Burnt Shadows

“As ever, their conversation moves between German, English, and Japanese. It feels to them like a secret language which no one else they know can fully decipher.” 

Shamsie often connects fluency in foreign languages with intimacy, suggesting that each individual person speaks a kind of language of the self. Here, this idea is extended to relationships, as Konrad and Hiroko’s love is imagined as a kind of private language. Shamsie equates the time and effort spent learning another language to the work of understanding and loving another person.

“Discarded clothes as a 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.” 

Spoken by James, this quote evinces the limits of intimacy within a given hierarchy. James is comfortable in his cross-cultural friendship with Sajjad only as long as he remains in a position of power. Shamsie implies that James’s personal relationship with Sajjad is a model for the greater relationship between the colonized India and the British Empire: inherently unequal and therefore incompatible with true cosmopolitanism.

“Hiroko once spent an entire afternoon looking at a picture of Harry Truman. She did not know how to want to hurt the bespectacled man, though she suspected she would feel a certain satisfaction if someone dropped a bomb on him; as for justice, it seemed an insult to the dead to think there could be any such thing.” 

Shamsie is careful to delineate between national and personal responsibility for the events of history, while acknowledging the difficulty this duality poses to resolving feelings of anger or guilt. Hiroko understands that US President Harry Truman is both the individual who ultimately decided to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan and merely a figurehead for the larger political and cultural forces that facilitated his decision. Hiroko resists ideas of retribution against either the nation or the man responsible for nuclear bombardment, understanding that more violence will only continue the cycle of nationalism.  

“It seemed the most extraordinary privilege—to have forewarning of a swerve in history, to prepare for how your life would curve around that bend.” 

Shamsie uses this passage not only to reveal how Hiroko is still adjusting to a life she never imagined before the bombing, but to also explore the different degrees of self-determination that different people are afforded. The bombing changed Hiroko’s entire life in an instant, while Ilse has the opportunity to reflect on how leaving India will affect her future. Ilse has the chance to consider her response to history, while Hiroko was forced to adapt unpredictably. Shamsie notes here that wealth and whiteness increase one’s agency in this context, positioning the unpredictability of the later 9/11 attacks as particularly destabilizing for a majority-white America, unused to violence on domestic soil.  

“Two years after the war they could accept an ally of Hitler sooner than they could accept someone of a different class, she thought, and wished she had entered India in a manner that would have allowed her into the houses of those who lived in Delhi’s equivalent of Urakami.” 

Shamsie portrays class as one marker of identity than can transcend cultural differences. Wealth becomes the common language of the world in Shamsie’s point of view, understood in every language. Although communicating a cynical view here, Shamsie later contrasts Hiroko’s disdain for the wealthy with her amazement at the ability of Pakistani and Indian taxi drivers in New York to achieve class solidarity. 

“There is a phrase I have heard in English: to leave someone alone with their grief. Urdu has no equivalent phrase. It only understands the concept of becoming ‘ghum-khaur’—grief-eaters—who take in the mourner’s sorrow. Would you like me to be in Urdu or in English right now?” 

Recalling Konrad and Hiroko’s private language, Sajjad here creates a new language of intimacy, in which Konrad’s German is replaced by Sajjad’s Urdu. Shamsie also reveals how cultural concepts are embedded in language, as even the idioms of English and Urdu reflect their respective cultural attitudes. This point bolsters Shamsie’s position that language is inherently connected to intimacy. 

“It struck him […] that this was how it should be—he, an Indian introducing the English to the history of India […] It was a surprising thought, and something in it made him uneasy. He had thought the world would change around him but his own life would stay unaffected.” 

Sajjad realizes at Qutb Minar that he cannot escape the political forces shaping his world. This realization destabilizes Sajjad’s sense of the world both helpfully and hurtfully. Sajjad loses his sense of safety and continuity to life in Delhi, but he also stops accepting the British-Indian hierarchy as a given and opens up to a relationship with Hiroko. Shamsie portrays the acknowledgement of political forces in one’s life as both troubling, in that one is vulnerable to forces beyond one’s control, and empowering, as one might better resist oppressive cultural norms by understanding their origins. 

