Burnt Shadows Part 10

First, he was disbelieving, convinced she was playing a ridiculous joke on him. Then he raised his voice, bellowed that the boy didn't study enough. But when she told him which exam he'd failed, and what had happened, Sajjad just shook his head in disbelief and sat down, his anger unable to sustain itself, as always.

'He'll take the exam again in the autumn,' Hiroko said, sitting next to him and clasping his hand. 'The results will be in before college starts, and they'll hold a place for him pending that one result. It's happened with our students before.'

For a few moments Sajjad was silent, but finally he nodded and brought her hand to his lips.

'All right, I won't be angry with him. It might not hurt him to miss a rung on a ladder. Next time, he'll leap right over it.'

He went outside to find his son, to tell him Hiroko instructed him to use these words 'These things happen'. On his way out he cursed under his breath the government which kept trying to force religion into everything public. His mother, with her most intimate relationship with Allah, would have personally knocked on the door of Army House and told the President he should have more shame than to ask all citizens to conduct their love affairs with the Almighty out in the open.

What Sajjad saw as he stepped outside was this: Bilal and Ali, his son's closest friends, driving down the street on a Vespa, Bilal waving the exam results in the air like a victory flag, while Raza hunched down behind Sajjad's car, hiding out of their sight.

15.

Flying into Karachi at night, the American, Harry formerly Henry Burton, looked down on to the brightly lit sprawl of one of the fastest-growing cities in the world and felt the surge of homecoming that accompanies the world's urban tribes as they enter unfamiliar landscapes of chaos and possibility. This is more like it, he thought, exiting the airport to a pell-mell of cars using their horns in a complicated and unrelenting exchange of messages about power, intention and mistrust. Even the beggar tossing a twenty-five-paisa coin back at him with a sneer made Harry smile.

G.o.d, it was good to be away from Islamabad the bubble in the hills, a town barely two decades old, characterised by government and not history, where everything had the antiseptic air of diplomacy with germs rife beneath the surface. 'Dull, but pretty', they'd described it to him beforehand. But pretty wasn't enough for a man who'd spent his childhood summers in Mussoorie. Harry wanted chaos of his cities and nothing less than beauty of his hill towns. Only on the one occasion he'd driven out of Islamabad into the hill station of Murree, and stood at Kashmir Point looking at snow-capped mountains in the distance with the smell of pine trees all around him, had he felt the gnarly stuff of s.p.a.ce and time which separated him from his childhood thin to cobwebs.

Karachi, Karachi, he almost sang out loud as the car with the diplomatic licence plate sped its way through the city. A truck driving on the wrong side of the road veered away from Harry's car at the last possible moment and he cheered with delight. Six months in Islamabad, without reprieve. How had he managed it? The sacrifices a man makes for his country, Harry thought, saluting his reflection in the tinted window.

But the next afternoon he was somewhat less buoyant at least mentally so, though physically he couldn't keep from bouncing up and down on the springless seat of a wedge-shaped auto-rickshaw, while fumes from exhaust pipes entered his pores and traffic crowded so close he could see each bristle on the moustache of the President-General whose face decorated the back of the truck that the rickshaw was stuck behind in the slow crawl through the commercial heart of Karachi. Although it was December the afternoon sun was still hot, and the sea breeze which had been so refreshing just a couple of miles back seemed unable to force its way through the thick fumes. Harry distracted himself with architecture, admiring the loveliness of an enclosed balcony jutting out from a yellow-stone colonial building, its lower half fashioned from delicate woodwork, its upper half coloured gla.s.s.

But eventually the rickshaw left behind all colonial remnants, left behind the s.p.a.cious homes of the elite in which he'd spent all his time on his previous visit to Karachi, and snaked through the streets of a city which had grown too fast for urban planning, everywhere concrete and cement and almost no greenery, th.o.r.n.y acacias overtaking all empty plots of land, except where they'd been cut down to make s.p.a.ce for the makeshift jute homes of the poor; and the further from familiarity the rickshaw travelled the more Harry began to fear the circ.u.mstances in which he might find the man he sought out.

'What's n.a.z.imabad like?' he'd said two nights earlier, in Islama bad, to a businessman at a party, who he found trying to catch fish with his bare hands in their host's pond while the armed guards employed to shoot predatory birds looked on uncertainly.

The man had barely glanced up.

'Muhajir depot,' he replied. 'Never been there. Very middle cla.s.s.'

