Burnt Shadows Part 3

Sajjad shifted away from his mother. The idea that anything could cut him off from Dilli was not just absurd but insulting, and he knew his mother was aware of this.

'Modern India will start the day the English leave. Or perhaps it started the day we used their language to tell them to go home.' Faintly, he wondered if he really believed this. 'No, modernism does not belong to the English. The opposite, in fact. They've reached the end of their history. They'll go back to their cold island and spend the next ten generations dreaming of everything they've lost.'

'They sound like the Muslims of India.'

Sajjad stood up, laughing.

'When I'm married, Ammi Jaan, you're still the one I want to have my morning cup of tea with.' He kissed her forehead, picked up his book and wiped away the ring of tea from its cover as he made his way to the vestibule.

Just as he was opening the heavy wooden door his brother Altamash came yawning out of one of the rooms off the courtyard and said, 'What's the little Englishman doing awake at this hour? Sunrise stroll with the Viceroy?'

Sajjad ignored the comment and stepped out, taking his bicycle with him. As though the soft dhuk! dhuk! of the door closing were a signal, the muezzin of Jama Masjid began the call to prayer. Sajjad turned his head and glanced up towards the mosque, just a few minutes' walk away, its marble domes and minarets almost two-dimensional in appearance. He recalled sitting on his father's shoulder one Delhi night, at the base of the sandstone steps that led up to the mosque, his vision given over entirely to the mosque and the darkness of the sky behind it. His father had told him that the Emperor Shah Jahan had come here one night with scissors that had belonged to the Prophet, and cut through the sky; in the morning when the people of Dilli woke up, the Jama Masjid was in their midst, revealing a glimpse of heaven's architecture. of the door closing were a signal, the muezzin of Jama Masjid began the call to prayer. Sajjad turned his head and glanced up towards the mosque, just a few minutes' walk away, its marble domes and minarets almost two-dimensional in appearance. He recalled sitting on his father's shoulder one Delhi night, at the base of the sandstone steps that led up to the mosque, his vision given over entirely to the mosque and the darkness of the sky behind it. His father had told him that the Emperor Shah Jahan had come here one night with scissors that had belonged to the Prophet, and cut through the sky; in the morning when the people of Dilli woke up, the Jama Masjid was in their midst, revealing a glimpse of heaven's architecture.

It had been weeks since Sajjad had last climbed those sandstone steps and walked across the pigeon-filled courtyard for Friday prayers. Pakistan was all anyone could talk about now, with the Imam and the most conservative members of the congregation arguing that you could not divide the Ummah, there was no place for nations in the brotherhood of Muslims; and the Muslim League supporters arguing back that it was already clear from the behav iour of the Hindus that they would not agree to share any power with the Muslims in a post-Raj India, and hadn't the descendants of the Mughals, the Lodhis, the Tughlaqs, fallen far enough already; and the Congress supporters insisting theirs was not a Hindu party but an Indian one, and what did the people of Dilli have in common with the feudals of the Punjab who would dominate this Pakistan? And so it went on and on, and in each group Sajjad found those who made complete sense and in each group also those whose opinions made him want to scatter seeds over the speakers so the pigeons would swoop down and stop their words with a tumult of feathers.

Someone in the distance called Sajjad's name it was the retired Professor from Aligarh University who had taught his sister and him English during their childhood while his brothers preferred to learn calligraphy from their father but though he usually went out of his way to greet the old man this time he pretended not to hear and started pedalling through the labyrinthine streets, all springing into wakefulness with the azan, eschewing the long route via the river to head straight through Kashmiri Gate into Civil Lines.

She had said, 'However early you arrive, I'll be awake.' He didn't really expect her to be dressed and ready at this hour, but the invitation or was it a challenge? seemed a good excuse to fulfil a long-held desire to see the Burton garden at dawn. He imagined himself sitting out on the verandah, watching the flowers emerge from the night's shadow while everyone in the house slept.

But Hiroko Tanaka was already sitting on the verandah as Sajjad was entering Delhi, pulling a shawl across her thin shoulders as she sipped a cup of jasmine tea, grateful to be regarding the world from a vertical position. It had not been so for most of these two weeks in Delhi. The first night in the Burton house she had slept in the guest room upstairs, too tired to wander out una.s.sisted and find a place to live but determined that the next day she would leave this house where there was nothing of Konrad to be found except a notion, gleaned from a single day in the company of Elizabeth Burton, of what his features might have looked like if his life had been unhappy.

