Burnt Shadows (33 page)

       
The Commander said nothing, just grabbed him by the neck and pushed him into a tent. Once more Raza recalled all the stories about Pathans and their proclivities, and then he saw there was another man in the tent, not a Pathan at all. A small man, darker than anyone else in the camp, with a clipped moustache, who was fastidiously wiping his hands with a pink tissue.

       
‘That’s him?’ he said in unconvincingly accented Pashto to the Commander, who nodded and stepped out of the tent, leaving Raza alone with the other man.

       
‘Name?’

       
‘Raza.’

       
‘Father’s name?’

       
Raza Hazara hadn’t mentioned his father’s name in years. He would not utter it until the last Soviet had been driven out of Afghanistan.

       
‘Sajjad Ali Ashraf,’ he said.

       
‘He’s Hazara?’

       
‘No. His family is from Delhi. My mother’s Japanese.’

       
The man raised an eyebrow and sat back.

       
‘The name of the American you were with at the harbour?’ he asked, switching from Pashto to Urdu.

       
‘Harry Burton.’

       
The man shook his head in disgust.

       
‘How can we work together with such little trust?’ he said.

       
‘I trust you,’ Raza blurted out, and the man laughed unpleas­ antly.

       
‘Who are you? What do I care if you trust me or not? Harry Burton, Harry Burton.’ He shook his head again. ‘I’ve never met him, but I know the story. Do you know the story? When he coloured his hair, wrapped a chador around him and thought this meant he could enter one of our camps without word getting back to us that the CIA had been where their own government has forbidden them to go.’

       
Uncle Harry?

       
‘Give him a piece of advice from me. Say the CIA needs to give its agents lessons in walking. Americans walk differently to everyone else. I can spot one as far away as the horizon.’ He held out the tissue, and Raza automatically stepped forward, holding out his hand to take it. This seemed to please the man. ‘So why have they sent you? You seem completely incompetent.’

       
‘No one sent me.’

       
‘You only make things worse by lying,’ the man said mildly. ‘You’ve already admitted you work for the CIA. Now what’s the point of saying they didn’t send you here?’

       
‘I can leave if you want,’ Raza said, and then wanted to hit himself for the idiocy of the statement.

       
The man’s laughter seemed more genuine this time.

       
‘Yes, I want. Go back to your Mr Burton and tell him we can’t afford to be spying on each other. It’s enough that I have to spend all my time mediating between Afghan commanders and politicians whose hatred for the Soviets is eclipsed by their hatred for each other – and their hatred for each other eclipsed by their hatred for our Arab brothers who have come to fight in this jihad. It’s too much. I’ve had an upset stomach for months now because of it.’

       
‘I’m really sorry,’ Raza said.

       
This time the man’s laugh was unmistakably filled with humour.

       
‘I don’t know what the CIA thinks it’s doing with someone like you. Do you have any money?’

       
Raza reached into the pocket of his kameez and pulled out a fistful of rupee notes.

       
‘Here, sir.’

       
‘Now I know you’re just playing the idiot.’ The man smiled. ‘You’re coming with me. This minute. I’m taking you to a train station. That money should be enough for a ticket back to Karachi. And, Raza Ali Ashraf, if ever again you try something like this you won’t find me so forgiving. Tell Harry Burton there are limits to what every friendship can endure.’

       
‘Yes, sir, I will,’ Raza said. As he followed the man out of the tent and up the mountain road towards the jeep that would carry him to a train heading home he kept looking up into the sky, overcome with gratitude for the unparalleled blessing of an answered prayer.

       
But he was only halfway up the road when he heard his name and Abdullah came running after him.

       
‘Where are you going?’ he said.

       
Before Raza could answer the man turned towards Abdullah and held up a hand of command.

       
‘He’s coming with me. Go back down.’

       
But Abdullah didn’t move.

       
‘Is this because of what I said?’ His eyes opened in horror and he reached out and caught Raza’s sleeve. ‘No, I didn’t mean it. He’s not with the CIA. He’s come to fight with us. He’s an Afghan, he wants to be a mujahideen. That’s all he wants. I was angry, so I said some lies about him.’

