked about the likely increase of violence leading up to, and leading on from, Partition. The communal make-up of Delhi he laid out in great detail. His own thoughts on the nature of violence and its effects on the most seemingly rational of human beings. The actions that desperation or rage or self-defence could provoke. He asked Sajjad questions starting with ‘What would you do if . . .’, asking the younger man to consider his possible responses to a range of violations – personal, religious, communal, familial. And when Sajjad was crouching on the ground, head in his hands, he had bent down, hand on Sajjad’s shoulder, and delivered his coup de grâce: ‘And after all Hiroko has had to endure, do you want to add to her suffering?’

       
Sajjad looked up, a supplicant before a man of wisdom.

       
‘But what other option do I have?’

       
James held out his hand and pulled Sajjad to his feet. This last act he would perform before leaving this place, these people. This final act of benevolent rule, against the tide of the Empire’s blood-soaked departure from India.

       
‘There’s an old general in Mussoorie who wants to give you a wedding present.’

       
It had been Elizabeth’s idea. There was no point telling Hiroko not to marry Sajjad, she’d told James; instead a way must be found to keep them away from Delhi ‘until all the Partition nonsense clears up’. She’d joined him in pacing for a while, and then cried out ‘Istanbul!’ and reached for the telephone. She placed a call to the General who had stopped Hiroko on the Mall to talk about flowers. His first wife, who had died many years earlier, had been Japanese and Elizabeth saw no reason to do anything other than take advantage of the old man’s sentimentality in regard to the figure of his lost love.

       
‘He has a home in Istanbul. His second wife was Turkish. But he hasn’t been there since her death in ’43. There’s a caretaker, though, and the General’s forever making drunken offers to anyone who’ll listen to go and stay in his yali by the Bosporus. And now he’s made an entirely sober offer for you and Hiroko to spend an extended honeymoon there.’

       
Honeymoons were for the English. Even if Sajjad had considered one, he couldn’t afford it. Hiroko would understand that. All his savings would have to go towards their new home in New Delhi. But he had heard the talk in the Old City about defence and revenge and infidels and justice, and he knew that James Burton was right when he said that Hiroko could not be allowed to witness further brutality. He would find a way to borrow money for the house when they returned to Delhi.

       
It had all seemed so inevitable, so sensible.

       
Sajjad turned his back on the indisputable beauty of the Blue Mosque, and trudged towards the ferry which would take him to the General’s yali and Hiroko. She would be sitting by the window looking at the light sparkling off the Bosporus, he imagined, finding a glimpse of calm in the image.

       
In fact, right then she was standing on a table, her palm pressing against the damp, sagging ceiling, trying to determine whether there was any immediate danger of the roof caving in. The yali, which had clearly once been glorious, was entirely in a state of disrepair. Its wood was rotting, the deep-red paint of its exterior peeling, and most of the windows had broken panes, or no panes at all. Even so, she had come to love the place in the months she and Sajjad had been here. They only used one room – the recessed one that overhung the Bosporus, and which Sajjad insisted had tipped forward several degrees since they started living there – but that was quite enough for both of them.

       
Hiroko stepped from the table to a chair and from there to the floor, and returned to the recessed room in which she thought she could detect the faint scent of this morning’s lovemaking. As she walked past the rosewood cabinet she touched the top drawer as thought it were a talisman. Inside was Elizabeth’s wedding present to her.

       
‘This belonged to Konrad,’ Elizabeth had said minutes after James took Sajjad by the arm and marched him outside the cottage. She unlocked a cupboard and took out a velvet box. ‘It was given to him by our grandmother, for his bride. He would want you to have it.’

       
Hiroko opened the box and, seeing the diamond set inside, she thrust it back at Elizabeth.

       
‘Let’s leave the grand gestures to the men,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You are the only person in the world with any claim to this. I’m not saying it in reproach to you for marrying someone else. I might hardly have known him, but I still know enough to be certain Konrad would only want your happiness. Take it.’

       
‘Save it for your son’s bride,’ Hiroko said. She felt no guilt about Konrad – could almost see a beautiful shape to the way he had brought both her and Sajjad to Bungle Oh! and to each other – but she wouldn’t claim things to which she knew she had no right. ‘What occasion will I have to wear it anyway?’

