Summary
Hiroko realizes that Raza has left home at dawn when the house is uncharacteristically silent. She goes to his room and sees that he has left a note for her saying that he is going on a trip with his friends and will return soon. She is still stressed about his unknown whereabouts, but Sajjad consoles her. Hiroko goes next door to visit her neighbor, Bilal's mother Qaisra, to complain about her son. Qaisra tells Hiroko that she is sure everything will be okay. When Hiroko leaves her friend's house, however, Salma tells Hiroko the truth—that Raza has escaped to a mujahideen training camp. Hiroko realizes that Raza's behavior over the last several weeks suddenly makes sense, especially his new interest in Afghanistan. Sajjad promises Hiroko that he will find their son.
Raza and Abdullah continue on their journey to the training camp. They drive for an hour into the desert and then hike into the mountains. They are being led by Abdullah's older brother, who gives them each a pattusi, a large, multi-use piece of cloth. Eventually, they reach the training camp. Raza is very homesick and afraid. When he expresses his fear and trepidation to Abdullah, the younger boy gets angry at him. He collapses from exhaustion when they arrive and passes out for several hours. Abdullah kicks him intermittently while he sleeps. Eventually, a man wakes him and tells him that he has already missed two calls to prayer and tells him to join this call to prayer. As Raza prays with the other men, he feels true faith for the first time. He feels as if he has truly become Raza Hazara.
After prayer, Abdullah apologizes to Raza and says that he might have said something he shouldn't have to the commander of the training camp. The commander asks Raza who he is and Raza tells him the truth—that he is Pakistani with an Indian father and a Japanese mother. The commander assumes that the CIA has sent Raza to spy on the camp (because of Raza's connection to Harry Burton) and tells Raza that he is putting him on the next train back to Karachi. Abdullah is upset when he sees that Raza is being taken away and apologizes to Raza for blowing his cover. Raza is secretly relieved to be going back home.
Meanwhile, Sajjad has spent the past several days trying to make contacts who would know where Raza is. At the fish market, he recognizes Harry's driver, Sher Mohammed. Sher Mohammed is conducting business for the CIA and no one knows his real name. At the sight of Sajjad approaching him and shouting that name, Sher Mohammed gets spooked and shoots Sajjad.
Raza arrives home while Hiroko is mourning over her husband's dead body. Harry arrives to pay his respects and Raza yells at him, saying that his father's death is Harry's fault. Harry tells Raza that Sajjad wouldn't have died if he hadn't run away to the training camp. Once again, Hiroko asks Harry to leave.
The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss (New York, Afghanistan, 2001-2)
The final section of Burnt Shadows is set in New York City 18 years after Sajjad's death, and three months after the September 11 terrorist attack. Hiroko has moved to New York City to live with Elizabeth. Kim is visiting her grandmother for the holidays and is planning to move back to NYC from Seattle. Harry and Raza live and work together in Miami, where they are private contractors hired by the U.S. government. They are currently conducting covert operations in Afghanistan, as the United States begins the War on Terror.
Kim is distraught by the September 11 attack; her entire world has been turned upside down. She is a structural engineer who has spent her career trying to keep buildings safe from disaster. However, there is no way to keep buildings from getting hit by planes. Hiroko is overcome with worry that India and Pakistan will start a nuclear war. She does not feel the same level of all-encompassing panic that Kim feels as a result of the attack. Kim and Hiroko do not see eye to eye on this front. Kim thinks that 9/11 changed the world; Hiroko thinks that it is just another event on a long list of devastating events that happen all over the world.
In Afghanistan, Raza steals a Humvee from the military base and makes his way to the Pakistani border. He is meeting his cousin, named Sajjad after his father. Raza's cousin is a captain in the Pakistani army. Raza asks Sajjad if they are truly considering nuclear war; Sajjad says that it might be the only option in the face of India's massive power. Raza had asked Sajjad to meet because he is looking for Abdullah. All Sajad could give him was the phone number of the commander at the camp that Raza spent a day in. On his drive home, Raza hears a call to prayer and stops outside of a mosque to pray. An American flies overhead in a helicopter and sees Raza praying.
Eventually, Elizabeth passes away. Harry flies back to NYC to be with Kim as they grieve. Kim gives Harry a hard time for his absence in her life over the years and Harry promises that he is going to retire soon. Hiroko asks Harry about the political situation between Pakistan and India and Harry assures her that everyone is doing their best to ensure that both sides back down. They go to Chinatown and eat fruit that Hiroko and Harry recognize from Delhi. Hiroko and Kim decide to live together in Elizabeth's apartment.
Harry goes on a special mission with his ex-coworker, Steve, who is still a CIA operative. Steve expresses suspicion about Raza, saying that he saw Raza praying outside of a mosque from a helicopter the other day. He suggests that Raza's religion makes him suspicious and warns Harry that Raza's ties may not solely be to the American government. Harry defends Raza. Back at the camp, Raza tells Harry that he is trying to get in touch with Abdullah. Harry asks Raza if that is a good idea. Raza says that he needs to apologize for encouraging him to go to the mujahideen camp so many years ago and then leaving him there.
