Burnt Shadows Part 9

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, j.a.panese 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 . . .

Part-Angel Warriors Pakistan, 19823

13.

Hiroko Ashraf watched the patch of brightness slide across the dining table towards her son, Raza, whose attention was firmly fixed on the crossword his mother had set for him. The sunlight b.u.mped up against Raza's arm, which was curled around the crossword in the defensive posture of the smartest boy in cla.s.s who is accustomed to everyone around trying to copy answers from his exam papers. Its gentle nudging failing to convince Raza to move his arm, the sunlight crept up on to his shoulders from where it could peep down at the grid with its j.a.panese and Urdu clues and German and English solutions.

Hiroko blinked once, twice, and the image was gone. In place of the young boy whose two chief delights were multilingual crosswords and stories told by his mother in which everything familiar birds, furniture, sunlight, crumbs, everything acquired character and role there was a sixteen-year-old tracing his finger over pictures from glossy magazines advertising the various electronic gadgets his cousin in the Gulf claimed to own. ('Doesn't he own a camera?' Sajjad had said. 'Why can't he send you photographs of his fancy VCR and his fancy answering machine and his fancy car instead of clippings from magazines you can buy in Urdu Bazaar? G.o.d knows if he's even left the country he's Iqbal's son, after all.') Strange, Hiroko thought, that through more than five decades she had never allowed nostalgia to take up more than the most fleeting of residencies in her life, despite all that glittered in her memory the walks through Nagasaki with Konrad, the ease of life in the Burton household, the Istanbul days of discovering love with Sajjad but since adolescence had suctioned Raza away from his younger self she'd learnt the desire to walk behind time. A demure j.a.panese woman at the end of the day, she thought to herself, and then smiled, with a touch of self-satisfaction, at the ridiculousness of the idea.

Raza looked up, found his mother watching him and realised that the glossy pictures he'd pasted inside his textbook when his father first insisted he had to spend at least six hours a day studying for his exams were clearly visible to her. He hid his embarra.s.sment in a noise of discontentment before walking out into the courtyard.

These days it was impossible to know from moment to moment who would emerge from the form of her son: a sweet, loving boy or a glowering creature of silences and outbursts. She could recall it quite clearly, the moment when the latter had announced his presence three years ago, when she'd asked her thirteen-year-old son why none of his friends had come to visit in the last few weeks. 'I can't ask any of my friends home,' he had yelled, the sound so unexpected Sajjad had run into the room. 'With you walking around, showing your legs. Why can't you be more Pakistani?' Afterwards, she and Sajjad hadn't known whether to howl with laughter or with tears to think that their son's teenage rebellion was a.s.serting itself through nationalism. For a while, though, she had packed away her dresses and taken to wearing shalwar kameezes at home, though previously they were garments she reserved for funerals and other ceremonies with a religious component; Sajjad said nothing, only gave her the slightly wounded look of a man who realises his wife is willing to make concessions for her son which she would never have made for him. But a few months later, when Raza said her kameezes were too tight, she returned to the dresses.

Hiroko put down her newspaper, and was about to call out a reminder to Raza that it was Chota's day off and he needed to clear up after himself when she was distracted by the sudden chittering of the sparrows which had been feeding from the earthenware seed-filled plate that hung from the neem tree in the courtyard. She looked out of the window and saw Raza standing beneath the tree, looking up at the sky while lazily brushing his teeth with the twig he'd just snapped off. Hiroko smiled. There was a freshness to April's early-morning breeze, her son was almost done with his exams and could soon return to the world of cricket and dreaming which gave him such pleasure, and tomorrow she would have lunch with a friend from the j.a.pan Cultural Centre and perhaps hear of some translation work, which would allow her to buy that painting of Old Delhi for Sajjad's sixtieth birthday.