       
‘Go back down,’ the man repeated, the tone of his voice making Raza shiver. But still Abdullah didn’t move.

       
‘You can’t send him away. He’s come here to fight with us. That’s the only reason he’s here. I lied. I’m telling you, I lied.’

       
The man looked placidly at Raza.

       
‘Move,’ he said mildly.

       
Raza gently detached Abdullah’s hand from his sleeve, unable to bring himself to look at the younger boy, who had fat tears running down his cheeks.

       
‘I’m sorry,’ Abdullah whispered. ‘Raza Hazara, brother  . . .’

       
Raza shook his head and walked away, each step that put distance between him and Abdullah intensifying the physical pain of grief and loneliness.

       
‘They really are a bunch of walnuts,’ the man said as he pushed Raza ahead of him towards the jeep.

25

By sunset on the fourth day of Raza’s absence from Karachi, Sajjad Ali Ashraf had almost resigned himself to another wasted day of back and forth between the port and the fish harbour, asking the fishermen and the truckers if they knew anything of Abdullah the Afghan boy. His only success had been on his second day when he found a trucker at the harbour who remembered the Afghan boy Abdullah, and said he worked with another Pathan – Sajjad remembered them faintly, the boy and man who Raza had been talking to when he and Harry exited the fish harbour all those months ago; but the trucker didn’t know how to find Abdullah or the other Pathan. ‘I see them now and then either here or at West Wharf. Eventually, they’ll show up.’

       
‘He won’t show up,’ Hiroko had said that evening when Sajjad finally gave up for the day and returned home. ‘He’s gone to a camp near the Afghan border. What are you hoping to find at the harbour, Sajjad?’

       
‘Maybe his friend, the other Pathan, will be there. He might know something more. What do you want me to do, Hiroko? Sit at home playing cards while my son thinks he’s in some movie but everyone else around him is carrying real AK-47s and God knows what else is going on? What will they do when they find out he’s lying? Hazara! What is he . . . is he mad? Is he on drugs? These Afghans and their drugs. I’m telling you this Abdullah has put him on drugs.’

       
So before dawn each day, Sajjad went down to the coast to wait for the Pathan truck driver – not even knowing if he’d recognise him again based on just that one glimpse and other truckers’ descriptions, but knowing he couldn’t go to work in the morning as if everything was all right. All day and into the night he traversed the space between the fish harbour and West Wharf, his car besieged at both stops by the street urchins to whom he paid a daily sum of money to keep an eye out for the Pathan, though the effect of the much larger amount he’d promised to whoever found the man first resulted in half a dozen false sightings a day and nothing beyond. He couldn’t keep this up much longer, he knew. The managing director of the soap factory – a relative of Kamran Ali, in whose car Hiroko and Sajjad had driven through Mussoorie, lifetimes ago – had been sympathetic when Sajjad had called to explain why he needed some time off, but sympathy only translated into a limited number of days away from the office.

       
But late on the fourth evening – while Raza watched the grimy train window reflecting a face which he looked at with honest distaste – Sajjad walked on to the docks at West Wharf. Ships of all sizes were moored in the harbour, the smell of oil more pungent than anything the sea could naturally produce. The bent giant arms of cranes at rest hovered menacingly above the docks. But Sajjad only noticed that – finally, finally – he had seen someone he recognised. It was Sher Mohammed, Harry’s rickshaw driver, shaking his head at a wiry man who was gesticulating in anger.

       
Sajjad had spent four days in prayer. Religion had never been more than a constant background hum in his life, but he discovered praying was something to do, some ritual in which to pass the time as he drove back and forth, saw one street urchin after another shake his or her head, no, no, maybe yes but really no, and waited, just waited for deliverance to announce itself. His lips moved constantly, body rocking forward as he recited the ‘Ayat-ul-Kursi’, having discovered he had none of his mother’s talent for finding comfort through conversing with God as though He were a recalcitrant lover. He could not yell familiarly, familialy, at the Almighty and so he prayed to Him in a language he didn’t understand, and felt the rightness of incomprehension when dealing with a power which showed no mercy when Altamash was killed, when Iqbal’s wife and children were massacred, when Sajjad entered the Consulate in Istanbul, and yet had the mercy to give him a son he hadn’t known he’d wanted so desperately until . . . until now, if he were honest. He had loved Raza from the moment he’d first taken the wriggling infant in his arms, but he had also soon grown to take him for granted as Sajjad had always taken the blessings of his life, other than Hiroko, for granted.