But the next day she had stepped out of bed feeling as though she were on a violently rocking boat and had barely made it down the stairs before collapsing on the floor. When she recovered consciousness she was in the bedroom on the ground floor, which was filled with the scent of James's aftershave.

The Burton family physician, Dr Agarkar, arrived within minutes and diagnosed an infection, probably picked up during her journey over to Delhi; nothing that rest and medication couldn't sort out.

'You'll be fine in, oh, a week or ten days,' he'd said and Hiroko, even in her enfeebled state, had whispered, 'Do you know somewhere I can go?'

'Don't be absurd.' Elizabeth's voice was both stern and kind. 'You'll stay here. There's no further conversation to be had about this.'

Later, as Dr Agarkar was leaving, Hiroko heard James talking to him in the hallway.

'Yes, a telegram came from that Watanabe fellow Julian Fuller's cousin in Nagasaki. Did you know Julian he was here in, oh, '34 or '35. Company man. Uncle married a j.a.p. Anyway, turns out there really was something between her and Konrad. And she's lost everyone, the telegram said. Everyone. Poor girl. I feel such a brute.'

'So she's staying with you while she's in Delhi?'

'I suppose, yes. At least until she gets better. After that, well, I don't know. We'll see how we get on. Might do Elizabeth some good to have someone to mother again. Did your wife get like this when Ravi went to Eton?'

Hiroko was asleep before the doctor answered. When she woke up, Elizabeth was sitting by her bed, her slumped shoulders suggesting she'd been there a while. Hiroko smiled, Elizabeth smiled back, and then Hiroko was asleep again.

Two days later, Hiroko was finally awake long enough to start feeling bored.

'I'll read to you,' Elizabeth said. 'Any preferences?'

'Evelyn Waugh.'

'Really? How strange.'

'That's what Konrad said. He said Waugh is for readers who know the English and understand what's being satirised. And I told him that maybe the books are better when you don't know it's satire and just think it's comedy.'

Elizabeth considered this.

'You're probably right. I find him much too cruel. And almost unbearably sad.'

Hiroko's fingers moved just slightly so they were almost touching Elizabeth's hand as it rested on the coverlet. It was a gesture so astutely poised between discretion and sympathy that Elizabeth found herself imagining a life in which Konrad had brought Hiroko into this house as a sister-in-law.

'Perhaps after you've spent some time among us you'll see the satire.'

'Oh, I see it already,' Hiroko said, nodding, and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

But Elizabeth Burton was laughing as she hadn't laughed in a very long time. She took Hiroko's hand in hers and held on firmly.

'Forget this boarding-house nonsense. You're staying here. We're practically sisters, after all.'

James Burton, standing in the doorway, watched his wife's face glow with laughter, and nodded. Hiroko was far from convinced that living with the Burtons was an ideal situation but she was too weak to feel anything but grat.i.tude for the continued offer of a bed to sleep in.

A couple of mornings ago she had woken feeling much stronger a greater relief than she allowed anyone else to know; she had feared the radiation sickness which had so incapacitated her in '45 might have returned or simply reawoken from some state of dormancy, as the doctors had warned might happen. But as soon as she felt herself returning to strength she dismissed such thoughts with the briskness with which she had once dismissed Konrad's repeated suggestions that it wasn't prudent for her to continue meeting a German in Nagasaki, and decided it was time to start finding a way to fill her days. She had come to feel a greater affection towards the Burtons during her convalescence than she had imagined possible on her first day in Delhi but she knew she needed something beyond their company to occupy her.

She thought she had a perfect solution but her suggestion that someone in Delhi must have need of a translator who could speak English, German and j.a.panese met with little enthusiasm from the Burtons. Dr Agarkar was called in to inform her she was not yet well enough to go 'gadding around', though Hiroko half suspected he only said so as an act of friendship to the Burtons, who seemed to think their hospitality was being called into question if their guest found employment.

So Hiroko turned to the next option that announced itself to her.

'I'd like to learn the language they speak here,' she had said.

'It's not necessary. English serves you fine. The natives you'll meet are either the Oxbridge set and their wives or household staff like Lala Buksh, who can understand simple English if you just know a clutch of Urdu words to throw into the mix. Those Elizabeth can teach you,' James had said.

It was the oddest thing Hiroko had ever heard.

'Even so, I'd like to learn how to read and write,' she said. 'Is there anyone . . .?'