She turned her eyes from the courtyard to the wall across the room from her, just above the dining table. Most houses in the neighbourhood had living-room walls covered in framed photographs, paintings, vast reproductions of beautiful landscapes or (among the more devout) scenes of worshippers at the Ka'aba. But Hiroko had always insisted that a room could only have one work of art as its focal point. For twenty-five years that focal point in this room had been a sumi-e painting of two foxes nestling together which Sajjad had commissioned for the price of an ice-cream soda and a brightly coloured hairbrush, from the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of Hiroko's friends at the Cultural Centre; it had been his tenth-anniversary gift to her. She wrinkled her nose affection ately at the foxes she would move them into the bedroom if the Delhi painting arrived.

Thirty-five years of married life! And her husband about to turn sixty. She wasn't so far behind herself. She tried out the word 'old' in her various languages, but they only made her giggle. No, she didn't feel old at all and certainly didn't think of Sajjad that way. And yet, something separated both of them by an incalculable distance from the young couple who had arrived in Karachi at the end of '47 so uncertain of tomorrow. Time hasn't aged us, it has contented us, she thought, nodding to herself. Contentment at twenty, she would have scorned the word. What was it she dreamed of then? A world full of silk clothes, and no duties. She considered the gap between the words 'duties' and 'dutiful' nearly four decades after Nagasaki she still had no time for the latter, but the former had become entwined with the word 'family', the word 'love'.

The door to the adjoining room rattled open. Sajjad came yawning into the living room, and bent down to pick up the newspaper his wife had discarded, brushing his thumb across the mole on her cheek as he did so. The action was ritual, one that had started the first morning they had woken up together in a ship on its way from Bombay to Istanbul. 'Just checking that the beetle hasn't flown away,' he'd said when she asked him what he was doing.

'Isn't Raza awake yet?' he said, walking over to the dining table, where he poured milky tea into his cup from a thermos and used the sleeve of his kurta to soak up the drops that spilled on to the plastic table-covering, drawing a half-hearted sound of exasperation from Hiroko. That sound like Sajjad's shake of the head as he unscrewed the thermos cap was a remnant of once pa.s.sionate fights. For Hiroko, fastidiousness was synonymous with good manners. For Sajjad, a steaming-hot cup of tea brought to a man first thing in the morning by a woman of the family was a basic component of the intricate system of courtesies that made up the life of a household.

Sometimes when Hiroko looked back on the first years of marriage what she saw most clearly was a series of negotiations between his notion of a home as a social s.p.a.ce and her idea of it as a private retreat; between his belief that she would be welcomed by the people they lived among if she wore their clothes, celebrated their religious holidays, and her insistence that they would see it as false and had to learn to accept her on her own terms; between his determination that a man should provide for his wife and her determination to teach; between his desire for ease and her instinct towards rebellion. It was clear to her that the success of their marriage was based on their mutual ability to abide by the results of those negotiations with no bitterness over who had lost more ground in individual encounters. And also, Sajjad added, taking her hand, when she once told him this, it helped that they found each other better company than anyone else in the world. Other things helped, too, Hiroko whispered back, late at night.

'Yes, he's awake.' She sat down beside Sajjad, and touched his arm. 'Now, don't give him a lecture about taking his foot off the pedal before the finishing line. You know it'll just upset him.'

'I promised you already, didn't I? When do I break my promises to you?' He dipped a tissue in water and ran it along her hairline. Since Hiroko's hair had started to turn white it was always possible to know if she'd read the morning papers or not by glancing at her roots. Smudges of newsprint attested to her habit of running her fingers along her hairline while reading.

'You shouldn't do it for me. You should do it for him,' she said quietly.

Sajjad sat back and sipped his tea. He sometimes wondered how different his relationship with his son might have been if the boy had been born earlier. He would have been well into adulthood by now, settled and earning a good income, and Sajjad would be spared his attacks of panic about both Raza and Hiroko's financial future each time he felt the slightest twinge in his chest or woke up with a pain that hadn't been there the night before. But after her miscarriage in 1948 Hiroko learnt fear in imagining what her radiation-exposed body would do to any children she tried to bear, and nothing Sajjad could say would change her mind about it. But at the age of forty-one she found herself pregnant. And Sajjad suddenly found himself counting the years towards his retirement with mounting panic, though until then he had viewed his finances with the careless air of a man of property (the house they lived in was paid for with Elizabeth Burton's diamonds), with no children, a reasonable pension plan and a wife who earned a useful supplementary income from teaching.

