Burnt Shadows - Kamila Shamsie

Some books are meant to be read. Others re-read several times. Burnt Shadows obviously belongs to the latter. I was drawn to the book as bees to nectar ,and emerged out of the Unity bookstall 30 dollars shorter. With such a name one can't go too wrong with picking a book, I argued with the notorious guilt conscience. The prologue had me.

Spanning 5 countries and 6 decades, Burnt Shadows begins where the world as we knew ended, in Nagasaki, on August 9 1945. The day began as a perfectly blue day but only the survivors, among them Hiroko, would associate it with a certain greyness. The greyness clouding the world, when war has removed all the vibrant colors.

War remains at the core of Burnt Shadows, not the horrors of war as you see it happening before you, but picking up from broken shards of a former life, in the aftermath of war itself. Every country that it encompasses, begins at a point when it has been razed down by hatred. Hiroko Tanaka loses her lover, Konrad, a German translator, on that fateful August day and her life changes forever.  Two years later she moves to Delhi, in search of Konrad's estranged half-sister, Iles Weiss(Elizabeth) and her husband, James Burton. Being a born linguist, and not having much to do, she learns Urdu from Sajjad Ashraf, an employee of James and hence, of the Raj. Soon enough, her seemingly quiet life is once again thrown into turmoil as Pakistan is born, and suddenly religion comes to the forefront of issues during Partition.

Displaced once again, the story follows Hiroko into Karachi. Kamila's powerful narrative style is evident as she gives us a glimpse into the lives and loves of her characters as they  brave the heat of Delhi or catch the seashore breeze in Karachi. She brings to light an important fact, that beneath all the religious frenzy dividing the two countries, as even nature did not deem fit, is a fundamental similarity. Kamila's literary creativity is evident in her use of rich metaphors as evident in phrases such as 'hair like black water' to drive a point home. At various points in the book, Kamila reveals that she is a master story teller with her strong plot and deep characters. She could not have chosen better than Hiroko, the Japanese, to try and lift the existing social hierarchy in a class conscious Indian society at the height of the British Raj.

Kamila has accurately captured the sense of imminent fear in the minds of her characters as they propel through the course of history and their lives, in a post 9/11 era, comforting themselves with the phrase 'After the war', only there is no same after. These otherwise fair minded characters, particularly Kim Burton lose all their  sense of justice and morality when it is a question of their nation's security. 

Immigrants have been given their due as all the characters are blasted out of their natural surroundings by the loud cries of war. Even as sorrow, (never regret), pervades the lives of her characters, the colorful descriptions of the numerous flora in the gardens of Delhi, seem to bring relief to them.  Friendships seem to transcend national and religious boundaries. The scenes capturing Ilse and Hiroko's friendship in particular, seem to be a pleasure to read. Sajjad's optimism permeates through the pages of the book and the reader finds himself catching on to it.

Burnt Shadows touches you to such an extent that you can never get over those feelings or the book. It raises some important questions about the world we live in, in the reader's mind, with haunting echoes reiterating, what could have been had, being destroyed forever in the name of war. As Guns & Roses, once sang, 'What is civil about war anyways?'.

Hurry and grab your copy of Burnt Shadows before it is too late.

Book Rating - 4.5/5

Lines from the book that leave an imprint:

"As for justice, it seemed an insult to the dead to think there could be any such thing."

"On dewy mornings the spiders build elaborate webs. Or perhaps the webs only become visible when dew is captured in their threads." 

"The bomb did nothing beautiful."

"But until you see a place you have known your whole life reduced to ash you don't realise how much we crave familiarity."

"...just this easily everything worthwhile in a life can be erased." 

"Muslim fatalism? No. No. Pakistani resignation. It's a completely different thing." 

"The men and women who walk through shadow-worlds in search of the ones they loved. Monsters who spread their wings and land on human skin, resting there, biding their time. The  army of fire demons, dropped from the sky, who kill with an embrace."

"...bodies without skin, bodies with organs on display, bodies that reveal what happens to bodies when nothing in them works any more." 

"We make a desolation and call it peace." 

"War is like a disease. Until you've had it you don't know it."  

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Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondatje

And now that I have left my readers with a heavy heart, it will not be long before I come back with tales of mirth about The Graveyard Book-Neil Gaiman.