Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

‘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.’

There was something she had learnt to recognise after Nagasaki, after Partition: those who could step out from loss, and those who would remain mired in it.