Strange and unpredictable, the alleyways that open up into alleyways as a man makes his way through the world, Sajjad thought, dipping a piece of bread into his tea and chewing thoughtfully on the sodden ma.s.s. At the start of 1947, he had believed that by the year's end he'd be married to a woman who he would learn to appreciate after signing a marriage contract that bound his life to hers; this woman, he knew, would be chosen for him in large part for her ability to meld into the world in which he had grown up. And that world, the world of his moholla, would be the world of the rest of his life, and his children's lives and their children's lives afterwards.

If he had known then that he and Dilli would be lost to each other by the autumn because of a woman he had chosen against his family's wishes he would have wept, recited Ghalib's verses lamenting the great poet's departure from Delhi, cursed the injustice and foolishness of pa.s.sion, and made lists of all the sights and sounds and daily texture of Dilli life that he was certain would haunt him for ever, making every other place in the world a wilderness of loss. He would not ever have believed that he would come to think of Karachi as home, and that his bitterest regret about his separation from Dilli would be the absence of safety nets that the joint-family system had once provided.

But now even that regret was easing. Raza was sixteen and already sitting for his Inter exams, a year younger than all the other neighbourhood boys Sajjad glanced appreciatively at his wife, who he had always credited as being directly responsible for Raza's quick mind and soon now he would enter law college, just a few steps away from an a.s.sured income, a bright future, of which any father would be proud. And then, Sajjad promised himself, he would stop being so demanding of his son insistent on results and achievements, impatient with his more frivolous side and allow himself the luxury of simply relaxing into Raza's company.

'There he is,' Sajjad said, standing up, as Raza re-entered the living area, his grey trousers and white shirt perfectly ironed and his hair slicked back in recognition that this was the final day on which he'd wear his school uniform. Usually the hair fell over his eyes, and kept his face hidden from the world. Now the surprise of his mother's eyes and cheekbones ceding ground to his father's nose and mouth was plainly evident, beautifully so. 'I had forgotten how nice you look when you clean yourself up.' At Hiroko's sound of exasperation he said, 'What? That's a compliment.'

'I should go,' Raza said. 'I don't want to be late for the exam.'

'Wait, wait. Are you going out celebrating with your friends tonight?'

Raza shook his head.

'Most of them still have one or two papers left. We'll go out on Friday.'

'Then tonight I'm taking us out for Chinese,' Sajjad said expansively, looking at Hiroko to catch her smile of pleasure. 'And you can wear this here, I don't want to wait until tonight to give it to you.' He gestured his son over to the steel trunk which doubled as a table, carefully removed the flower-patterned cloth that covered it, and opened it to release a smell of mothb.a.l.l.s into the room. 'Should have aired it,' Sajjad muttered as he took out something wrapped in thin tissue, and gestured for his son to come closer. 'Here.' He stood up, holding out a beige cashmere jacket to Raza. 'It's from Savile Row.'

'Is that in Delhi?' Raza asked, touching the sleeve of the jacket.

'London.'

Hiroko saw Raza's hands lift away from the jacket. He checked his palms for dirt, holding them up against the sunlight before allowing his fingers to drift back down on to the cashmere in slow, gentle caresses.

Hiroko smiled to see Sajjad help their son into the jacket he'd been wearing the first time she had seen him.

'My lords,' she said, with a trace of amus.e.m.e.nt, 'I hate to be the one to say this, but winter is over.'

'Oh, practical Ashraf! The restaurant will be air-conditioned. Raza can put it on when he gets inside.' Sajjad brushed nothing off Raza's lapel, feeling the need for an excuse to touch his son. It was in Hiroko's company that he felt his love for Raza most powerfully it was indivisible from his love for his wife. Those first years of married life which Hiroko recalled as 'negotiations' he was still startled sometimes by the language of practicality which she could bring to situations of intimacy he remembered quite differently. Always, in the beginning, the fear of losing her. She was a woman who had learnt that she could leave everything behind, and survive. And some nights he'd wake to find her looking steadily at him, and believe that she was imagining practising life without him. For him, the loss of home had a quite different effect it made him believe he only survived it because he had her. Would survive anything if he had her; would lose everything if he lost her. All those 'negotiations' he would have given in to her on each one if he didn't know she would disdain him for it. So behind every negotiation was his own calculation of where to give in, where to hold his ground in order to keep her love and respect.