'Sajjad,' Elizabeth said. 'He used to teach Henry my son.' Her upper lip didn't really stiffen, Hiroko thought, but there was some subtle shift around her mouth suggesting tamped-down pain at the mention of the child sent a year ago to boarding school in England, from where he wrote letters to his parents saying he wanted to be 'home, in India'.

'He doesn't have the time for that,' said James. 'You know I can't let him work half-days now. I don't have an office full of clerks any more.'

'You still have the office, James. You just choose to pretend your leg isn't healed well enough for you to go to it. And in any case, you and Sajjad do nothing but play chess all day.' Let the boy work for his salary again, Elizabeth thought to herself. She had been profoundly annoyed by Sajjad's acceptance of the raise James had given him at the start of the month; it seemed not just dishonest, but impudent.

Hiroko slipped off the sofa and went to look through the bookshelves, hoping by her movements to remind the Burtons she was in the room before they started one of their more unpleasant arguments, and wondered if Sajjad would mind being asked to play the role of teacher. She should have asked him first, she realised. Coming from the Burtons it would be a command rather than a request. But much to her relief, when James grudg ingly broached the subject later that day, Sajjad seemed delighted.

'I will teach you the chaste Urdu of Ghalib and Mir so that you can read the poets of Delhi.' Seeing James's look of unhappiness, he added, 'And since you say you wake up early, Miss Tanaka, perhaps we could have our lessons before Mr Burton and I commence our day's business.'

James had smiled broadly and Elizabeth didn't know whether it was Sajjad, James or herself who she wanted to hit for the effortlessness with which the Indian could delight her husband.

Hiroko bent her face into the steam that rose from the teacup, its warmth a pleasant contrast to the chill of Delhi's winter-morning air, and hoped Sajjad wouldn't arrive soon. It was rare, and welcome, this feeling of being alone in the Burton house, no need to modulate her expressions so that nothing in them would give cause for concern or offence. When either James or Elizabeth was around she always had to look busily engaged with something to avoid provoking a panicked stir of conversation or activity; they behaved as though she had lost Nagasaki only yesterday, and their joint role in her world was to distract her from mourning. It was kind, but trying.

She rubbed her thumb along the interlacings of the green cane chair. And this world, too, was ending. A year or two, no more, James had told her, and then the British would go. It seemed the most extraordinary privilege to have forewarning of a swerve in history, to prepare for how your life would curve around that bend. She had no idea what she planned to do beyond Delhi. Beyond next week. And why plan anyway? She had left such hubris behind. For the moment it was enough to be here, in the Burton garden, appreciative of a blanket of silence threaded with vibrant bird calls, knowing there was nothing here she couldn't leave without regret.

She was less than halfway through her cup of jasmine tea when she saw Sajjad enter the garden from around the side. He seemed surprised almost disappointed to see her there, but all that was just a flicker of the eyes before his polite smile settled into place and removed all expressiveness from his face. She wondered if her own face had revealed and concealed exactly as had his.

'There's a lot of dew this morning,' she said, watching his footprints turn the silver gra.s.s green.

'Yes.' He felt he should add something intelligent to that comment so he said, 'The spiders like it. On dewy mornings they build elaborate webs. Or perhaps the webs only become visible when dew is captured in their threads.'

'The spider is beloved of Muslims.'

'Yes.' He smiled, pleased beyond measure that she should know such a thing, as he stood beside the bridge table and waited for her to rise from her chair and join him there.

'Konrad told me that.' The day they stood together on Megane-Bashi and his heart had leapt into hers in a blur of silver. She couldn't recall the moment itself without an accompanying memory of remembering it as she lay on a hospital bed in the hours after Yoshi told her no one near Urakami Cathedral had survived the blast.

'Mr Konrad was-' Sajjad pulled his ear-lobe, trying to find a way to express himself. 'I liked him very much.'

Hiroko smiled as she sat down at the bridge table. It was so easy to see why Konrad had said this man was the only person in Delhi worth seeing.

'He mentioned you. He said you were lovely.'

'Lovely?'

'Yes.' She watched him take in the compliment as though it were a feast. 'Why didn't you want me to say anything to you in front of the Burtons the day I arrived?'

Sajjad set down the lined exercise book he had bought with his own money for the lesson, wiping his cuff against the remnant of a tea stain.

'I didn't know what you were going to say. But it didn't seem right.'

'What didn't?'

