Abdullah looked curiously at Raza.
‘Why are you saying all this now?’
‘I just didn’t see before.’ Raza stepped closer to Abdullah and put a hand on his arm. ‘You have the number of that friend in Peshawar who Afridi is staying with. You should call him as soon as we get to the training camp. Tell Afridi to come back and pick us up.’
Abdullah looked at Raza as though he didn’t recognise him, but before he could say anything a jeep turned the corner, headed for them, and the boys held their hands against their eyes to guard against the pebbles ricocheting from beneath the wheels.
‘They’ve come to take us to the training camp. And, Raza, don’t be such a city boy. There are no phones there.’
23
The morning of Raza’s departure from Karachi, Hiroko woke with the dawn azan as was her practice. She loved to hear the echoes of Arabic dropping gently into the courtyard like a lover stealthily entering a home, undaunted by the knowledge that today again his beloved will turn him away – her rejection of him so oft repeated, so tenderly repeated, it becomes an expression of steadfastness equal to his. But that morning, as she listened to – and felt – Sajjad’s gentle snores against her shoulder, some quality of stillness about the house had her lifting her husband’s arm from her waist and slipping out of bed.
Raza’s bedroom door was open. Nothing unexpected there. It was hot enough now for the need for cross-ventilation to override any desire for privacy that a seventeen-year-old boy might have. Even so, she quickened her pace across the courtyard.
When she saw the note on his pillow, written in Japanese, she knew something was very wrong. What could he be doing that required him to leave the house before dawn and of which he knew his father would so strongly disapprove that it was necessary to leave it to Hiroko to find a way to deliver the news to him?
She read the note, and seconds later she was shaking Sajjad awake, translating the Japanese for him without any thought to softening its blow.
Please don’t worry about me. I have gone away for a few days with my friend, Abdullah. We are going to travel through Pakistan. There is so much of this country I haven’t seen and Abdullah has friends everywhere who will look after us. I will bring back presents for both of you. Soon I will be a serious university student and there will be no time for such holidays, so don’t be angry with me. Raza.
To her amazement, Sajjad seemed entirely unconcerned. If anything, he was mildly amused.
‘You don’t know what it’s like to be a seventeen-year-old boy,’ he said, yawning as he reached for the mole just above her cheekbone, clicking his tongue in irritation when she moved back and wouldn’t let him touch her. ‘You know if he’d told us he was going you would have asked a million questions. Where will you go, who will you stay with, who is Abdullah, what does he do, why don’t you ask him to come over for dinner first, what is his family’s phone number, what are the phone numbers of his friends you’ll be staying with, which clothes are you taking with you –’ He sat up in bed and pulled his wife down next to him. ‘In the meantime, you overlook the fact that, for the first time in many years, you and I are living alone together.’ He kissed the mole lightly. ‘It’ll be like when we were first married.’
‘You are as silly and irresponsible as your son,’ she said, half-heartedly trying to disengage the arms around her waist. ‘Who is Abdullah?’
‘There was some boy called Abdullah at school with him, wasn’t there? There must have been. Abdullah – everyone knows an Abdullah.’
‘Everyone knows an Abdullah,’ she echoed, shaking her head in disgust. ‘Who knows what company your son is keeping, where he’s going, and all you can say is everyone knows an Abdullah.’
‘Don’t you trust your son?’
‘I trust my son. I don’t trust Abdullah.’
‘But you don’t know Abdullah.’
‘Exactly. So why should I trust him?’
Sajjad covered his ears with his hands.
‘Nagasaki, Dilli, Karachi. No matter where you women grow up as soon as you become mothers you all start using the same logic. If it makes you happy, ask some of his old schoolfriends. Ask Bilal.’ As she stood up briskly, he caught her arm. ‘Not now. It’s just sunrise. You can’t wake people up at this hour.’ But she shook him off with a look he knew there was no point in arguing against.
Just a few minutes later, she had let herself in through the side gate of Bilal’s house and was tapping on the kitchen window, where she knew Bilal’s mother, Qaisra, would be making her morning cup of tea following the dawn prayers. Over the years, the friendship between their sons had extended into a friendship between the mothers.
‘Bilal’s not here,’ Qaisra said, when Hiroko told her why she had come calling so early. ‘He stayed at the hostel overnight, working on some project with two other college boys. Or at least that’s what he told me. God knows what they do now they’re out of school and think they’re grown men.’ She handed Hiroko a cup of tea. ‘But he’s never talked about an Abdullah. And, you know, our boys, they don’t see each other so much any more.’
‘He would have told us where he was going unless he knew we would disapprove,’ Hiroko said, putting the teacup down and busying herself removing the dead leaves from the potted plant in the kitchen window.
‘They want to be grown men as much as we want them to be little boys, but really they’re neither. Doesn’t that sound wise? You said it to me last year when Bilal took the car without permission. Listen, stop worrying. And stop attacking my plant. He’ll be back soon, and wherever he is he won’t do anything stupid. You’ve raised a good son.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Which is more than can be said for some people. Have you heard? About Iffat’s son getting divorced? Isn’t it terrible?’
‘Not for his wife, it isn’t,’ Hiroko said, and Qaisra threw back her head and laughed.
‘Only you would say that.’
For years Hiroko and Qaisra had taken turns being the worried parent, the consoling parent, and now, as always before, Hiroko felt considerably reassured as she said goodbye to her friend, whose final words were a reminder that Raza would never do anything of which his parents might seriously disapprove.
But as Hiroko was exiting the side gate she heard a voice say, ‘Mrs Ashraf!’ and Qaisra’s daughter Salma, one of her former students, followed her out into the street.