His fear of her leaving subsided over the years, but didn't disappear entirely until the day Raza was born and he entered the hospital room to see his wife holding their child in her arms with a look of terror which said she had been handed something she could never leave behind, never survive the loss of. And then she looked at Sajjad, differently from ever before, and he knew she was tethered to their marriage by the tiny, wailing creature.

When, years later, he'd confessed all this, she'd teased him. 'So if we'd had a child right away, you'd have been a tyrannical husband instead of the generous, accommodating man I've lived with all these years?' But she never denied she used to imagine a life without him or when he elaborated on his fears that the new life would have been in the company of Elizabeth Burton, now Ilse Weiss, whose every letter in the first years implored Hiroko to come and stay with her in New York, while never mentioning Sajjad.

'You'll let me wear this tonight? Raza said, his hands gently stroking the arms of the jacket, wondering if his cousin in Dubai had anything this fine.

Sajjad kissed his son's forehead.

'It's yours. A present for my young lawyer. You make me proud.'

Raza took off the jacket, and carefully folded it.

'I'm not a lawyer yet,' he said.

'Only time stands between you and that.' Sajjad looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. 'This is the right way. You go to school, you go to college, you pa.s.s every exam, you prove what you are capable of and what you know. Then no one can take it away from you.'

'Yes, Aba,' Raza said automatically. Every father in this neighbourhood of migrants, each with stories of all they had lost and all they had started to rebuild after Part.i.tion, made a similar speech to his son. Perhaps he should be grateful that it was law, not medicine or engineering, that he was expected to spend his life pursuing, but that seemed a difficult thing to be grateful for when there existed a world beyond among the sand dunes where boys like his cousin Altamash who had never even pa.s.sed his Matric exam could work in hotels with escalators and lifts and marble floors in the em ployee quarters, and earn a salary sufficient to buy everything new and gleaming while still having enough left over to send home for their families.

All those years in which he insisted he was perfectly happy working as general manager in a soap factory, Hiroko thought, looking at her husband, and from the day Raza was born suddenly he couldn't stop using the word 'lawyer'. He'd made only one attempt, when they first came to Karachi, to re-enter the legal profession in which he'd always imagined he would one day distinguish himself. The lawyer on whose office door he knocked said he could start the next day on a clerk's salary, a pittance of an amount. When Sajjad listed all he could do, all he knew about the law, the man said, 'You have no qualifications whatsoever.' Sajjad sat up straight, took the name of the solicitor in Delhi who had offered him a job, and was told that man was dead no, not Part.i.tion riots, a hunting accident. Sajjad spent a single evening holding his head in despair and the following day went to find the newly migrated and well-connected Kamran Ali, in whose car he and Hiroko had driven into their wedding mist in Mussoorie, and came home, proudly beaming, saying, 'General manager! With a factory of over a hundred workers to oversee!' as though that was all he had ever wanted from the world.

And it was true, Hiroko knew, that he was content to be in a position of authority, respected and well liked, able to provide for his wife and son, and also in large part for the family of his dissolute brother Iqbal in Lah.o.r.e. But all those other dreams for a career that would bring more than mere contentment had come to rest on Raza's shoulders now. And if only Raza had admitted he wanted something else, she would have found a way to show Sajjad the damage he was doing. But Raza only ever laughed when she directly confronted him and said, 'Habeus corpus! A priori! We'll add Latin to the list of my languages, Ami.'

'Why must you be so adored,' Hiroko grumbled to her husband as she picked up the jacket with its overwhelming mothball smell and took it into the courtyard to air out.