'I work for Mr Burton.' He quickly added, 'Not like Lala Buksh. I'm not a servant. I'm going to be a lawyer, one day. Already I know all there is to know about . . .' He stopped, aware he was boasting. 'I'm not a servant,' he repeated firmly. 'But I'm . . . you're . . .'

'Yes?'

'You had just walked in. A link to her dead brother. It was not the time for you to stop and talk to me.' What he meant was, 'I could see that you were going to speak to me as an equal. They would have held it against both of us. You would not have been asked to stay.' 'I think we should start the lesson.' He opened the exercise book. 'To begin with, you will have to let go of the notion that writing starts on the left-hand side of the page and moves right.'

Hiroko started to laugh, wondered whether that would seem rude, but saw that Sajjad was unbothered his head angled slightly to the side, his eyes curious, as though simply waiting for her to finish and explain herself rather than worrying that he had said something deserving of mockery. She turned the exercise book towards herself and wrote down its page.

'This is j.a.panese,' she said.

Sajjad's eyes opened wide.

'After Urdu you'll have to learn a diagonal script.'

She laughed again, and they both looked at each other and then dropped their eyes. They had both decided independently that it was merely the unfamiliarity of the other's features that gave rise to this desire to stare and stare which had been present since their first meeting.

'The first letter is alif,' Sajjad said, and the lesson commenced.

Within a few minutes Sajjad discovered what her German teacher at school and the priest who tutored her in English had earlier come to know: that for her language came so easily it seemed more as though she were retrieving forgotten knowledge than learning something new. Before he knew it they had progressed to the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.

'This is zal, the first of four letters in Urdu which replicate the sound of the English zed,' Sajjad said, drawing a curved shape with a dot on top. 'Zal, zay, zwad, zoy.'

'Why four letters for one sound?'

'Don't tell me you're one of those people who don't see the beauty in excess?' he cried it was the first time she saw his deliberately ridiculous side.

'In other words, you don't know, Sensei.'

'What does that word mean?'

'Teacher.'

She was surprised by how red his skin could become. He picked up a pen, rolled it between his fingers, pressing a thumb against its nib and then examining intently the blue ink that spread across his skin.

'You call them Elizabeth and James. You mustn't call me anything other than Sajjad, Miss Tanaka.'

'You mustn't call me anything other than Hiroko, Sajjad.' The one thing she had liked most about the Americans was their informality with each other. No stifling honorifics to make every relationship so bounded in. She saw, in their company, how ridiculous she had been in referring to the man she loved as 'Konrad-san'. And she had even started to believe that if she'd said 'Konrad' instead he would have proposed earlier, and everything would have been different. Everything, except the bomb.

Sajjad saw that her mind was winging away from Delhi and everyone in it. He knew what the Burtons would do in such a situation interrupt, hold her in the present. As far as he knew there was only one occasion on which Elizabeth had asked about her life before Delhi Sajjad had been pa.s.sing by the open door of her room when Elizabeth broached the question and he couldn't help but stay and listen. He had been struck by how matter-of-fact her response had been.

'After the bomb, I was sick,' she'd said. 'Radiation poisoning, though we didn't have a name for it at the time. Konrad's friend, Yoshi Watanabe, had a relative in Tokyo who was a doctor. Nagasaki's hospitals were overrun. So Yoshi-san accompanied me to Tokyo. He felt responsible, you see, because he felt he'd betrayed Konrad. Taking care of me was one way of making it up. He had me admitted to the hospital where his cousin worked, and then he went back to Nagasaki. Some American Army doctors came to see me when we were there. I was such an object of curiosity. I spoke to them in English, and one of them asked if I was interested in working as a translator. Working for the Americans! After the bomb, you might wonder how I could agree to such a thing. But the man who asked me he had such a gentle face. It was impossible to hold him responsible for what had been done. It was impossible, really, to hold anyone responsible the bomb was so . . . it seemed beyond anything human. Anyway, I agreed.

'I worked as a translator for over a year. Made friends with one American nurse in particular, who took me to have my hair cut short like hers, and let me borrow her clothes when we went out to nightclubs together. I'd grown up in the war; these peacetime luxuries were all new to me. I didn't ever want to go back to Nagasaki, but I was content to be in Tokyo with the Americans. And then one day near the end of '46 the American with the gentle face said the bomb was a terrible thing, but it had to be done to save American lives. I knew straight away I couldn't keep working for them. The nurse came to find me when she heard I was leaving. What are you going to do, she said. The words just came out of my mouth go far away. Not you as well, she said. That Canadian friend I keep telling you about is shipping out to India.