One of the more perplexing things about Pakistan, Harry had found, was the tendency of the elite to say 'middle cla.s.s' as though it were the most d.a.m.ning of insults. He wasn't quite sure what to make of 'Muhajir depot'. He knew 'muhajir' was the Urdu word for 'migrant' and, as such, was a word Harry himself identified with, though he also knew that in Pakistan it was used specifically for those who had come to Pakistan from what was now India at Part.i.tion. But though he knew the word he wasn't sure what its connotations were for this businessman of whose ethnic background Harry was utterly unaware. The fact was, Harry had been briefed extensively about the different groups within Afghanistan, could expound at length on the tensions, enmities and alliances between Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, but knew little about any groups in Pakistan other than the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

What he did know was that Karachi was nothing like Islamabad, though it was clear people in Islamabad were mixed in their feelings about how positive a comment this was on the port city.

The businessman by the fish pond had been far from complimentary about it.

'Nothing but a city of failed aspirations,' he said.

But a woman standing near by with hair like black water had disagreed.

'It's got life,' she said simply. 'People wouldn't be migrating there from every part of the country if all aspirations failed as they approached the sea.'

It was for this comment as much as for her hair that Harry had gone to bed with her; afterwards, there was no pillow talk, and no mention of phone numbers or last names. In truth, there was barely any afterwards. She was dressed and out of his house just minutes after he'd pulled out of her. Harry had never known s.e.x to so intensify his feelings of loneliness.

It was loneliness, he knew, that had brought him here, in search of a past that was as irretrievable as his parents' marriage or his own childhood. For months now he had ignored his desire to fly to Karachi and knock on the door of a particular house in n.a.z.imabad and now it was the desire to put that desire to rest more than any kind of hope that had finally persuaded him to seek out the first person he'd ever been conscious of loving.

The rickshaw turned into a quiet street of a residential neighbourhood: a more communal area than the parts of Karachi Harry knew no dividing boundary walls, no gardens and driveways buffering the s.p.a.ce between one house and another; instead, there was a long row of homes ab.u.t.ting each other, a single step leading from each doorway to the street. Harry released a breath he didn't know he'd been holding it wasn't grand, but there was no whiff of failure or disappointment about the street.

The rickshaw driver turned to look at him as he exhaled heavily and Harry shook his head to say he'd meant nothing. The man quoted the fare to Harry, whose raised eyebrows received the response: 'If I don't overcharge an American, everyone will know I work with the CIA.' Though there was clearly no one else around to see how much he was charging, the cheek of the remark amused Harry enough to pay the full amount.

'I could be a while.' He pointed to a tree growing at the front of a house, its roots creasing the road. 'It might be better if you park in the shade.'

The man nodded.

'Your Urdu is very good.'

Harry eased himself out of the rickshaw there was an unpleasant sucking sound as the sweating bald patch on his head detached from the vinyl canopy and nodded towards house number 17.

'My first teacher is in there. I'll tell him you said so.'

The group of boys playing cricket further down the street stopped to watch Harry as he strode across to the door and rang the bell. He looked back at them, amused by the cricket sweaters some of them were wearing in the balmy afternoon.

There was a sound of footsteps on the other side of the door, and Harry stepped back as it swung open to reveal a young man little more than a boy in jeans and a faded red T-shirt and with facial features Harry immediately identified as belonging to the descend ants of the Mongol tribes Hazara, probably. Maybe Tajik. Uzbek, even. The intensity of his disappointment startled him. Had he really expected to find the man he was looking for at an address last known to be accurate over twenty years ago? But perhaps oh clutch those straws, Burton the present occupants might know where he could be found.

'h.e.l.lo,' he said. 'I'm looking for Sajjad Ashraf. He used to live here.'

Raza just stared at the tall, green-eyed redhead, whose shiny bald spot and thickening waist did nothing to dissipate the glamour that attached itself to his Starsky and Hutch Starsky and Hutch accent. accent.

Harry repeated the question in Urdu, wondering which language the boy spoke, and what he was doing here.

'I speak English,' the boy said, his tone offended. 'And j.a.panese and German.' For the first time in months he had reason to boast, and that made boasting necessary. 'And Urdu, of course. Pashto, also. What do you speak?'

Harry Burton couldn't remember the last time he'd been so taken aback.

'English and German and Urdu. And a little Farsi.'

'I beat you,' Raza said in German. There was no arrogance in the statement, just a muted pride which was unsure of its own right to exist.

'Conclusively,' Harry replied in English, feeling a ridiculous urge to pull the boy into an embrace. Then, switching to German, 'I'm Harry. You must be Sajjad and Hiroko's son.'

