Summary
While translating for a group of Afghan men, Raza receives a phone call. The person on the other line asks for Raza Hazara. It is Abdullah's brother, who drove Raza and Abdullah to the training camps years ago. Harry tells Raza to take the call. Abdulla's brother tells Raza that Abdullah is in trouble in the U.S. and running from the FBI. Raza calls Kim and tries to get her to help Abdullah by smuggling him over the border to Canada. Kim is offended by the request and hangs up on him. Raza leaves his room to see Harry playing cricket with some of the other men on the compound. The cricket ball rolls in Raza's direction, and as he lifts it to throw it back to the men, Harry is shot and killed by an Afghan man who broke into a guard tower.
Steve comes to talk to Raza. He accuses Raza of working for the enemy and signaling to the shooter. Raza tries to defend his name, but Steve uses the call from Abdullah's brother as evidence. He accuses Raza of being a jihadi and tells Raza that he will never leave the compound. Raza, who wants to get to the U.S. so he can grieve Harry's death with his mother, escapes through a tunnel that he and Harry discovered months ago. He steals a car at the other end of the tunnel and heads toward Pakistan.
In NYC, Hiroko meets Abdullah in the New York Public Library. Kim had told her that Raza had called her asking to help Abdullah. She tells him that she is Raza's mother and that Raza lied about being Afghan all those years ago. She offers to help Abdullah, but at first he is skeptical. Abdullah tells Hiroko that he was with the mujahideen until the Soviets left Afghanistan. However, the fighting didn't stop, so he went back to Karachi. After four years, he moved to New York, where he has been a taxi driver ever since. He left his wife and his only child back home in Karachi. Hiroko is moved by his story.
Raza makes it to Kandahar with the help of two Pathan men. He finds a mosque that Abdullah told him about in his youth and discovers Abdullah's brother, the one that called him on the phone, there. He warns the brother that the Americans will be looking for him; the brother says that he will be safe in Afghanistan. He convinces Abdullah's brother to help him get to Canada where, he is hoping, he will be able to see his mother.
Kim moves her father's things out of his apartment in Miami. She decides that she needs a retreat in order to properly process her grief over her father's death. When she arrives home in NYC, she finds Hiroko and Abdullah in their home. Kim correctly guesses that Hiroko is planning on helping him. Her plan is to drive him across the Canadian border. Kim is angry that Hiroko thinks her plan is reasonable; there is no way that border patrol officers will let her into Canada with her Pakistani passport. Kim tells Hiroko that she will help Abdullah across.
Raza undergoes an arduous journey to get to Canada. To get to Iran, he is smuggled in a crate of cabbages and feels like he is drowning. He then travels across Iran with a nomad—this is the best part of the journey. On the other side of Iran, he boards a boat and is sent below deck, which is packed with too many people. The rows of men in the cargo hold remind Raza of a mass grave. He is next to a boy, who at the beginning of the journey is wailing for his mother and soon faints from heat exhaustion. Raza puts the child on his chest to protect him from the rocking of the ship. He thinks he is about to die. Eventually, he is allowed to leave the boat and taken to a plane that is full of zoo animals. He is told, before boarding the plane, that he will have to hide in a gorilla.
Kim crosses the Canadian border with Abdullah smuggled in her trunk. She is tense and still ambivalent about the whole ordeal. Once they make it across, she tells Abdullah to sit in the front with her while they finish the drive to Montreal. They try to find common ground with each other, but their conversation becomes increasingly tense. When Abdullah brings up the concept of "jihad," Kim is so incensed that she tells Abdullah that his heaven is an "abomination." Nevertheless, Abdullah tells her that he will not forget what she did for him once they get to their destination.
Raza makes a deal with his handler, John, that Abdullah can fly back on the flight that Raza just took instead of having to take a ship. Raza is the one waiting for Abdullah in the diner in Montreal after Kim drops him off. Abdullah and Raza catch up. Raza tells Abdullah everything he has been through and Abdullah says that he "truly now" is an Afghan. He then admits to Raza that he upset Kim in the car but also expresses weariness at the American attack against Islam. Raza looks at the parking lot and sees a police car that wasn't there before and Kim talking to the police officers. He tells Abdullah to run and puts on Abdullah's coat. The police officers cuff him and take him into custody. Kim sees that it is not Abdullah from her car. She goes up to the police officers and comes face-to-face with Raza. However, Raza tells her to be quiet in Urdu. He then tells her to say "yes" to the police officers when they ask her to confirm whether they have the right man.
When Kim arrives back in NYC, Hiroko already knows that Raza has been taken into custody because Abdullah called her friend, Omar. Kim tries to defend her decision to call the police, but Hiroko is incredibly angry. She informs Kim that Raza was running from the law. Then, she tells Kim that she now understands, through Kim's behavior, how people can justify their nation dropping a nuclear bomb. Their relationship has been severed. Raza's fate is unknown, though, as is suggested by the Prologue, he will probably end up in Guantanamo.