'More adoring than adored,' he called after her. He rested his hand on Raza's back and gave him a gentle push. 'Go, my prince. Go, conquer.'

Raza slung his satchel over his shoulder inside was the textbook from which he planned to study during the lunch hour between his history and Islamic-studies exam and kissed his mother on the cheek before heading out on the short walk from his quiet residential street to the commercial road where three other boys from the neighbourhood were already waiting for the bus. It was still early enough for most of the shops to be closed, though the advertis.e.m.e.nts painted on to steel shutters ensured there was always some kind of commercial life in process. Across the street men were unloading crates of squawking chickens from a van and carrying them into the butcher's shop, which was located right next to a flower-seller, who carried on a roaring trade despite the stench of blood from next door. If your business is weddings and funerals, the flower-seller liked to say, nothing can stand between you and success except another flower-seller.

'Junior!' one of the boys, Bilal, greeted Raza, his arm looping over his shoulder to bowl an apple core at high velocity between Raza's legs.

Raza, ready for him, had already taken his textbook out of his satchel, and used it gracefully to flick the apple core on to the dusty pavement, where a crow swooped down and pecked at it.

'Such a hero our Junior has become,' Bilal said, affectionately grabbing Raza in a headlock. 'Look, at him, all slicked-back and ironed.' The nickname 'Junior' had followed Raza around since he was ten and his teachers had decided he should skip a cla.s.s year and take his place among the eleven-year-olds.

'Bilal, I ironed that shirt. If you crease it, I'm going to get very angry.'

At the sound of Hiroko's voice, the boys turned, smiling, standing up straight, all the childhood that was still in their seventeen-year-old faces suddenly apparent. While every other mother in the neighbourhood was 'aunty', Hiroko was Mrs Ashraf their former, and beloved, schoolteacher who only had to threaten disapproval to give rise to both consternation and obedience. When she and Sajjad had moved to this newly constructed neighbourhood in the early fifties and she had taken up a teaching position at the school near their house it was her students who were her first allies recognising in her a woman who could never be fooled or flattered, but whose smiles of approval or encouragement could transform a day into glory. Through the children she won over the mothers, whose initial reaction towards the j.a.panese woman with the dresses cinched at the waist was suspicion. And once the mothers had made up their minds, the neighbourhood had made up its mind.

'You didn't take money to buy lunch,' she said to Raza, handing him a five-rupee note. 'And share with your friends. Now quick, quick, the bus.'

The brightly coloured bus was hurtling down the quiet early-morning street towards them, slowing rather than stopping as it came alongside the boys, who jumped on with cries of accomplishment.

'Sayonara,' they all called out to Hiroko as the bus picked up speed again. Or at least, all of them except Raza called it out. He only spoke j.a.panese within the privacy of his home, not even breaking that rule when his friends delighted in showing off to his mother the one or two j.a.panese words they'd found in some book, some movie. Why allow the world to know his mind contained words from a country he'd never visited? Weren't his eyes and his bone structure and his bare-legged mother distancing factors enough? All those years ago when he'd entered a cla.s.s of older boys, at an age when a year was a significant age gap, his teacher had remarked on how easily he fitted in. He saw no reason to tell her it wasn't ease that made it possible but a studied awareness one he'd had from a very young age of how to downplay his manifest difference.

14.

Hiroko exited the sanctuary of the bookshop with its thick walls and slowly whirring fans into the chaos and furnace-like heat of Saddar. This used to be her favourite part of Karachi in the early days, when almost every one of the yellow-brick colonial buildings housed a cafe or bookstore, before it became a thoroughfare for buses with their noxious exhaust fumes and the impa.s.sioned university students disappeared into a new campus built far away, while the migrants who had crowded in refugee camps within walking distance of here went wheeling into distant satellite towns. Now every time she came here another several bookstores or cafes had disappeared, often replaced by the electronic shops through which her son loved to wander.