'Yes.' The boy smiled. 'I'm Raza. How do you do?' He extended his hand with the tentative air of someone executing a move he'd only ever practised in front of the mirror, and Harry shook it vigorously. 'Come,' the boy said, taking Harry's arm with the physical familiarity of Pakistani men to which the American hadn't yet become accustomed, and pulling him indoors. 'I'll tell Aba.'

Harry stepped through the vestibule and into a smaller version of the Ashraf home as he recalled it from his childhood: low-roofed rooms built around an open-air courtyard which was dominated by a large tree. But the flowerpots filled with marigolds, snapdragons and phlox which were cl.u.s.tered near the tree brought to mind another Delhi world.

A grey-haired man dressed in a white kurta pyjama was pouring water into the flowerpots, and Harry almost laughed out loud with joy at the sight. Of course it would happen this way. In this city, where tree roots cracked cement, and broad tree-trunks were canvases for graffiti, and branches became part of the urban architecture as sidewalk vendors draped cloth over them to create makeshift roofs, of course he would find Sajjad Ashraf in a sun-dappled courtyard, surrounded by flowers and leaf-patterned shadows.

'Aba, Uncle Harry is here to see you,' Raza said, unsure what to make of the expression with which this foreign stranger was staring at his father.

The grey-haired man straightened instantly recognisable as the Sajjad of old, the laughter which always suggested its presence beneath the surface now inscribed on his face in fine lines around his eyes and mouth and looked at the newcomer with no trace of recognition. It was Hiroko, stepping out from the bedroom, who saw in his red hair and the slight droop of his eyelids something familiar but before she could excavate Konrad's features from her memory the man said, 'I'm Henry Burton. James and Ilse's son.'

Sajjad took a step forward, and then another one.

'But you were a child,' he said. 'Really? Henry . . . Henry Baba!'

'Just Harry now. I've been working in Islamabad for the last six months at the American Emba.s.sy. I'm a consular officer you know, visas and things. And I couldn't be in Pakistan without coming to see you.'

The American stepped forward and held his hand out to Sajjad, who laughed and said, 'I used to carry you on my shoulders. Can't we do more than shake hands?' He clasped one hand against the small of Harry's back and leaned his head forward so his chin was just above Harry's shoulder, his ear inches away from Harry's ear. Then he moved his head so that it was Harry's other shoulder, his other ear framing part of Sajjad's face. It was all too quick for Harry to respond before Sajjad was standing back, smiling. 'Don't you remember? You made me teach you how to gala-milao when you came to condole with my family at my father's death. You walked into the courtyard, took your shoes off, stood up on a divan and embraced each of my brothers like that. They all thought you were the finest Englishman in India. You must have been about nine.'

'Seven. I was seven. It's one of my clearest memories of childhood. My first time in a home that wasn't English. Why was I there without my parents? I don't remember that part.'

Sajjad could barely contain his delight at hearing the Urdu sentences trip so lightly off the tongue of his former student. Unable to think of anything to say that wouldn't strike a false note with this stranger who was not a stranger, he took off his gla.s.ses and cleaned the lenses with the sleeve of his kurta. When he put them back on he nodded as though he now had a better view of the events of 1944.

'You wanted to come. You said, I wish to condole with your family on behalf of my family.' Sajjad smiled and nodded at Raza as though imparting a lesson. 'I was so proud of my Henry Baba that day.'

The tips of Harry's ears reddened to be provided with such a good account of his younger self. He was spared having to think of a response by Sajjad holding out his hand to gesture to the woman who was walking up to them.

'My wife. Hiroko.'

'Hiroko-san.' Harry bowed. He was not a man used to bowing and was conscious he looked as though he had been attacked by a back spasm.

Hiroko took Harry's hands in her own.

'Just Hiroko. It's very good to meet you. Harry.' Her smile recognised and dismissed Harry's startled awareness of the a.s.sociations she must have with that name. 'There is a piece of my heart reserved for members of the Weiss family.' She turned to her son. 'Raza, this is Konrad's nephew.'

'Oh.' The boy regarded Harry with new interest. 'My middle name is Konrad.'