Analysis
The close of "Part-Angel Warriors" and the beginning of "The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss" demonstrate a big change in Raza's character arc. As a result of hiding his identity to enter the training camp and the subsequent death of his father, Raza becomes someone that he does not recognize anymore. At first, he finds vindictive pleasure in lying about his identity. He tells Salma, "'People like me better when I don't tell them who I really am'" (224). However, when Abdullah and Raza finally arrive, he sees the extent of his deception: "Raza, listening to remember how to become a Hazara—he pictured himself raising a Kalashnikov to his shoulder, but in the midst of these men for whom a Kalashnikov was something familiar enough to be casual with he saw his own posturing for what it was" (231). This causes Raza to turn on himself, disliking who he sees in the mirror: "Raza watched the grimy train window reflecting a face which he looked at with honest distaste" (239). Raza's rupture from his past and the values that his parents instilled in him leads him to work for the American government alongside Harry Burton. Almost two decades after he leaves Abdullah in the training camp, he ends up working for the mujahideen's enemies, against his conscience. He wonders if it is his grief over his father's death or leaving Abdullah behind that changes him so completely: "Was that the moment he walked in one direction and his conscience in another, Raza wondered, or was it earlier when he urged a boy towards a training camp filled with militants?" (261).
Another change that occurs in Raza through these years is a turn towards religion. When Raza prays with the other mujahideen in the training camp, he feels true faith for the first time. This moment alters him completely; he is no longer Raza Konrad Ashraf and is instead Raza Hazara: "All at once, Raza saw the beauty in the moment and it was with a true sense of reverence, such as he had never felt before, that he laid his pattusi on the ground and stepped on to it. . . Raza Hazara woke up, looked upon the world, and found it extraordinary" (233).
In the days that Raza is away from home, both Raza and Sajjad turn to faith. While Raza begins to understand the language of the prayers "from a place of pure faith," the foreignness of the language feels right to Sajjad (234). Sajjad, who is angry at God for Raza's disappearance, nevertheless prays compulsively for his son's safe return: "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" (240). For Raza and Sajjad, religion gives them peace in a time of terrible uncertainty. They approach their faith with sincerity, hoping that it will provide them clarity amidst such uncertain circumstances. These moments stand in contrast to Hiroko's hasty conversion to Islam at the end of "Veiled Birds" as Hiroko and Sajjad drive to the mosque to marry. Additionally, Hiroko offers the perspective of a Muslim woman who is suspicious of governmental "Islamisation" in Pakistan.
All of these examples work together in the novel to show Islam as a non-static entity that changes according to the person that is approaching it. Not every Muslim approaches religion in the same way or holds the same beliefs, even in the same region. Americans in the novel, however, prefer to group all Muslims into a single category, especially after 9/11. Steve, for example, does not trust Raza because of his faith, despite the fact that Harry and Raza share a close relationship. After he sees Raza praying outside of a mosque, Steve asks Harry, "'It really doesn't bother you—in this time, in this place—that he's found religion?'" (286). Harry brushes off Steve's concerns, but they speak to the concerns of most Americans in regard to Islam, something that will become clear at the end of the novel when Kim must grapple between seeing Abdullah and Raza as individuals or as Muslims.
"The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss," which is set after 9/11, introduces the motif of American exceptionalism as Kim and other characters process the terrorist attack. Kim is so shaken by 9/11 that she feels as if the entire world has changed. Hiroko reminds Kim that the attack did not affect the whole world: '"That's not the world, it's just the neighborhood'" (254). Later, Kim laments to her grandmother that she "just want[s] the world to be what it was" (270). Elizabeth gently suggests to Kim that she should widen her perspective: "I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love" (271). Though Harry understands the wider context surrounding 9/11, he, too, feels "disproportionate" grief when he learns about the attack: "He was in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the time, overseeing the setting up of Arkwright and Glenn's operation to provide security for a diamond-export company, and was well aware of how disproportionate his attitude must seem in a country which had lost more than two and a half million people in a war which seemed to have pauses rather than an end" (276).
Kim and Harry's emotional responses to 9/11 reflect what many Americans were feeling in the months after the terrorist attack. At first, Hiroko feels allied with the residents of New York, volunteering at Ground Zero and trying to donate blood. However, the American response to nationalism and patriotism quickly turns her off. She wonders, "How could a place so filled with immigrants take the idea of 'patriotism' so seriously?" (295). These tensions communicate a major theme throughout the novel as a whole: that of individual vs. national experience. As each character moves through different political conflicts in Burnt Shadows, they grapple with their national identity and their individual experiences. As Harry reminds Kim, what happened during 9/11 is "only part of the story" (276). There is a "big picture" that is beyond any individual's power to change (299).
Often, Burnt Shadows' characters respond to the tension of political identity vs. individual identity by favoring their individual identity and forming personal ties with others despite political categories. The generations-long friendship between the Burtons and Ashraf families is evidence of this. Omar also communicates this attitude to Hiroko when he tells her about Indian and Pakistani taxi workers banding together to go on strike in New York City: "'Don't ask how it's possible that we can strike together when our countries are in the middle of planning for the Day of Judgement. It's what all the journalists ask. Aunty, we are taxi drivers, and we're protesting unjust new rules. Why should we let those governments who long ago let us down stop us from successfully doing that?'" (294). As politics and nationalistic forces try to tear relationships apart, understanding each other's individual contexts and lived experience brings them back together. The Burtons and the Ashrafs look out for each other over the course of almost 60 years. This is the overarching story of Burnt Shadows until the very end. It all comes to an end, however, in the next section, with the actions of Kim Burton.