The one she most missed was Jimmy's Coffee Shop with the art deco stairs leading up to the 'family section' with lurid green walls where, for years, she used to meet a group of j.a.panese women on the first Sat.u.r.day of each month at 5 p.m. Those monthly meetings had started in early '48 when she and Sajjad were still living in the refugee camps, not so far from here, and he had come running to find her one evening and said he'd met a j.a.panese woman, her husband worked at the Emba.s.sy, she was sitting in one of the cafes waiting for Sajjad to bring Hiroko to meet her. Through her, Hiroko met the other j.a.panese wives in Karachi, and entered their weekly gatherings at Jimmy's it had meant a lot, more than she would have guessed, to have the promise of an evening every week to sit and laugh in j.a.panese. She never told any of them about the birds on her back, though. Considering it now, she decided the day she knew her life had tilted into feeling 'at home' in Karachi was when she found she was able to tell her neighbourhood friends that she had lived through the bombing of Nagasaki, while still insisting to the j.a.panese women that, although she grew up there, she was in Tokyo when the bomb fell.

The ripple ice cream at that cafe she closed her eyes to remember it was particularly wonderful. But really, the heart went out of those meetings when the capital shifted to Islamabad in 1960, taking the j.a.panese Emba.s.sy with it. The cafe stopped reserving the entire family section for them, though the meetings continued Hiroko's partic.i.p.ation becoming more sporadic after Raza was born until the demolition of the cafe a few years ago brought an end to the weekly gatherings altogether. She found herself mourning the loss, even though in the last years prior to Jimmy's closing she had attended the meetings mainly from a sense of obligation she had become the fount of wisdom about all things Karachi-related for the group.

She wondered sometimes near the end if she seemed as foreign to the newer members of the group as they did to her so j.a.panese! she sometimes caught herself thinking. The only person she could really talk to about this was the one Pakistani member of the group Rehana, who had spent twenty years in Tokyo before her j.a.panese husband had come to Karachi to set up an automobile plant. Rehana had grown up in the hills of Abbottabad, and said Karachi might be part of the same country as her childhood home but it was still as foreign to her as Tokyo, 'but I'm at home in the idea of foreignness.' When Hiroko heard her say that she knew she'd found a friend. But now Rehana was back in Abbottabad she had moved there two years ago when her husband died and months could go by without Hiroko going to the j.a.pan Cultural Centre and meeting other past members of the group, though there were several for whom she retained an affection.

As she retained an affection for Saddar, despite the electronics shops and the loss of Jimmy's, she thought, looking around. There was one world at street-level frenzied, jostling, entirely in the now: pavement vendors, large gla.s.s display windows, neon signs, gaping manholes, rapid-fire bargaining, brakes and horns and throaty engine sounds, the rush, the thrum of urban life and then, overhead, if you stood still, shoulders squared against the pa.s.sers-by, and looked at the arched windows, the cupolas, the intricate carvings, there was another world of buildings constructed in the belief that life moved at a different pace, more elegant, more pompous.

She was entirely happy for the pomposity to be displaced, but there was something else seeping into the atmosphere, worse than electronic shops, which made her uneasy. A few minutes earlier she'd picked up a copy of War and Peace War and Peace to replace her battered copy, shaking her head in fond exasperation at the memory of her son telling her time and again that eventually he'd learn Russian and then he'd read it, when a man standing beside her the air of ordinariness about him said, 'You mustn't read their books. They are the enemies of Islam.' to replace her battered copy, shaking her head in fond exasperation at the memory of her son telling her time and again that eventually he'd learn Russian and then he'd read it, when a man standing beside her the air of ordinariness about him said, 'You mustn't read their books. They are the enemies of Islam.'

After the man left, the bookseller apologised.

'Strange times we're in,' he said. 'The other day a group of young men with fresh beards came in and started to pull all the books off their shelves, looking at the covers for which were unIslamic.'

'What makes a cover unIslamic?' Hiroko asked.

'Portraiture,' the man replied. 'Particularly of women. Fortunately, there was a policeman walking past who saw what they were doing and came and stopped them. But I don't know what's happening in this country.'

