Burnt Shadows (27 page)
As he placed the receiver carefully on its cradle, first pausing to wipe off the tears that had run down to the mouthpiece, he realised he had been waiting a long time for confirmation that he was . . . not an outsider, no, not quite that. Not when he’d lived in this moholla his whole life, had scraped and scabbed his knees on every street within a one-mile radius. Not an outsider, just a tangent. In contact with the world of his moholla, but not intersecting it. After all, intersections were created from shared stories and common histories, from marriages and the possibility of marriages between neighbouring families – from this intersecting world Raza Konrad Ashraf was cast out.
He walked out into the courtyard, deeply inhaling the sharp evening breeze, and shook his head at his father’s invitation to sit, sit, listen to Sikandar’s letter from Delhi, before heading out into the street, deserted except for a feral tomcat, which squatted on its haunches and hissed at him until he turned and walked in the opposite direction, nodding as if to indicate the cat was a guide, not a threat.
She’d marry Sikandar’s son if he proposed.
The thought – though absurd and untrue – came to mind as a statement of fact. Yes, Salma’s parents would let her marry his cousin Altamash, Sikandar’s youngest son, named for the eldest of the Ashraf brothers. They’d let her marry Altamash even though he was Indian and poor and they knew nothing about him worth knowing except that he was Sajjad Ashraf’s nephew, Raza’s cousin. Raza hunched over, arms crossed around his body, causing a woman watching from her balcony to wonder if the strangely arresting young man had a stomach ache.
In the neighbourhood, people still asked about Altamash, though it was five years since he had come to Karachi, accompanying his mother, who hoped the middle-class neighbourhood in which Sajjad lived would net her a wife with a sizeable dowry for Altamash’s eldest unmarried brother. Altamash was the only one of the Delhi cousins near Raza in age, and the two boys had fallen upon each other in a rough-and-tumble fight of instant adoration when they met. But when they went out together it was Altamash, not Raza, who everyone took for Sajjad’s son.
And then there was that Friday afternoon, a group of boys making their way from mosque to cricket ground, when Altamash had turned angrily on Bilal after he hailed down a rickshaw and, pointing at the two cousins, asked the driver to play the ‘guess which one of these two boys is not Pakistani’ game which had so entertained him over the past few days. It’s not funny, Altamash explained. In India when they want to insult Muslims they call us Pakistani. Bilal had laughed out loud. In Pakistan when they want to insult Muhajirs they call us Indian, he replied. The two boys had slapped each other on the shoulder while Raza stood awkwardly beside them, sliding the skullcap off his head and trying to understand why such injustice should be seen as humour.
He’d never known until now what it was in Bilal’s game that had upset him so much, just as he’d never really interrogated his need to keep hidden his Japanese vocabulary. But in that moment, unable to duck the knowledge that more than anything else Salma pitied him, it was inescapable: he didn’t fit this neighbourhood. A failure, a soap-factory worker, a bomb-marked mongrel. He spat the words out, over and over: Raza Konrad Ashraf. Konrad. His lips drew back from his teeth as he said it. He wanted to reach into his own name and rip out the man whose death was a foreign body wedged beneath the two Pakistani wings of his name.
Hands clenched, he turned on to a street lined with compact shopfronts, and saw the familiar sight of young boys playing tape-ball cricket in the middle of the road, cries of ‘O-ho, Khalifa!’ greeting the captain, who had just promoted himself up the order. A car came zipping down the road, swerving away from the boys and the wickets, windows down and the sound of the beautiful teenage girl singing the new hit ‘Boom! Boom!’ spilling out on to the street. A few months ago he and his class-fellows would have been part of that cricket match, or one near by . . . as he thought that he saw two of those former class-fellows strolling towards him, pulling the paper wrapping away from kabab rolls. They were both studying to be engineers and from the gesticulations of their hands he knew they were discussing something they had learnt that day, using kabab rolls to stand in for – what? Aeroplanes? Currents? Railway tracks? He knew nothing of the language in which their days were now steeped. One of the boys glanced in his direction, and Raza backed into the shadows. You could be a bomb-marked mongrel or a failure but not both. Not for a second, both.