Analysis
In this final section of Burnt Shadows, the plot comes to its climax: after several continents and three generations, the relationship between the Burton and Ashraf families comes to a head and Kim and Raza meet face-to-face for the first time, in the moment when she is betraying him. Up until this point in the novel, the Burtons and the Ashrafs looked beyond their differences to help each other. They pass the story of the spider from the Quran in which the spider helps the prophet Mohammed, who is in hiding, stay hidden by building a web across the door of the cave he is hiding in. Mohammed's pursuers do not look inside the cave because the spiderweb deceives them into thinking it has been undisturbed for a long time. Harry sees the story of the spider as a metaphor for the families' allegiance through the years: "This story had passed hands between their two families for three generations. In Afghanistan, Harry had pointed this out and said, 'You need to tell it to Kim. Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs—we are each other's spiders" (356).
In Kim's decision to turn in Abdullah (and, consequently, Raza) to the police, she places her nationalist ideology over her family ties. As Raza is being pulled away by the police officers, he still sees the allegiance between them despite her betrayal: "He could only try to convey, in that final instant before they dragged him away—in the dip of his head, the sorrow of his smile—that he still saw the spider as well as its shadow" (364).
The question of allegiance comes to head in the final chapters of this novel. Though Raza has worked as a contractor for the U.S. government for over a decade and had a close relationship with Harry, Steve accuses him of being involved with Harry's death because of his nationality and religion. In the end, Harry's fantasies about America (discussed in the Section 4 Analysis), turned out to be false. The United States does not welcome everyone who tries to be American. Those who do not fit the stereotype of "American" are regarded suspiciously. As Raza escapes, he expresses frustration and his lack of legitimacy in the eyes of the American government: "That nothing in the world could possibly show him to be Harry Burton's murderer seemed barely to matter in the face of all that could be done to his life before that conclusion. If anyone even bothered with a conclusion. He had never felt so sharply the powerlessness of being merely Pakistani" (314).
Kim Burton, like Steve, unfortunately reduces people to stereotypes before looking into their character. In the wake of the 9/11 attack, she develops a nationalist attitude that implicitly sides with the U.S. government. Hiroko observes, "Kim was the first person Hiroko had ever known with an unshakeable faith that she lived in a world that allowed all protests, all acts of discontentment, to take place within a legal framework. Moving out of that framework was simply grandstanding" (335). Hiroko does not understand Kim's logic and instead sees it as "baffling," akin to religious belief (335). Kim's faith in the American government means that she looks at people through the eyes of her nationality rather than through the eyes of an individual. Rather than think of Abdullah as an individual, she reduces him to "an Afghan who ran from the FBI" (305). This is not a far leap, in her mind, from the man who killed her father, who was "just one Afghan with a gun" (353).
Kim's nationalist attitude causes miscommunications between herself and Abdullah during their drive to Canada. Abdullah tells Kim the story of himself and some friends finding a pile of teddy bears in the middle of the road during a road trip, causing a traffic jam. Abdullah does not tell Kim that he and his friends drove up to the teddy bears to take some home to send to their families in Afghanistan because he is worried that she will think that he is a thief. Kim's assumption, however, is much more damaging—she thinks that Abdullah and his friends drove through the teddy bears. She sees it as a "violent" image, leading her to wonder what other kinds of violence Abdullah has committed. In the end, it is Kim's misconceptions about Abdullah that lead her to disregard Hiroko and Raza's pleas to help him and instead turn him in.
In contrast to Kim, Hiroko, Raza, and Abdullah find common ground and mutual understanding despite their differences. When Hiroko and Abdullah meet, she understands the loss that he has faced in his life as similar to her own. She finds him in the library looking at old pictures of an Afghanistan that no longer exists, the same way she might look at old pictures of Nagasaki. Like Hiroko, like Sajjad, Abdullah understands "lost homelands and the impossibility of return" (319). Hiroko is willing to see the good in Abdullah's character, and is in fact looking for it: she observes him "taking a long stride forward and bodily lifting up a drunk who was weaving towards Hiroko and setting him down again, out of her path, with a quick pat on her shoulder. He was unaware that she had seen his entire character in that gesture" (320). It is because of this that Hiroko offers to help Abdullah cross the border—she cares much more about an individual's character than their political or national allegiance.
Similarly, when Raza and Abdullah are talking in the diner in Canada, Abdullah sees the similarities between himself and Raza. Despite the fact that Raza had lied to him all those years ago and left him in the training camp, Abdullah still sees them as brothers. Abdullah tells Raza, "'Your mother told me something of your life—your real life. . . 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, and this is the part of your story you say the least about. Raza, my brother, truly now you are an Afghan'" (357). Here being an "Afghan" is not a nationality but instead a way of living, one that is characterized by loss but also true friendship and generosity of spirit. Though Raza and Abdullah spent the larger part of their adult lives fighting for opposing sides in a war, and though it has been years since they have seen each other, Abdullah knows that they are the same kind of people.
In the last few chapters, Kim is told that she should be "proud" of turning in Abdullah (and unwittingly turning in Raza in his place) by law enforcement (330, 370). Hiroko, however, has a different message for Kim in the final pages of the novel. Instead of feeling pride, Hiroko rebukes Kim and her treatment of Abdullah, whose humanity Kim denied: "'In the big picture of the Second World War, what was seventy-five thousand more Japanese dead? Acceptable, that's what it was. In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he's guilty, maybe not. Why risk it? Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb'" (370).
