Home Fire

by Kamila Shamsie

In almost all human history, figures descending from the sky would have been angels or gods or demons—or Icarus hurtling down, his father, Daedalus, following too slowly to catch the vainglorious boy. What must it have felt like to inhabit a commonality of human experience—all eyes to the sky, watching for something mythic to land?

The weight of snow pressing familiarity out of the objects, so that the glove placed beside its former pair looked no more than a distant relative. And what then do you do? Throw away both gloves, or wear them mismatched to acknowledge the miracle of their reunion?

Small talk came more naturally to him than to her, but he was careful not to dominate the conversation—listening with interest to even her most banal observations, asking follow-up questions rather than using her lines as springboards to monologues of his own in the manner of most of the men she knew.

“So you don’t understand ‘bay-takalufi.’” He sat up straight and raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I do know that one. It’s informality as an expression of intimacy.” She experienced a brief moment of wonder that a father who hadn’t taught his son basic Urdu had still thought to teach him this word. “I wouldn’t say intimacy. It’s about feeling comfortable with someone. Comfortable enough to forget good table manners. If done right, it’s a sort of honor you confer on the other person when you feel able to be that comfortable with them, particularly if you haven’t known them long.”

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.

“I’m driving at the fact that habits of secrecy are damaging things,” Hira said in her most professorial voice. “And they underestimate other people’s willingness to accept the complicated truths of your life.”

Everyone would be perfectly polite, but at some point the following day, either Max or Alice would call him up to say, “Lovely girl. I hope she didn’t mind our sense of humor?” No relationship had ever withstood “hope she didn’t mind our sense of humor.”

She rested the back of her hand against his cheek, a touch he’d never had from her before. He bowed his head and rested it against hers, a moment of love between them that made all obstacles surmountable, even the ones around her heart.

In Aneeka’s company he’d learned to listen to the sounds of the world. “Hear that,” she used to say in the beginning, somewhere between a command and a question. Soon he learned the pleasure of being the one to say it to her, hear that,

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.

How exactly it happened he couldn’t have said. He had been too busy changing to stop and chart the change.

Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.