'It won't last,' Hiroko a.s.sured him. When any of her friends in the staff room complained of this new wave of aggressive religion which was beginning to surface in some of their students she always told them that compared to the boys she'd first taught who dreamt of kamikaze flights these Karachi boys with their strange fervour for a world of rigidity were just posturing youths. And in any case, nothing could supplant cricket as their true system of worship.

Ignoring the crippled beggar who had dashed crazily across the street in his wheeled crate to get to the foreigner in whom he saw the possibility of compa.s.sion long since erased from locals, she looked around for her son. He was late, which was unlike him, but everything in Raza had been a little bit strange these last weeks since he finished his exams. She couldn't explain to Sajjad exactly what disturbed her, beyond saying there was a falseness about their boy as he threw himself into enjoying the time before college, talking loudly and excitedly about the law, boasting that when the exam results came out his name would be at the top of the list he who'd always been so circ.u.mspect about his successes. She found herself thinking that she shouldn't have agreed when the teachers suggested he skip a cla.s.s intellectually he was ready for it, but there was so much growing up to be done in the year between sixteen and seventeen and she wondered if he was yet ready for the next stage of life.

'Ma!' Raza pulled up in Sajjad's car, extending his torso through the window to take the heavy bag of books out of her hands, impervious to the car horns behind him.

'Wait,' she said. 'I forgot my other shopping inside. Go round the block and come back.' Without waiting for a response she darted back into the shop.

Raza continued sitting where he was, taking a strangely m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic pleasure in the humid stillness which made sweat stains bloom on his shirt. As the beeping of horns grew more insistent he gestured to the cars behind to go round, even though there was no room for them to manoeuvre. The crippled beggar raised a hand in supplication towards the open car window but Raza's indifferent 'Forgive me' the words a matter of custom, rather than meaning convinced him that nothing would be gained by staying here. As the man wheeled away, Raza's hand rested briefly on the afternoon newspaper on the dashboard, its reflection in the windscreen revealing columns of names the exam results. Grimacing, he picked up the newspaper and slid it beneath the mat on which his feet were resting. Almost immediately, he changed his mind and returned it to the dashboard.

At least it had finally happened. No more lying, no more pretence. By the time he arrived home he knew all the boys in the neighbourhood would have seen the newspaper. Who would be the first of them, he wondered, to stop scanning the lists of candidates who had 'pa.s.sed' and realise that it wasn't just an error that prevented him from finding Raza's name where it should be?

And when they asked him what had happened, urged him to appeal to the Board because obviously it was a mistake, it couldn't be anything else, right, Junior, right, even total idiots got the 33 per cent required to pa.s.s what would he say then? How could he explain to anyone when he didn't understand himself what had happened the final day of the exams when he sat down to the Islamic-studies paper?

The initial moment of panic when he looked at the questions was nothing new. For years he'd been familiar with this sickening sense of free fall as his eyes jumped from one question to the next, unable to finish reading one before darting forward, individual words and phrases from different questions clumping together in his mind to create an unintelligible ma.s.s. But then he'd steady himself, force his mind into quietness and read more slowly and meaning would attach to the words, answers flying from his pen to the paper as quickly as he could write. There had been times, through these Inter exams, when the moment of panic had lasted longer than normal, and it took three or four attempts of reading through the questions before everything fell into place. But that afternoon, that final exam of his school-going days, nothing fell into place. The jumble of words only grew more jumbled, bright spots of light appeared before his eyes as he tried to read, and nonsensical answers to questions he didn't even understand kept coming to mind in j.a.panese. He knew he had to calm down, that panic only bred panic, but then he remembered that this was a compulsory paper, failing it would mean failing everything, and how would he ever look his father in the eyes again? As soon as he thought of Sajjad Ashraf pictured his trusting, expectant face everything emptied from his mind. And then, the examiner was collecting the papers. Just like that. And his was blank. He picked up his pen, wrote firmly on the page, 'There are no intermediaries in Islam. Allah knows what is in my heart,' and handed in the paper.