Harry nodded, as though there were only delight, not surprise, to be garnered from this revelation. In the months leading up to their daughter's birth, still unaware of her gender, Harry and his ex-wife had searched the world around them for names that they could both commit themselves to for the rest of their lives (they already knew by then that their commitment to each other would crumble, but that only gave extra impetus to this desire to find a mutually loved syllable or two to which they could hold on long after they'd let each other go). His ex had been the one to suggest 'Konrad' for a boy after a weekend visiting Ilse in New York, but Harry had waved his hands at her in distress and taught her the Urdu word 'manhoos', meaning 'bad-omened'. And yet here was Sajjad, who had taught him that word, smiling as his son claimed the name of the man Hiroko had loved first, who had been eradicated from the earth's surface before he turned thirty.

'So are you at school or university, Raza Konrad?' Harry turned back to the boy something about the discovery of his middle name allowed Harry to feel avuncular.

Raza's head dipped forward, hair tumbling over his eyes.

'My father never went to university. Why should I have to?' He spoke in German, and Harry was aware of a strange tension in the air, and of Sajjad looking sideways at Hiroko for a translation that was not forthcoming.

'No reason,' Harry replied in German while casting Sajjad a glance meant to convey that there was no conspiracy here. 'If you read the world in five languages you're probably better off without cla.s.srooms boxing in your thoughts to fit the latest fashionable mode of thinking.'

Sajjad watched his son straighten, smile and widen his stance into something that was almost a swagger and, recalling the ease of his early relationship with Henry as contrasted to that of the Burton father and son, wondered at life's ironies and reversals.

'How is your father, Henry?'

'Dad? He's . . . unyielding even to death. He had a scare with his heart some months ago, no way he should have survived. Not at his age. But he's still around going to lots of parties. He had the sense after my mother left him to marry a woman who loves that sort of thing. Don't know that she much likes Dad, but she likes his lifestyle. And that's enough for him. He has his Gentlemen's Club for companionship.'

Harry could feel displeasure settle around the courtyard. Of course. He couldn't say a word against his father, not even among people who were entirely aware of James Burton's shortcomings such were the rules of Indian courtesy (he still considered Sajjad an Indian though he'd been in Pakistan long enough to know he should never voice such a thought). 'My mother's doing well,' he said, nodding to Hiroko in acknowledgement of the friendship between the two women, which had continued via letters for over a decade after Part.i.tion, before the anarchy of international mail ended it. 'She'll be overjoyed to hear I've found you. She still has a photograph of you and her together, up on her mantel.'

Raza hardly knew what to do with himself as Harry took the proffered chair and the offer of tea, and made it clear there was nothing he'd rather do with his evening than spend it with the Ashrafs. Almost more astonishing than the presence of the American was the att.i.tude of Sajjad and Hiroko, who seemed to think it perfectly natural to have him in their courtyard, talking about 'the Delhi days'. Raza was completely transfixed by everything about Harry Burton the expansiveness of his gestures, the way he had of suggesting that whatever mundane things Sajjad and Hiroko had to say about their lives were more interesting than anything he could bring to the conversation, the way he p.r.o.nounced words in both Urdu and English. ('Naw-shus, Tom-aytoe, Skedule', Raza repeated to himself as though it were a mantra.) When Harry asked if he might have a gla.s.s of water, Raza jumped up to get it, and was rewarded as he was entering the kitchen by the American's voice drifting across the courtyard, saying, 'He's a great kid. Do you have a parenting handbook I can borrow?'

But almost instantly the exaltation left him. Next he would ask, 'Which cla.s.s is he in at school? What does he like to study?' and then his parents would tell him, or, worse, they would feel the need to lie.

Raza covered his face with his hands and leaned against the kitchen wall. It came upon him with no warning now, this swooping down of complete hopelessness, of despair.

He had failed the exam again. The second time it was even worse than the first. Even before he walked into the exam hall he'd lost the ability to make sense of words in the bus on the way to the exam he'd looked at billboards and graffiti and the words all smudged and blurred in front of him. When the examiner said it was time to start he could already feel his heart pounding so hard it seemed impossible it wouldn't tear out of his chest. And nothing made sense. His hand couldn't hold his pen. He walked out after five minutes and came straight home, unable to look directly at his parents as they saw him walk in and knew it was too early, much too early, for him to have finished.

He saw tears in his father's eyes that day, and for the first time Sajjad Ali Ashraf looked old as he begged his son, 'Why? Why can't you do this one little thing? Please, my son. Do this for me.'

All the neighbourhood boys who had laughed off his first failure and said it was 'just a drama, all good heroes need a drama, and it's only that one paper, you'll retake it and everything will be fine', this second time round they didn't know what to say to him. Conversations stopped when he entered a room. They were just days away from university now, and it was all they dreamt and talked about. He couldn't bear the kindness with which they tried so hard to speak of other things around him strained silences entering the s.p.a.ce between him and them and so he stayed mostly at home, and though they occasionally coaxed him out he could tell that it was always a relief to everyone, including himself when he left their company.