And then he thought a single word. America.
He exhaled slowly, unclenching his hands. Yes, he would go there. Uncle Harry would make it happen. None of the rest of this mattered while he had the promise of America.
20
Raza stood in the doorway of his parents’ room, listening to his father’s groans of pain with a mixture of concern and guilt.
‘Oh Allah – the Beneficent, the Merciful – it is this you tried to spare us!’
Raza didn’t know what Allah had to do with throwing Harry Burton out of the house the previous night, but he did know that he was the reason his father had acted so against his own hospitable nature that he was suffering physical agony over it.
He still couldn’t believe how things had turned out. The evening had started magnificently – it was dinner in the courtyard to celebrate Raza’s decision to retake his exams, armed with Uncle Harry’s strat egies for test anxiety. Raza had taken advantage of the cool February breeze to put on his cashmere jacket, which he felt compelled, halfway through dinner, to offer to ‘return’ to Harry. Uncle Harry said no, of course – and, winking, added, ‘Just because I stole your shoes that once doesn’t mean I’m going to run off with your entire wardrobe.’
Everyone was so happy, so filled with laughter – and his parents both extended their hospitality so far as to drink large quantities from the bottle Uncle Harry had brought for Hiroko, even though it was clear to Raza from a single sniff that the liquid was badly fermented. Failure was a world away on a night like this, bombs an entire universe apart.
But after dinner Raza asked if it was true that in New York the city lights were so bright you couldn’t see the stars, because if so he’d take a picture of Karachi’s night sky with him to university and pin it on to the ceiling of his room.
Then he’d turned casually to his parents, who were looking askance at him, and said, ‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. Uncle Harry’s going to get an American university to pay for me to go there.’
That’s when things started to fall apart. Uncle Harry said well no, that wasn’t what he’d said at all – though there was no reason Raza shouldn’t get into university if he managed to do well in his exams. Of course, funding wouldn’t be easy – but he’d be sure to get Raza one of those books which detailed all the American universities and their admission and financial-aid policies and procedures.
It took Raza a few moments to realise he wasn’t joking.
‘But you said . . .?’ He turned to his father. ‘He said!’
‘Come on, Raza.’ Harry leaned forward, frowning. ‘I said I’d teach you strategies to combat test anxiety. That was the only promise I made and I’ve delivered on that, haven’t I? Well, haven’t I?’
‘Those stupid exercises won’t do any good,’ Raza sulked.
‘There’s a difference between stupid and simple. Grow up. Christ, it’s ridiculous the way this country makes you believe that if you know the right people everything is possible. Do you really think I can snap my fingers and get you into university?’
‘You said, “I’ll help you out with all the application stuff.” Those were your words.’ He had worn them on his heart these last few weeks.
‘Well, of course I’ll help you figure out the admissions process. Of course I’ll do that. And I’ll give you any information the Embassy has about standardised tests.’ He spread his hands generously. ‘I’ll even look over your personal statement. There’s nothing more than that I can do. If I’d meant anything more – if I’d given any kind of guarantee – I’d have told you there’s no need to retake the Islamic-studies exam. American universities won’t need that. But no, you need to retake it in case you have to fall back on higher education here. I never told you to rely on getting to America.’
Raza was horrified by the tears that started to leak from his eyes, and further horrified when Sajjad slammed down his glass on the table and turned on Harry.
‘You Burtons! You’re just like your father, Henry, with your implied promises that are only designed to bind us to you. He used to tell me there was no one more capable than me – I didn’t understand that meant I was the most willing and uncomplaining servant he’d known.’ Some long-buried outrage, brought to the surface by the crushing disappointment on his son’s face, made him stand up and point towards the door. ‘We Ashrafs don’t need any more Burtons in our lives. Please leave my family alone.’
