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She is leaning further out, looking through the smoke for the spires of Urakami Cathedral, when she hears her neighbour’s scream.
            Hiroko looks down, sees a reptile crawling up the path towards her house. She understands now. The earth has already opened up, disgorged hell. Her neighbour’s daughter is running towards the reptile with a bamboo spear in hand – her grip incorrect. The reptile raises its head and the girl drops the spear, calls out Hiroko’s father’s name. Why does she expect him to help? Hiroko wonders, as the girl keeps chanting, ‘Tanaka-san, Tanaka-san,’ hands gripping the sides of her face as she stares at the reptile.
            The only light is from the fires. Her neighbour is calling her name, somewhere close. The neighbour is inside the house, her footsteps on the stairs. Where is Urakami Cathedral? Hiroko bats at the air with her hands, trying to clear away whatever separates the spires from her sight. Where is the Cathedral? Where is Konrad?
            Why is she falling?
     
     

‘There. See? There.’
            ‘How can you be sure it’s him?’
            ‘No one else in Nagasaki could cast such a long shadow.’
     

Veiled Birds
    Delhi, 1947
     
     

1
    Sajjad Ali Ashraf had his eyes fixed on the sky as he cycled parallel to the Yamuna River, trying to locate the exact celestial point at which Dilli became Delhi. Dilli: his city, warren of ‘by-lanes and alleys, insidious as a game of chess’, the rhythmically beating heart of cultural India (he wasn’t merely dismissive of opposing views, he was inclined to believe they were only made in jest), the place to which his ancestors had come from Turkey over seven centuries earlier to join the armies of the Mamluk King, Qutb-ud-din Aibak.
            And then – Sajjad almost tipped over as his feet on the pedals turned recalcitrant, as they were apt to do when his attention was elsewhere – there was Delhi: city of the Raj, where every Englishman’s bungalow had lush gardens, lined with red flowerpots. That was the end of Sajjad’s ruminations on British India. Flowerpots: it summed it all up. No trees growing in courtyards for the English, no rooms clustered around those courtyards; instead, separations and demarcations. Sajjad smiled. That was it. That would be the subject of today’s discussion with James Burton. Not flowerpots, but separations. Of course, almost all the wisdom he polished and honed in his mind on his morning journey into Delhi remained unspoken. But even so, as James Burton said, the readiness was all.
            On the matter of separations . . . Sajjad looked up again, but this time stopped the bicycle as he did so, and hopped off it. Yes, there, there was the boundary of Dilli and Delhi. There, where the sky emptied – no kites dipping towards each other, strings lined with glass; and only the occasional pigeon from amidst the flocks released to whirl in the air above the rooftops of the Old City where Sajjad’s family had lived for generations.
            I am like those occasional pigeons, Sajjad thought. At home in Dilli but breaking free of the rest of my flock to investigate the air of Delhi. He mounted the bicycle again, and wondered if there was a couplet to be written about pigeons and the Indians who worked for the English. Almost immediately he was impatient with the thought. He had no talent for verse, and it was only when in Delhi that he spoke fervently of the culture of poetry he had grown up with; in Dilli itself, while his brothers and sisters-in-law and aunts and cousins and mother traded couplets with each other, his mind would occupy itself with thoughts of the chess games which he and James Burton carried over from one day to the next as though they were stories of sultans and djinns. If he was to be honest, he missed the days when it was legal documents rather than chess games which occupied his thoughts each morning, but one day they would return to