He poured water into a tall gla.s.s and looked out of the kitchen window, trying to see if the set of Harry Burton's shoulders revealed he'd just discovered that the 'great kid' was the new neighbourhood Donkey.

There was another exam in a few months. His father was determined he take it. But he knew he would only fail again and insisted no. Something inside him had stopped working, it was as simple as that. He placed the gla.s.s carefully down on a tray, wiping away his smudged thumbprint from its surface, and thought, Just this easily everything worthwhile in a life can be erased.

16.

'Not the port. The fish harbour!'

The rickshaw driver Sher Mohammed swerved at the sound of Harry's barked instructions from the back seat.

'Sorry, sorry. Forgot. Too early. My brain is still asleep.'

Not the most rea.s.suring statement to hear from the man in the driver's seat, but then again Harry had already decided that Sher Mohammed navigated the streets with a mixture of intuition and Providence. In the crush of midday he at least acknowledged certain traffic rules, but in the early morning he drove through the almost deserted streets with the air of a man who does not conceive the possibility of other vehicles impeding his progress, treating 'right of way' as an una.s.sailable personal liberty which he carried with him through every intersection and traffic light.

Harry pulled his shawl tight around himself as the rickshaw hurtled onwards, wind whistling through it. So Karachi actually could get cold, he thought, watching his breath steam in the dawn air.

When they arrived at the entrance to the fish harbour, Sajjad and Raza were already there in Sajjad's car, Raza slumped against his father's shoulder, asleep.

'Wake up, my prince.' Sajjad rubbed his knuckles on the top of Raza's head, and his son's eyes flickered open, closed, and he mumbled 'Fish' before falling asleep again. Carefully as once Harry had seen him handle an egg that had fallen out of a nest miraculously intact Sajjad eased his son off his shoulder and positioned him as comfortably as possible against the pa.s.senger-side door. 'We'll wake him for breakfast,' he said, stepping out of the car, looking out of place in a thick woollen sweater and open-toed shoes. 'This gives us a chance to talk, Henry Baba.' He looked down at Harry's shoes, shook his head, climbed back into the car and emerged holding up the rubber-soled shoes he'd taken off Raza's feet. 'Wear these,' he said.

Harry's toes curled over the edge of Raza's shoes, reminding him incongruously of Billy, his cat from his early days in America who used to perch on the very edge of the stoop waiting for him to return from school. He wriggled his toes, and the cat batted the air with its paw.

'Believe me, you'll be glad you're wearing them,' Sajjad said, taking Harry's arm and leading him towards the harbour.

Perhaps it was the memory of the cat, which regarded all forms of insect life as prey, that did it when Harry walked through the rusty gates and the harbour came into view all he could think was that the swarm of wooden sailing boats with their riggings painting chaos against the sky looked like gra.s.shoppers lying on their backs, waving their insect limbs in the breeze. There were hundreds of them in peeling paint of blues and whites and greens lined all the way along the dock and stacked against each other four, five, six ships deep.

'Breathe through your mouth until we get to the market,' Sajjad recommended, walking swiftly towards the boats.

'Why?' Harry said, and then he caught a whiff of a smell so overpowering it made him imagine a fish-monster the size of a house, sliced open to rot for years in the baking sun.

'Come, come.' Sajjad caught his arm and pulled him along, in through another gate. 'Now you can use your nose again.'

They had entered a bazaar of seafood, all wares too fresh for any unpleasant odour. All along the cement ground, beds of ice with fish laid out on them. Men with wheelbarrows were tipping ice-chips on to the ground to replace what was melting, while other men pushed past holding baskets of fish listing with the weight of their contents. And water everywhere you stepped not the overflow of the sea as Harry had first thought, but liquefied ice. It was barely dawn, but the activity was already frenzied. Harry caught hold of Sajjad's elbow, as the latter moved forward along the aisle between the two rows of fish. Snapper and salmon and cauldrons of flounder. Sharks. Eels. Huge great whiskered things with dinosaur-era jaws.

Sajjad stopped to haggle with a fish-seller who jokingly tried to steer him away from the tuna and towards a fish the size of a man.

'What am I going to do with that? Sleep with it?' Sajjad laughed.

A man approached Harry, holding a little shark in his hand, his fingers waggling the fin.

'For s.e.x,' he said, in English.