Now Raza watched his father lying in bed with his hands pressed to either side of his head as though he thought he might be able to squeeze out the memory of yesterday, and wondered why it was so much easier for him to make things worse than better. On a sudden inspiration he bounded from the room into the living room, unplugged Sajjad’s most beloved possession – his tape recorder – and brought it into his parents’ room along with a cassette of sarangi music which he had bought for his father yesterday with his wage from the soap factory. He had thought he would present it to his father after dinner last night, but Harry Burton’s departure had destroyed the necessary mood of festivity.
Raza plugged in the tape recorder, inserted the cassette and pressed play, mouth already forming into a smile in anticipation of Sajjad’s delighted response. But at the first sound of the stringed instrument, Sajjad cried out, ‘Turn it off!’ and Raza, startled, slapped down on the stop button, the force of his hand unbalancing the tape recorder from its precarious position at the edge of the bedside table and toppling it on to the floor with a sickening crash.
Sajjad turned his head, saw the pieces of the tape recorder on the floor and looked at his son only long enough to say, ‘Raza . . .’ in a tone of total despair before turning on his side, his back towards the boy.
Hiroko, entering the room with a piece of toast, saw the broken machine and made a noise of grief.
‘It’s broken,’ she said. ‘Oh, Raza. Your father’s tape recorder.’
Raza backed out of the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but Hiroko was already bending over her husband and telling him to eat some toast.
‘I’m dying,’ Sajjad said. ‘I’m dead already. I’m in hell.’
‘If this is hell why am I here?’ Hiroko demanded, a hand on her hip.
Sajjad opened one eye.
‘You’ve come to rescue me?’ he said hopefully.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘With toast. Eat it and stop complaining, you silly drunkard.’
But Raza didn’t hear any part of this conversation. He was in his room, stuffing the entire wad of his earnings from the soap factory into the pocket of his kurta, an expression of resoluteness on his face.
An hour later he was elbowing his way off a ‘yellow devil’ minibus and heading for the truck-stand by Sohrab Goth’s Bara Market.
Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Raza knew from the Pathan school-van driver, Sohrab Goth was a village on the outskirts of Karachi, where nomadic Afghans lived in makeshift homes during the winter months when their lands in Afghanistan yielded nothing but barrenness and the perennial nature of Karachi’s demands – for labour, for goods – beckoned men from their mountains and plains towards the sea. But now Sohrab Goth had sprawled into Karachi, a rapidly expanding part of the city’s ‘informal sector’, serving everyone from the policemen whose meagre salaries left them dependent on bribes to factory-owners looking for cheap labour to smugglers who needed markets and middlemen for shiny new technologies that reflected the gleaming eyes of teenagers searching for some way to make things up to their fathers.
Raza kept one hand jammed into the pocket of his kurta as he walked through Sohrab Goth, clutching the bundle of money, wondering whether he should simply go back to the factory next week instead of wasting his time over another attempt at the exam. The belief that Harry’s strategies for dealing with test anxiety would work now seemed as foolish as the belief that any American university would pay for him to study there. Perhaps he just needed to accept his fate. Failure. Bomb-marked mongrel. No talisman to replace the ‘America’ wrenched from his grasp and stamped beneath Uncle Harry’s heel.
There was no one at the truck-stand beside Bara Market, but in the adjoining plot a child picking through the garbage and slinging what could be recycled into a cloth bag on his back nodded when Raza asked for ‘Abdullah with the dead Soviet on his truck’ and directed him towards a squatter settlement on the other side of Bara Market.
Raza had never walked through slums before, and the fastidiousness that was his Tanaka inheritance almost turned him around as he made his way gingerly through the narrow unpaved lanes and the stench of a rivulet of water announced itself as sewage. But he pushed forward, wondering how he was supposed to find Abdullah in this densely populated gathering of refugee homes. Bare wires looped dangerously low, attached by hooks to the electricity lines beside which this tenement had sprung up. From a distance they had looked like fissures in the sky, revealing the darkness beyond. Raza tried not to think about sanitation as a man walked past him with two buckets filled with brackish water.