“In talking to Lala Buksh, Sajjad realized that atrocities committed on Muslims touched him far more deeply than atrocities committed by Muslims—he knew this to be as wrong as it was true.” 

Sajjad’s revelation of his own prejudices comes after his realization of the ways in which his life and values are influenced by political forces. Shamsie acknowledges the role identity plays in an individual’s sense of morality and posits that people naturally feel sympathetic to other people who share important markers of their own identities, such as religion or nationality, while maintaining that this practice denies the humanity of people different from oneself. Shamsie suggests that the only way to avoid acting on the dubious moral grounds of cultural bias is to actively confront one’s own biases.

“You said to me once that Delhi must seem so strange and unfamiliar, but nothing in the world could ever be more unfamiliar than my home that day. That unspeakable day. Literally unspeakable. I don’t know the words in any language…” 

Hiroko explains to Ilse how the trauma she has experienced has destroyed her sense of home, resulting in a sense of permanent displacement. Shamsie presents this kind of violence as incomprehensible, the tragedy too terrible to be expressed without minimizing it, setting up her later examination of the justifications made for violence in war. Later, the death of Sajjad will produce a nearly identical feeling in Raza, emphasizing Shamsie’s position on the relationship between trauma and notions of belonging. 

“It would be a betrayal of his mother to do what he was contemplating, he knew. But she had told him to keep on living and perhaps if death freed her from convention she would understand that was precisely what he was doing.”

Khadija’s death in combination with the political upheaval of Partition make it possible for Sajjad to break with tradition and seriously consider marriage to Hiroko. Sajjad himself has been “freed from convention,” no longer beholden to a system of social norms that is being reorganized by political forces beyond his control. Shamsie presents Sajjad and Hiroko’s relationship as a rare positive result of geopolitical forces influencing personal decisions. 

“But in moments of real honesty when he heard his wife and Hiroko laughing together, something more than language acting as a barrier between him and them, he knew simply that he missed Sajjad’s company.” 

Shamsie allows James a rare moment of perception, able to sense the depth of his disconnection, but Shamsie does not write James with the self-awareness to realize that it is his own prejudices that render him incapable of the vulnerability that facilitates intimacy. James’s longing for friendship, and his inability to see his own faults that prevent that friendship, suggest that unexamined biases are harmful to both the self and to others. James struggles to feel love from others just as he struggles to show love to others. 

“I would like to go on being with you. I almost put that aside myself in fear of a possible tomorrow, but if these days teach us anything it’s that all we can do in preparation for tomorrow is nothing.”

Sajjad dispels Hiroko’s fear of how the lingering effects of the nuclear bomb might affect their future together by insisting on the unpredictability of the world. Sajjad helps Hiroko to accept the uncertainty she struggles with after the bombing and empowers her to take comfort in relationships rather than avoid them out of fear of being hurt. Shamsie also insists through Sajjad’s willingness to meet the future as it comes that even in the midst of tragedy, life and love go on.

“Everything James Burton said about violence is true. It is the most contagious of all the madnesses.” 

Sajjad marvels at the way his hometown is transformed by the religious-political tensions of Partition. In a reverse portrayal of the cosmopolitan ideal espoused in the novel, Shamsie explores how all communities are equally susceptible to violence predicated on difference, both within and between nations. As she does frequently in the novel, Shamsie portrays violence here as an almost insurmountable obstacle.  

“Afterwards, she and Sajjad hadn’t known whether to howl with laughter or with tears to think that their son’s teenage rebellion was asserting itself through nationalism.” 

After Raza asks Hiroko to behave more like other Pakistani women, Hiroko realizes both the irony of her son’s attachment to convention and the trouble he has fitting in that it indicates. Shamsie sets up what could be a typical trope of teenage angst—rebelling against the ideals of one’s parents—to be the basis for true tragedy. Raza’s longing for acceptance makes him vulnerable to forces that would abuse his longing to belong, specifically the mujahideen, and at 16 Raza is not mature enough to be aware of the danger.

“Six months in Islamabad, without reprieve. How had he managed it? The sacrifices a man makes for his country, Harry thought, saluting his reflection in the tinted window.”