'India! She said it, and I knew immediately where I would go. I told her and she said that's crazy. But OK, let's see if we can find someone to keep you company. I love that about the Americans the way they see certain kinds of craziness as signs of character. That night she and I took the Canadian to dinner and gave him lots of sake, and by the end of the evening we were drinking toasts to travelling companions. In case you're wondering if he had ulterior motives, Elizabeth, he was what is that phrase you used about your cousin Willie? . . . of a Wildean persuasion.'

Later, when Elizabeth repeated all this to James, in Sajjad's hearing, he shook his head and said, 'I hope your curiosity is satisfied. But don't you think we should simply let her forget all that now?' And since then the Burtons had never asked a question about j.a.pan, or allowed her a moment of contemplation that could lead to memory.

Sajjad considered all this as Hiroko's gaze turned inwards, then sat back in his chair, looking out at the garden, and let her be.

4.

Hiroko watched the shadows thrown on to the ruins of Hauz Khas, around which an elaborate moonlit picnic was in progress. The ruins were just ruins, shadows just distorted impressions created by the interplay of light and dark. So even this had come to pa.s.s: a collapsing structure, the silhouette of a man falling upon it, did not impair her ability to turn with a polite smile to hear the question posed by the woman beside her.

'How are your Urdu lessons coming along?'

Hiroko couldn't recall the name of the Englishwoman who asked the question, though she knew her husband was on the Viceregal staff and that she had the finest jacaranda trees in New Delhi.

'Very well, thank you. It's been three weeks and we've finally accepted that I can only make a "k" sound using the roof of my mouth, not the back of it. It has drenched Sajjad in sorrow, but sorrow is inescapable with Urdu so he's not blaming me.'

'Sajjad? Oh, James's dogsbody. Is that what he said, "sorrow is inescapable with Urdu"? They make the oddest claims, don't they?'

Dogsbody? Hiroko bit into a piece of roast chicken to give her mouth something to do other than retort. She didn't know how to behave around these people the rich and powerful, a number of whom had asked her about the samurai way of life and thought she was being charmingly self-effacing when she said the closest she had come to the warrior world was her days as a worker at the munitions factory. Two years after the war they could accept an ally of Hitler sooner than they could accept someone of a different cla.s.s, she thought, and wished she had entered India in a manner that would have allowed her into the houses of those who lived in Delhi's equivalent of Urakami. And yet, that was unfair to the Burtons and at least partially untrue. The soft sheets, the abundance of mealtimes, the dizzyingly coloured dresses Elizabeth had pa.s.sed on to her, the vastness of the Burton library, the kindness of the Burtons themselves . . . she was more than grateful for all these things, and all too conscious that they were hers by generosity, not by right. Hiroko bit into a piece of roast chicken to give her mouth something to do other than retort. She didn't know how to behave around these people the rich and powerful, a number of whom had asked her about the samurai way of life and thought she was being charmingly self-effacing when she said the closest she had come to the warrior world was her days as a worker at the munitions factory. Two years after the war they could accept an ally of Hitler sooner than they could accept someone of a different cla.s.s, she thought, and wished she had entered India in a manner that would have allowed her into the houses of those who lived in Delhi's equivalent of Urakami. And yet, that was unfair to the Burtons and at least partially untrue. The soft sheets, the abundance of mealtimes, the dizzyingly coloured dresses Elizabeth had pa.s.sed on to her, the vastness of the Burton library, the kindness of the Burtons themselves . . . she was more than grateful for all these things, and all too conscious that they were hers by generosity, not by right.

'Why are you wasting your time with Urdu?' Kamran Ali, one of the Indian Oxbridge set, lowered his bulky frame on to the picnic blanket beside Hiroko. 'Language of mercenaries and marauders. Do you know the word "Urdu" has the same root as "horde"? Now, Latin. That's a language worth learning.' He held up his empty gla.s.s and a liveried bearer stepped forward to fill it. 'Vini, vidi, vino,' Kamran Ali said, and the Englishwoman next to Hiroko laughed and drew him into the conversation about the odd utterances of one's Indian staff.

Hiroko felt someone touch her elbow and looked up to find Elizabeth there.

'Elizabeth, are you joining us?' the Lady of Jacaranda said without making any attempt to shift and make s.p.a.ce.