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Overview
Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows is a story for our time by "a writer of immense ambition and strength. . . . This is an absorbing novel that commands in the reader a powerful emotional and intellectual response" -Salman Rushdie.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
An Orange Prize Finalist
Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Hiroko Tanaka watches her lover from the veranda as he leaves. Sunlight streams across Urakami Valley, and then the world goes white.
In the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb, Hiroko leaves Japan in search of new beginnings. From Delhi, amid India's cry for independence from British colonial rule, to New York City in the immediate wake of 9/11, to the novel's astonishing climax in Afghanistan, a violent history casts its shadow the entire world over. Sweeping in its scope and mesmerizing in its evocation of time and place, this is a tale of love and war, of three generations, and three world-changing historic events.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429920780 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 386 |
| Sales rank: | 587,451 |
| File size: | 606 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sajjad. Ali Ashraf had his eyes fixed on the sky as he cycled parallel to the Yamuna River, trying to locate the exact celestial point at which Dilli became Delhi. Dilli: his city, warren of "by-lanes and alleys, insidious as a game of chess," the rhythmically beating heart of cultural India (he wasn't merely dismissive of opposing views, he was inclined to believe they were only made in jest), the place to which his ancestors had come from Turkey over seven centuries earlier to join the armies of the Mamluk King, Qutb-ud-din Aibak.
And then — Sajjad almost tipped over as his feet on the pedals turned recalcitrant, as they were apt to do when his attention was elsewhere — there was Delhi: city of the Raj, where every Englishman's bungalow had lush gardens, lined with red flowerpots. That was the end of Sajjad's ruminations on British India. Flowerpots: it summed it all up. No trees growing in courtyards for the English, no rooms clustered around those courtyards; instead, separations and demarcations. Sajjad smiled. That was it. That would be the subject of today's discussion with James Burton. Not flowerpots, but separations. Of course, almost all the wisdom he polished and honed in his mind on his morning journey into Delhi remained unspoken. But even so, as James Burton said, the readiness was all.
On the matter of separations ... Sajjad looked up again, but this time stopped the bicycle as he did so, and hopped off it. Yes, there, there was the boundary of Dilli and Delhi. There, where the sky emptied — no kites dipping towards each other, strings lined with glass; and only the occasional pigeon from amidst the flocks released to whirl in the air above the rooftops of the Old City where Sajjad's family had lived for generations.
I am like those occasional pigeons, Sajjad thought. At home in Dilli but breaking free of the rest of my flock to investigate the air of Delhi. He mounted the bicycle again, and wondered if there was a couplet to be written about pigeons and the Indians who worked for the English. Almost immediately he was impatient with the thought. He had no talent for verse, and it was only when in Delhi that he spoke fervently of the culture of poetry he had grown up with; in Dilli itself, while his brothers and sisters-in-law and aunts and cousins and mother traded couplets with each other, his mind would occupy itself with thoughts of the chess games which he and James Burton carried over from one day to the next as though they were stories of sultans and djinns. If he was to be honest, he missed the days when it was legal documents rather than chess games which occupied his thoughts each morning, but one day they would return to that — no doubt, no doubt. James Burton had promised him.
A few minutes later he was in the Burton property in Civil Lines, walking up the driveway lined with flowerpots. He paused by the Bentley to check his reflection in its window and when all he saw was the car's interior he moved undaunted to the bonnet, which reflected his image gleamingly back at him. He paid little attention to those aspects of his appearance that made his mother blow prayers over him to cast off the Evil Eye — the fine yet abundant hair, the perfectly proportioned features (except, at certain angles, the nose), the neat moustache, the fair skin of his Turkish ancestors, the confident air of a man of twenty-four who has never known failure — and instead fixed his attention on the beige cashmere jacket from Savile Row, running his hands along its length with sensuous pleasure.
"The peacock is here," Elizabeth Burton said, watching from her bedroom window and believing it was the slimness of his torso rather than the softness of the fabric he was admiring. She saw Sajjad bring the sleeve of his jacket to his lips — so embarrassingly pink and fleshy — and her eyes flitted away from him impatiently.
"Say something?" James asked from the doorway.
"I wish you wouldn't give him your clothes," Elizabeth said without turning towards James. "He's started looking at everything you wear as if it's his property; did you see how upset he was yesterday when you spilt ink on your shirt?" "Discarded clothes as metaphor for the end of Empire. That's an interesting one. I don't care how he looks at my shirt so long as he allows me to choose the moment at which it becomes his."
Elizabeth leaned her cheek against the open window shutters, and James watched her for a moment — the copper hair falling sleekly just above her shoulders, the statuesque figure, the sensuous droop of her eyelids. At thirty-seven she wasn't fading, just sharpening her edges. Trying to remember the last time they made love, he recalled instead the furious passion that had consumed their nights in the aftermath of Konrad's death, and the relief he knew they had both felt when it ebbed away. ("So this must be what sex feels like for animals," she had said one night during that crazed period while James was still inside her. He had been unable to meet her eye in daylight for the rest of the weekend.)