When he emerged from the examination hall, there was a group of his friends clapping him on the shoulder. 'All done, hero! We really can't call you Junior any more, college boy.' One of them Ali slung an arm around Raza's shoulder and called out to a group of girls walking past, 'Who wants to go for a scooter drive with my friend, the college boy? Top marks this one will get.' He dropped the keys to his Vespa into Raza's hand, and pushed him towards the group of girls, two of whom were smiling directly at Raza, no coyness, no pretence, in the way that college girls smiled at college boys. Right then Raza knew he wouldn't tell anyone what had happened. For a few more weeks he could still be Raza the Brilliant, Raza the Aspiring, Raza the Son Who Would Fulfil His Father's Dreams.

When his mother sat down in the pa.s.senger seat he handed her the newspaper and pulled away from the pavement, his voice strangely calm as he said, 'I didn't pa.s.s. I left the final paper blank.'

A small noise of shock and disappointment escaped her mouth before she stopped herself and said, 'What happened?'

'I don't know.' He wished she would shout at him so he could be petulant or resentful in return. 'I couldn't understand the words on the exam paper. And then time was up.'

She had been a teacher long enough to know things like this sometimes happened to the best of students.

'This was your Islamic-studies paper?' When he nodded, she allowed herself a long, luxurious expression of disgust, though it wasn't directed at him. Devotion as public event, as national requirement. It made her think of j.a.pan and the Emperor, during the war. 'And why do you need that to study the law? Ridiculous!' She stroked the back of his head. 'Why didn't you tell me this earlier, Raza-chan?'

The childhood endearment brought tears to his eyes.

'I don't want to be the new neighbourhood Donkey.' Abbas, who used to live down the road from him, had acquired that nickname when he was eight and had to repeat a cla.s.s year after failing his exams. For three years he barely sc.r.a.ped through, coming at the bottom of the cla.s.s, and then he failed again. After that, no one called him anything but Donkey. Failure was the ultimate embarra.s.sment in the neighbourhood, a disgrace to the whole family, and the children picked up on this early, distancing themselves quickly from it through insults and jeers.

'Raza! No one will think of you that way. It was only one paper. You'll retake it in a few months. Everything will be fine.'

'But how will I tell Aba?'

'I'll tell him,' she said firmly. 'And if he says one word in anger to you I will make him regret it.' At his smile of relief, she said, 'In return you have to do one thing for me. Tell me what you really want from your life. I know it isn't the law.'

Raza shrugged and gestured to the electronic shops. 'I want to have everything that's in there,' he said grandly.

'I'm not asking what you want to possess. I'm asking what you want to do.'

They were stopped at a traffic light, behind a rickshaw that had a pair of sultry eyes painted on it, beneath which was emblazoned, in Urdu, LOOK LOOK BUT WITH LOVE BUT WITH LOVE. Raza's mind found itself instantly translating the words into j.a.panese, German, English, Pashto a reflexive response to any piece of writing he glimpsed as he drove through the city's streets.

'I want words in every language,' he said. His hands briefly left the driving wheel in a gesture of hopelessness. 'I think I would be happy living in a cold, bare room if I could just spend my days burrowing into new languages.'

Hiroko rested her hand on Raza's, not knowing what to say to that unexpected moment of raw honesty. To her, acquiring language was a talent, to her son it was pa.s.sion. But it was a pa.s.sion that could have no fulfilment, not here. Somewhere in the world perhaps there were inst.i.tutions where you could dive from vocabulary to vocabulary and make that your life. But not here. 'Polyglot' was not any kind of practical career choice. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of sorrow for her boy, for that look in his eyes which told her he knew and had always known that he would have to take that most exceptional part of himself and put it to one side. She knew what Sajjad would say if she tried to discuss it with him: 'If the greatest loss of his life is the loss of a dream he's always known to be a dream, then he's among the fortunate ones.' He'd be right, of course, but that didn't stop this pulling at her heart. There was something she had learnt to recognise after Nagasaki, after Part.i.tion: those who could step out from loss, and those who would remain mired in it. Raza was the miring sort, despite the inheritance he should have had from both his parents, two of the world's great forward-movers.

When they arrived home she went inside first, leaving Raza outside, leaning against the car, until she talked things over with Sajjad.