‘He’s gone somewhere near Peshawar,’ she said, speaking very low. ‘This Abdullah is some Afghan boy with a truck. Raza met him at the fish harbour a few months ago. He’s gone with him to one of those training camps. For mujahideen.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Hiroko said. ‘What does Raza want with training camps?’
‘I saw him yesterday when I was at the bus stop. We started talking. He told me. He said in two weeks at these camps they teach you as much as the Army will teach in cadet colleges in two years. He was making it sound like some kind of holiday.’
It wasn’t at the bus stop that he’d said any of this to her. They hadn’t spoken in months when he called her the previous night to say triumphantly, ‘Thank you for your advice. You were right. People like me better when I don’t tell them who I really am.’ He obviously had some secret he was itching to share, and she understood as soon as he started speaking that she was the only one in Raza Ashraf’s life to hear about Abdullah the Afghan who was going to vie with Raza Hazara to drive the last Soviet out of Afghanistan.
‘Am I supposed to be impressed by how good you are at lying to stupid Pathans?’ she’d said, when he got to the part where he convinced Abdullah to go to the training camp. It was this response that made him veer away from the truth into declaring that he was going to join Abdullah at the camp ‘for a couple of weeks or so’. She had been impressed then – and made it obvious by telling him to be careful and to call her from there, to which he’d said, ‘Maybe,’ and hung up. It had occurred to her that she should say something to someone – Bilal, her parents, Raza’s parents – but then they would ask why he had told her, of all people. And how would she answer that? So she told herself that he was inventing stories – just as he had invented that story about the man from New York who would convince a university in America to pay for his education.
Hiroko did not stay to ask why Raza had revealed his plans to Salma when the girl finished telling her everything Raza had said. Instead, she turned and set off instantly towards home, trying to run, convincingly scissoring her arms through the air but finding her legs had trouble understanding how to move at a pace brisker than a walk; Sajjad, setting off for work in his car, had slammed on the brakes to see his wife running in slow motion towards him as though in a parody of a scene from a movie in which a wife races home to tell her husband something terrible has happened to their son.
When she told him what Salma had said his first instinct was to laugh. The stories a boy told to try and impress a girl! And Salma was certainly the kind of girl a boy would want to impress. Older than Raza, but even so. He’d have to tell the boy off soundly when he came back from wherever he was, of course – unacceptable to worry Hiroko so much. But he felt vindicated – years ago he’d told Hiroko there was more than a touch of his brother Iqbal in Raza and this certainly proved him right. Hiroko had disagreed sharply, calling him an ungenerous father, refusing to accept that of all his brothers he loved Iqbal the most despite knowing him to be the most flawed of all the Ashrafs.
But then – as Hiroko seized him by the back of his head, shocking him into thinking his wife was about to kiss him here, on the street, in public – everything in Raza’s behaviour which had mildly puzzled him the last few weeks coalesced into a single explanation. All the interest in Afghanistan! He’d bought a map of the country, asked Sajjad questions about the war there, paid close attention to every news item about it, though previously cricket had been the only current event that interested him. The truth didn’t just seem inescapable, it also seemed so obvious Sajjad marvelled at how it was possible he hadn’t realised earlier that his son had been making plans that delighted him in the way that only very foolish plans could delight a young man of Raza’s temperament.
Very gently, Sajjad disengaged his wife’s grip on his skull.
‘I’ll find him,’ he said.
‘How? He could be anywhere.’
Sajjad touched the mole on her cheek in a promise, and stepped back into his car.
‘I’m going to the fish harbour. Someone there must know this boy. I’ll find a way to call you from there. See if Salma knows anything else.’
Hiroko watched him drive away and then felt a hand on her arm.
‘That’s all I know,’ Salma said. ‘I’m sorry. I think I’m responsible for this.’
It was impossible to be angry with Salma when she revealed all she had said to Raza in the conversation about marriage. Impossible even to be angry at Qaisra, her dear friend, from whom Salma must have picked up those comments about Raza being ‘deformed’. All Hiroko could think was: the bomb. In the first years after Nagasaki she had dreams in which she awoke to find the tattoos gone from her skin, and knew the birds were inside her now, their beaks dripping venom into her bloodstream, their charred wings engulfing her organs.
But then her daughter died, and the dreams stopped. The birds had their prey.
They had returned though when she was pregnant with Raza – dreams angrier, more frightening than ever before, and she’d wake from them to feel a fluttering in her womb. But then Raza was born, ten-fingered and ten-toed, all limbs intact and functioning, and she had thought he’d been spared, the birds were done with her.
She had not imagined the birds could fly outwards and enter the mind of this girl, and from her mind enter Raza’s heart. She had never truly understood her son’s need for belonging, the anger with which he twisted away from comments about his foreign looks – in truth, she had thought that anger little more than an affectation in a boy so hungry to possess the languages of different tribes, different nations – but she knew intimately the stigma of being defined by the bomb. Hibakusha. It remained the most hated word in her vocabulary. And the most powerful. To escape the word she had boarded a ship to India. India! To enter the home of a couple she’d never met, a world of which she knew nothing.
She waved off Salma’s words, whatever they were – why didn’t the silly girl just stop talking – and walked down the street towards her home. He was her son. Her son. Like her, so intent on escape that nothing seemed impossible except staying put. She pushed open the door of her house, stepped into the vestibule and paused at the entry into the courtyard. The shadows of the neem tree fell exactly where she knew they would fall at this time of the morning; the emptied flowerbed surrounding the tree told her Sajjad had cleared away the remnants of the spring flowers and was preparing to plant zinnias – and so summer had truly begun. And the zinnias would bring butterflies. Somewhere during the course of the decades she had settled into this place, learnt to anticipate – not merely to react to – its lengthening days, its shifting shadows.