Elizabeth picked up her cup of tea from the windowsill and felt as though she'd posed herself for a portrait, The Colonial Wife Looks upon her Garden. It was worth looking upon, she conceded. The February sun had none of the antagonism that characterised it in later months, and the garden had responded to its benevolence with a burst of colour. Elizabeth made a mental checklist as she looked from one end of the front garden to the other: verbenas, dog flowers, larkspur, roses, sweet peas, phlox. And those were just the flowers at the far end, against the boundary wall. In colonial Delhi, gardens were to the wives what cricket was to the husbands — when conversation became tense, stilted, awkward, it would retreat to Bradman or gladioli. And February, when the chrysanthemums gave way to roses, was the very peak of the gardening year. All those interminable ladies' lunches!
Perhaps this would be the year she'd reveal that it wasn't the winter flowers for which she waited all year, it was the royal poinciana — or the gulmohar, as the Indians more romantically called it. She envisaged the indignation of the Delhi wives if she were to dismiss the winter flowers of Delhi — which were also the summer flowers of England — in favour of that most brazen of India's trees, with its red-gold flowers that flamed through the city in the summer, offering up resistance to the glare of the sun and, in so doing, unmasking the winter flowers as cowards.
"My imagined rebellions get more pathetic by the day," she said.
She didn't expect James to still be there; they had long since fallen out of the habit of staying around to listen to each other's responses. Even so there was a moment in which she hoped to hear him ask her what she had meant. But James was already making his way slowly down the stairs — his leg still not fully recovered from the fall from a horse two months earlier.
Sajjad was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, and James smiled at the sight of the young man in his perfectly fitted jacket.
"Which of your poor sisters-in-law was up all night adjusting that to your size?" he said, hopping down the final two steps and allowing all his weight to fall on the stronger leg.
"Qudsia." Sajjad held up a hand to steady James as he tipped forward on landing.
"Your younger brother's wife?"
Sajjad made a noise that sounded like confirmation. In fact, he was the youngest of the brothers but he saw no point in James Burton's occasional attempts to unfurl the tangle of consonants and relationships that made up his family.
The two men walked across the chequered-tile floor to the verandah where two tables were set up — one with a chessboard, its game already in progress, and the other bare.
On this second table Sajjad deposited the files he'd carried over, while his eyes scanned the back garden for anything feathered.
"There is a sunbird in your hollyhock, Mr. Burton."
"Sounds like a rude punchline. Go, wander" — he waved his hand in the direction of the garden — "I'll look over the excuse for work they've sent me this week."
Sajjad hopped down from the verandah to the grass, ignoring the steps. Elizabeth would see something pointed in that, James knew. She'd think the younger man was attempting to draw attention to the disparity between the elegance of his landing and James's earlier stumbling descent. But James was pleased with the carelessness with which the Indian felt he could hurl his body from one surface to the other; such a contrast from that studied formality which had marked his earliest interactions with James, eight years earlier.
It was Konrad who had first discovered Sajjad. ("You say that as though he were a continent," Elizabeth had remarked once on hearing him articulate the thought.) During his brief stay in Delhi he had come home to James and Elizabeth's one day, after a morning of taking in the sights, with an absurdly good-looking Indian boy following behind.
"Can't you find him a job?" Konrad had said, striding into the family room, where Henry, just learning to walk, was scrambling over James's knees. "He speaks fine English — once you wrap your ear around the accent — and has no interest in his family's calligraphy trade."
"Konrad, you can't simply pick up urchins off the street and bring them home," James said impatiently, glancing at the boy who stood just inside the doorway, his eyes to the ground.
James saw the boy's head lift up for a moment, and the expression told him that the Indian's English was good enough to understand, and be offended by, "urchin." James looked him over more carefully. No, not an urchin — the dirt on his white-muslin clothes was that of someone who had thrown himself to the ground in a wrestling match rather than someone with only a single set of clothing, and the fact that Lala Buksh, James's bearer, was making no attempt to guide the boy out to wait in the corridor or in the driveway while the "sahibs" discussed his fate was telling. In the year James had been in Delhi he'd learnt enough to know that Lala Buksh could be counted on to serve as divining rod for the hidden currents of social status among Indians.
He summoned the boy closer with a single gesture from his index finger.
"What can you do?"
Sajjad Ali Ashraf raised his eyes to James's.
"I can be priceless," he said. At the sound of choked laughter coming from Elizabeth, he reddened. "Invaluable," he corrected himself. "I can be invaluable."
Who would have thought he'd one day come to see that declaration as understatement, James thought, watching the boy — a man now — pick his way quietly across the grass to the sunbird.
Sajjad lowered himself to a crouch near the ruby hollyhock from which the bird was feeding, the iridescent feathers at its throat winking from crimson to black to emerald as its head dipped and retracted. When he married, he sometimes fantasised, he would leave his family's home and buy a house, just for himself and his bride, and the central courtyard would be a garden, filled with flowers heavy with nectar and vibrant with colour to summon Delhi's birds.
