Free Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie Page A

‘I could see that you were going to speak to me as an equal. They would have held it against both of us. You would not have been asked to stay.’ ‘I think we should start the lesson.’ He opened the exercise book. ‘To begin with, you will have to let go of the notion that writing starts on the left-hand side of the page and moves right.’
            Hiroko started to laugh, wondered whether that would seem rude, but saw that Sajjad was unbothered – his head angled slightly to the side, his eyes curious, as though simply waiting for her to finish and explain herself rather than worrying that he had said something deserving of mockery. She turned the exercise book towards herself and wrote down its page.
            ‘This is Japanese,’ she said.
            Sajjad’s eyes opened wide.
            ‘After Urdu you’ll have to learn a diagonal script.’
            She laughed again, and they both looked at each other and then dropped their eyes. They had both decided independently that it was merely the unfamiliarity of the other’s features that gave rise to this desire to stare and stare which had been present since their first meeting.
            ‘The first letter is alif,’ Sajjad said, and the lesson commenced.
            Within a few minutes Sajjad discovered what her German teacher at school and the priest who tutored her in English had earlier come to know: that for her language came so easily it seemed more as though she were retrieving forgotten knowledge than learning something new. Before he knew it they had progressed to the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.
            ‘This is zal, the first of four letters in Urdu which replicate the sound of the English zed,’ Sajjad said, drawing a curved shape with a dot on top. ‘Zal, zay, zwad, zoy.’
            ‘Why four letters for one sound?’
            ‘Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who don’t see the beauty in excess?’ he cried – it was the first time she saw his deliberately ridiculous side.
            ‘In other words, you don’t know, Sensei.’
            ‘What does that word mean?’
            ‘Teacher.’
            She was surprised by how red his skin could become. He picked up a pen, rolled it between his fingers, pressing a thumb against its nib and then examining intently the blue ink that spread across his skin.
            ‘You call them Elizabeth and James. You mustn’t call me anything other than Sajjad, Miss Tanaka.’
            ‘You mustn’t call me anything other than Hiroko, Sajjad.’ The one thing she had liked most about the Americans was their informality with each other. No stifling honorifics to make every relationship so bounded in. She saw, in their company, how ridiculous she had been in referring to the man she loved as ‘Konrad-san’. And she had even started to believe that if she’d said ‘Konrad’ instead he would have proposed earlier, and everything would have been different. Everything, except the bomb.
            Sajjad saw that her mind was winging away from Delhi and everyone in it. He knew what the Burtons would do in such a situation – interrupt, hold her in the present. As far as he knew there was only one occasion on which Elizabeth had asked about her life before Delhi – Sajjad had been passing by the open door of her room when Elizabeth broached the question and he couldn’t help but stay and listen. He had been struck by how matter-of-fact her response had been.
            ‘After the bomb, I was sick,’ she’d said. ‘Radiation poisoning, though we didn’t have a name for it at the time. Konrad’s friend, Yoshi Watanabe, had a relative in Tokyo who was a doctor. Nagasaki’s hospitals were overrun. So Yoshi-san accompanied me to Tokyo. He felt responsible, you see, because he felt he’d betrayed Konrad. Taking care of me was one way of making it up. He had me admitted to the hospital where his cousin worked,