       
‘Sometimes you can be quite obtuse. I’m giving it to you. It’s yours. What you choose to do with it is your business. If you’re not going to wear it, well then . . .’ She shrugged, and as clearly as though the words had been spoken aloud Hiroko heard, Sell it!

       
Hiroko held out a hand to take the box. For an instant Elizabeth felt herself start to draw back – James had given her this diamond set on their wedding night, placing the necklace at her throat, the bracelet on her wrist, the earrings on her lobes while she lay naked on their bed – but then she released it into Hiroko’s hand.

       
Hiroko moved away from the cabinet and made herself comfortable amidst the many cushions on the window seat. Soon they would be back in Delhi and Sajjad would sell Elizabeth’s gift to a jeweller he could trust and use the money to buy their house. He had, at first, strongly resisted the idea of being so indebted to Elizabeth Burton – much of August had been spent in fighting about the matter – but as his own savings dwindled and each day brought further evidence that Hiroko was entirely unsuited to life within the joint family system his resistance had worn away. The relief of coming to a resolution about the matter so overwhelmed them both that they had spent the last few weeks in a state of total harmony, both careful to be generous with the other, willing – almost grateful – to give ground on minor disagreements. That was what was meant by the honeymoon period, Hiroko had thought the night before when Sajjad brushed her hair for her and said no, of course he didn’t wish it were longer, never mind that no woman in his moholla had hair as short as a boy’s. She wondered what would follow when the honeymoon ended.

       
She leaned out of the window, taking in the cool air that came off the Bosporus. Delhi in October! Sajjad had said they could wait a little longer before going back so that they’d arrive closer to winter, but she knew he said it hoping she’d refuse, and so she did. She had seen how it had agonised him to be away from his home in September when the Partition riots had overtaken Delhi, and the Old City had become a virtual siege town.

       
‘It’s not that I want to be there,’ he had said one night, lying on his stomach with the comforting weight of her resting on top of him, their fingers loosely linked. ‘What would I do? Join the men with machine guns guarding every entrance to my old neighbourhood? Refuse to join them, and cower inside my family home instead? That’s where we’d be, you know – Muslim homes in New Delhi are being destroyed. Women pulled out of their beds at night . . .’ He turned his face, and the moonlight showed Hiroko the unusual introspection of his expression. ‘Everything James Burton said about violence is true. It is the most contagious of all the madnesses. I don’t want to know which of my childhood friends have become murderers in the time we’ve been away. I don’t want to know what Iqbal might have done in all his frustrated passion. No, I don’t want to be there. But it feels like a betrayal, all the same.’ He had not then, or at any time, told her he’d left for her sake.

       
But that was September. Now the violence had ended, and though Sajjad said he knew it would be a different Delhi he’d be returning to, nothing could change the essential Dilliness of the place. He said it emphasising the ‘dil’ (it was in their first lesson that he’d told her ‘dil’ meant heart. She’d seen him blush as he said it, and she’d blushed in response. Remembering all the blushing of that initial lesson made her want to laugh. What strangers they’d been to each other and to themselves.)

       
She heard the door open. At last he was home. How ridiculous that he’d had to go to the Indian Consulate to get paperwork processed before they could return to Delhi.

       
He entered the room and the look of him made her breath stop.

       
Without saying a word, he walked across to her – his steps so slow, so dragging, everything about him defeated.

       
‘What’s wrong? What happened?’ she said as he sat down beside her, carefully, as though his bones were brittle.

       
‘They said I chose to leave.’ He said the words slowly, carefully, as though they were a foreign language whose meaning he was trying to grasp. ‘They said I’m one of the Muslims who chose to leave India. It can’t be unchosen. They said, Hiroko, they said I can’t go back to Dilli. I can’t go back home.’

       
Hiroko could only watch as her husband drew up his legs and curled over on the mattress. She said his name, repeated endearments in English, Urdu, Japanese – but he couldn’t hear her above the fluttering of pigeons and the call of the muezzin of Jama Masjid and the cacophony of his brothers’ arguments and the hubbub of merchants and buyers in Chandni Chowk and the rustling of palm leaves in the monsoons and the laughter of his nephews and nieces and the shouts of kite-fliers and the burble of fountains in courtyards and the husky voice of the never-seen neighbour singing ghazals before sunrise and his heartbeat, his frantic heartbeat  . . .