At first presented as sardonic humor about his dislike of Islamabad, Harry’s words take on dramatic irony when he is murdered while under contract to the US government. Harry will make the ultimate sacrifice for his country, long after his idealism about America has waned. “Sacrifices” also refers to Harry’s failed relationships with his wife, his mother, and his daughter, which are inhibited by the necessary secrecy of his work. 

“‘This coastline was along the slave route—not your slave route, of course. The Eastern one.’

‘I wouldn’t call it my slave route.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Sajjad said dismissively, letting go of the boy with a pat on the head. ‘What I’m saying is, this is a city of comings and goings—even before Partition.”

This short exchange between Sajjad and Harry at the fish market exemplifies each man’s relationship to his past. Like his father, James, Harry is unable to reconcile with the past harm done by his ancestors and rejects all personal responsibility for the actions of his nation, past or present. Sajjad, however, displays his ability to learn about and adjust to new places, seeking to forge a deeper connection with his new home not defined by the circumstances of his arrival there.  

“Sometimes I look at my son and think perhaps the less we have to ‘overcome’ the more we feel aggrieved.” 

Hiroko cannot understand Raza’s difficulties fitting in and test anxiety, feeling that she and Sajjad have faced much more acute challenges than their son. Shamsie explores through Hiroko’s insight the ways in which privilege counterintuitively reduces a person’s capacity for hardship. Shamsie echoes this notion both in Hiroko’s earlier declaration of the British privilege of foreknowledge in leaving India and in Ilse’s attempts to calm Kim by taking a wider perspective on 9/11.

“Languages had always come easily to Raza, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of the weight attached to language lessons. […] In India, it was language lessons that brought Sajjad and Hiroko to the same table, overturning the separateness that would otherwise have defined their relationship.”

Shamsie portrays Raza’s attachment to the Afghan refugees as deeper than the surface-level adventure of pretending to be one of them. Raza finds it impossible to share language without developing intimacy, given his awareness of the role language plays in his family history. Shamsie uses this opportunity to explicitly state her position that multilingual fluency is the best path to connection.

“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.” 

In Hiroko’s dreams, her bird scars become the embodiment of the forces of violence and the fear of difference. Hiroko imagines the birds to be responsible for her miscarriage—the past she was trying to escape making claims on her future. After Raza runs away, Hiroko imagines the birds have grown even more power, able to fly out of her and threaten her son. 

“How could a place so filled with immigrants take the idea of ‘patriotism’ so seriously?” 

Hiroko marvels at the quick descent of New York into racially motivated paranoia and nationalism. Shamsie presents the impulse to reject others on the basis of difference as a fear-based instinct, capable of changing people very quickly. Hiroko, who believes in pacifism and cosmopolitanism, is devastated to see even a diverse city like New York repeat what she considers the mistakes of the past. 

“Here, at last, a tiny glimpse of the world Abdullah held on to, the lost beauty which had allowed him to contemplate grotesque violence.” 

Raza is finally able to picture the beauty of Afghanistan before the wars and understand how such a place could inspire devotion. Shamsie also sets beauty and violence in direct opposition here, noting that they are opposing yet connected forces. Shamsie suggests that the cruelest aspect of violence is not that it destroys beauty, but that violence against beauty motivates more violence. 

“Your mother lost her family and home to war; your father was torn away from the city whose poetry and history had nurtured his family for generations; your second father was shot dead in Afghanistan; […] Home is something you remember, not some place you live; and your first thought when you reach safety is how to help a friend you haven’t seen in twenty years […].”

Abdullah’s tidy summation of Raza’s experiences also serves to emphasize the connection between traumatic events and one’s sense of self and home. Abdullah, with his own experiences of displacement, easily connects Raza’s personal struggles to his inherited traumas. Shamsie also highlights Raza’s innate, hard-won compassion, presenting Raza’s concern for Abdullah as the twist ending in a series of tragedies. 

“She missed Harry. She missed Ilse. She missed the world as it had been. Abdullah’s voice in her head said it had never been.” 

Shaken by Raza’s arrest, Kim questions her decision with a heightened awareness of how her decision might be viewed by others. Too late, Kim begins to explore the possibility that her worldview at least partly comprised unconscious bias and even overt nationalism. Shamsie presents the world as in a constant state of flux and suggests the dangers of certainty when people of different cultures interact.