Published by Bloomsbury, 2009. 367 pages. Price Rs 425.
On August 9, 1945, Hiroko Tanaka's life changed forever. As she rejoiced in the future to be with Konrad, her German lover, a mushroom cloud enveloped Nagasaki. Hiroko survived, the design on her silk kimono burning its imprint on her back. The title of the book remains a constant reminder of the horror that was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Burnt Shadows is a novel of almost epic proportions with a seamless theme of loss and anguish, hope and renewal. The victim of the atomic bomb comes to Delhi on the cusp of Partition and finds love. She finds Sajjad who is attached to his Dilli and his mohalla, only to find fate and the circumstances of the day relocating him and his Japanese bride to Karachi. And this is the story of their lives, of their son and friends, as Pakistan itself changes with Islamization and the Afghan struggle against Soviet occupation and the darkness that
followed 9/11.
Kamila Shamsie is not constrained by sequence or continuity. Decades pass before the narrative is resumed, the past occasionally glimpsed in sepia to lend substance to the present. And decades pass again before the thread is picked up at yet another defining moment. Hiroko Tanaka remains the central connecting strand, but the other characters come vividly to life as time unfolds. Her husband Sajjad for whom Dilli will always be home, Raza, the bright and self-absorbed son, who is yet to find himself, come vividly to life. As does Harry, the Englishman turned American, who connects the past and the present. There is Ilse, Konrad's sister, who befriended Hiroko on her lonely arrival in Delhi and who has the courage to seek and find freedom for herself. And if these are the main characters in this remarkable narrative, many others appear to make their contribution.
Burnt Shadows is, of course, not all about Hiroko and her family. It is about
what nuclear weapons could do to humanity. It is about the partition of India and what it meant to families at the time, brought to us through Sajjad for whom the poetry and the monuments of his Dilli were essential nutrients for his being. Raza's friend, Abdullah, brings to the pages the continuing agony of Afghanistan. Shamsie is clinical in her dissection of the cynicism with which the West, notably the United States, has approached the human tragedies of Afghanistan and the manipulation of peoples that continue. But she does so neither with prejudice nor in judgement, but in a sad acknowledgement of reality as it exists.
Kamila Shamsie has presented the reader with a window on the times in South Asia. Her acknowledged skills as an author have been matched, perhaps surpassed. For people in South Asia it will also remain a document recording history.