The sunbird hovered between Sajjad and the hollyhock for a moment before darting out of sight. Sajjad stopped to wonder who his mother and aunts would pick to be his bride. They had chosen well for two of his brothers, but the third — Sajjad shook his head in contemplation of the sullen, slow-witted creature his brother Iqbal had married. Angling his back so that James Burton couldn't see what he was doing, Sajjad leaned forward and flicked his tongue into the hollyhock, trying to sample its nectar, but without any success. Well, whoever he was going to marry, Sajjad thought as he stood up and returned to the verandah, it would be soon. His father's illness and death two years earlier had terminated his mother's first round of searching, and the second round had proved itself an excessive waste of time — if his sister-in-law's cousin was going to elope why couldn't she have done it at the start of the marriage discussions, not when the final preparations were under way? The whole matter had sapped everyone's spirit, but in the last few weeks the women of his family had started to turn their attention once more to the matter of Sajjad's future.
Occasionally Sajjad imagined finding a wife for himself, but then he thought of the Burtons.
"Let's play chess," James said, dismissing the contents of the file with a wave of his hand.
"The alleys of Dilli are 'insidious as a game of chess.'" Sajjad sat down opposite James, his hand sweeping over the lower half of his face to wipe off any pollen that might have attached itself to his skin. "Don't you agree?"
"Rubbish." James passed his handkerchief to Sajjad and gestured to the spot of pollen on the bridge of the other man's nose. "Chess isn't insidious. It was my move, wasn't it?"
This question incorporated a joke between the two men, referring back to a time when Sajjad was too conscious of the disparity of their social positions to contradict anything the Englishman said. Now, whenever they played and it was Sajjad's move first, James would claim the turn for himself.
"Yes, your move." Sajjad brushed his fingers across his nose, and returned the handkerchief to James. 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.
James raised his eyebrows at Sajjad.
"No, it wasn't. It was yours."
"Yes, Mr. Burton." With barely a glance at the board, Sajjad moved his knight into the path of James's pawn.
"What are you being so petulant for? Move that knight back, Sajjad, don't be ridiculous."
"Why isn't chess insidious?"
"It's that damn book again, isn't it? You're quoting that damn book to me."
The "damn book" was Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi, published during the war by Hogarth Press. James's mother had sent him a copy for Christmas and he'd read no more than two pages before deciding it an overblown piece of hyperbole and thrusting it in Sajjad's hands to show him the kind of nonsense that was being praised as an Indian masterpiece. "Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster at their patronising best. You could write a better book than this." But Sajjad loved the novel, and had taken to peppering his conversation with quotations from it in the hope of revealing to James the beauty of its sentences.
Sajjad moved his knight back to its previous position, and pushed his pawn forward instead.
"Do you think an Englishman will ever write a masterpiece in Urdu?"
"No." James shook his head. "If there ever was a time we were interested in entering your world in that way, it's long past. And you wouldn't know what to do with us if we tried."
It seemed to Sajjad these were the kinds of things said so often that repetition made fact of conjecture. He'd know what to do with an Urdu masterpiece written by an Englishman. He'd read it. Why pretend it was more complicated than that?
"Anyway, if it was going to happen it would have happened by now. The new Viceroy's arriving soon. To preside over the departure of the Raj from these shores." He sat back, surveying both Sajjad and the garden beyond as though he were in equal parts responsible for both. "Even the best innings must come to an end, I suppose." Sajjad wondered how James Burton would have felt about the end of the Empire if he didn't have this cricketing phrase handy. James returned his attention to the board, smiling as he identified the trap Sajjad was laying for him. "People who know about such things seem to think the creation of this Pakistan seems quite likely now. Ridiculous really."
Sajjad twirled his fingers in the air in what James had learnt to recognise as an Indian gesture of indifference.
"Either way it won't matter to me. I will die in Dilli. Before that, I will live in Dilli. Whether it's in British India, Hindustan, Pakistan — that makes no difference to me."
"So you keep saying. I think you're talking nonsense."
"Why nonsense? The British have made little difference to the life of my moholla." At James's look of confusion he translated "neighbourhood," barely disguising his impatience at the Englishman's failure after all this time to understand that all-important Urdu word. "It goes on as it has gone on. Yes, there are interruptions — 1857 was one, perhaps the departure of the British will be another — but believe me over the next century Dilli will continue to do what it's been doing for the last two centuries — fade at a very slow, and melancholically poetic, pace."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Burnt Shadows"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Kamila Shamsie.
Excerpted by permission of Picador.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
PROLOGUE,
The Yet Unknowing World - NAGASAKI, 9 AUGUST 1945 Veiled Birds - DELHI, 1947,
Part-Angel Warriors - PAKISTAN, 1982–3,
The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss - NEW YORK, AFGHANISTAN, 2001–2,
ALSO BY KAMILA SHAMSIE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
FURTHER READING,
Copyright Page,
Reading Group Guide
About this Guide
The following author biography and list of questions about Burnt Shadows are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach Burnt Shadows.