       
But as his brain recognised familiarity in the shape of Sher Mohammed and he remembered that the rickshaw driver had been parked outside the fish harbour when Raza first met the Afghan boy he was overcome by a feeling of gratitude so overwhelming he staggered back with the force of it. For a few seconds he could do nothing but stare at Sher Mohammed, thinking that it was unlikely the answer to a prayer had ever taken a more unexpected form than this little man with only a scattering of teeth still attached to his gums, and an ear-lobe in tatters. He had complete certainty that Sher Mohammed would help him find Raza; it was impossible for his presence here to be anything but an act of Providence.

       
He would have liked to lower himself on to his knees in gratitude, but there was a puddle of oil-slicked water on the ground and Hiroko would have something to say about it if he came home with a ruined shalwar. So instead he allowed himself a moment to watch the fiery pupil that was the sun staring out at him from the dark eye of oil. I will be a better father after this, he promised. Whatever he wants to do with his life, I will accept.

       
He was certain there was no one but himself to blame for what had happened. Hiroko had barely spoken these last few days – refused to see any of her friends when they came to call – and when she did say anything it was to ask, ‘What did we do that was so wrong?’ She didn’t just mean how could he have done something so foolish, but also, how could he have convinced an Afghan boy to go to one of those camps just because he saw it as occasion for his own adventure. Sajjad couldn’t bring himself to care about the Afghan boy. He just wanted his son back. He wanted a chance to be a different father – Hiroko had done everything a mother could do, was in no way to blame for what had happened. Any faults in Raza were signs of his flaws as a parent. Law school! It seemed so irrelevant now. What did it matter if the boy passed an exam or not, became a lawyer or not? Let him be here, be well. Nothing else mattered.

       
Rainbows bubbled at the edges of the puddle. He wished he could sift them out into his palms and take them home to Hiroko. He’d walk into the courtyard, toss the rainbows up so they’d catch in the limbs of the neem tree and call Hiroko out to sit under the canopy of colour while he told her how he’d found their son through the man with the tattered ear-lobe.

       
Their first weeks in Karachi together, living in refugee tents, he used to wake up every morning thinking, Will this be the day she decides to go back to the Burtons with their expanse of bookshelves and feather pillows and gardens? So every day became a day to find something of beauty in their strange new home that he could point her towards to say, Look, there’s loveliness here, really there is. One day a seashell with an ocean roaring behind its pursed lips, one day a cactus flower in bloom, one day a Dilli poet who wrote verses on leaves because he couldn’t afford paper (he gave an armful of leaves to Sajjad, and Sajjad pasted them directly on to the inside of their tent, just above the bedroll). In his desperation to make Karachi a place where Hiroko could imagine her life he learnt reasons to fall in love with the city, realising only much later that Hiroko had known what he was doing and had let him do it because she knew he was the one who needed to find ways to imagine a future in this place so removed in its architecture and its air and its pace of life from the city he had wanted to live and die in.

       
Sajjad touched his heart briefly, and stepped over the puddle.

       
‘Sher Mohammed!’ he called out, quickening his pace. ‘Sher Mohammed!’

       
The rickshaw driver was deep in argument with one of the ships’ captains responsible for transporting arms to Karachi for transit to the mujahideen. The ISI had been to see the captain, demanding to know why his supply didn’t match up to the CIA inventory and though he had given them a line they seemed to accept because it was so often true – that the discrepancy must have occurred somewhere earlier in the supply line – the encounter had both shaken and angered him. So he now rounded on the man responsible for the discrepancy – Sher Mohammed, one of the CIA’s local assets who had previously used the occasion of driving the captain to a CIA rendezvous to convince him no one would notice if a few guns went missing.