Burnt Shadows: A Novel

by Kamila Shamsie

There. See? There.” “How can you be sure it’s him?” “No one else in Nagasaki could cast such a long shadow.”

Flowerpots: it summed it all up. No trees growing in courtyards for the English, no rooms clustered around those courtyards; instead, separations and demarcations.

He knew how important it was to James to enact these moments of camaraderie which undercut the rigidity of the barriers between them. That it was only in James’s hands to choose when to undercut and when to affirm the barriers was something Sajjad accepted as inevitable and James never even considered.

“There is a phrase I have heard in English: to leave someone alone with their grief. Urdu has no equivalent phrase. It only understands the concept of gathering around and becoming ‘ghum-khaur’—grief-eaters—who take in the mourner’s sorrow. Would you like me to be in English or Urdu right now?”

She wondered sometimes near the end if she seemed as foreign to the newer members of the group as they did to her—so Japanese! 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 Japanese 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.”

But then, things shifted. The island seemed tiny, people’s views shrunken. How could a place so filled with immigrants take the idea of “patriotism” so seriously? Ilse had laughed and said, “The zeal of the convert.” And that phrase spoken by a smiling young man in Tokyo kept returning to her: “American lives.” It was a talisman, that phrase, the second part of it given weight by the first part.

She felt about people who believed in the morality of their nations exactly as she felt about those who believed in religion: it was baffling, it seemed to defy all reason, and yet she would never be the one to attempt to wrestle the comfort of illusory order away from someone else.

“When Konrad first heard of the concentration camps he said you have to deny people their humanity in order to decimate them. You don’t.” Walk on, Kim told herself. Get into your bedroom and close the door. But she stayed where she was, cradling the glass of Scotch that put Harry in the room with her. “You just have to put them in a little corner of the big picture. In the big picture of the Second World War, what was seventy-five thousand more Japanese dead? Acceptable, that’s what it was. In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he’s guilty, maybe not. Why risk it? Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb.”