Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

We’ll be in touch all the time, she and Aneeka had said to each other in the weeks before she had left. But “touch” was the one thing modern technology didn’t allow, and without it she and her sister had lost something vital to their way of being together.

As she walked home she thought how much more pleasant life was when you lived among foreigners whose subtexts you couldn’t hear.

At first the words were just a language she didn’t know, but as she continued, closing her eyes to shut out the world, they burrowed inside her, flared into light, dispelled the darkness. And then the light softened, diffused, enveloping her in the peace that comes from knowing your own powerlessness.

an elderly woman made small by age answered, wearing a shalwar kameez with a thick cardigan that signaled her internal thermometer was still set to another country.

Soon she was frying samosas for him, as though determined to inhabit a stereotype,

She doesn’t think our lives allow for dreaming, Aneeka had said, in a way that rang as both indictment of and justification for Isma’s position.

He’d grown up knowing that his father was a shameful secret, one that must be kept from the world outside or else posters would appear around Preston Road with the line DO YOU KNOW WHO YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE? and rocks would be thrown through windows and he and his sisters wouldn’t receive invitations to the homes of their classmates and no girl would ever say yes to him. The secrecy had lived inside the house too. His mother and Isma both carried an anger toward Adil Pasha too immense for words, and as for Aneeka, her complete lack of feeling or curiosity about their father had been the first definite sign that he and his twin were two, not one.

Oops

It was another planet, one on which he’d always be the boy from Earth whose lungs don’t know how to breathe this wondrous, terrifying atmosphere.

He didn’t know how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons he had attached to his own heels.

Grief changed its shape to fit your contours—enveloping you as a second skin you eventually learned to slip into and resume your life. Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overhead, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them never to turn around. Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.

Countless hours of recording, and never his own voice. As though he’d started to practice disappearing long ago.