281 / 138
Engaging Politically from the Margin 281
breaks out, Vivian returns to London to serve as a VAD nurse with her
old school friend Mary, who is a suffragette turned zealous supporter
of the war. Upon receiving a postcard from Tahsin and believing that
Tahsin is encouraging her to go to Peshawar to escape the war, Vivian
travels to Peshawar, where she befriends a young Pashtun, Najeeb Gul,
and teaches him about excavations and antiquity. At the same time,
Najeeb’s brother, Qayyum, is discharged from a British hospital in
Brighton after losing an eye on the Western Front, where he has served
with the 40th Pathans for the British Raj. The first part of the novel
ends in 1916 when, deeply disappointed at not finding Tahsin and
Scylax’s Circlet, Vivian returns home to find more job opportunities
for women in London and is saddened to learn that Tahsin has died
because she betrayed his secret role in the rebellion against the
Ottoman Empire to the British War Office. In Book II, Najeeb’s letters
bring Vivian back to Peshawar in 1930 to dig for the Circlet again with
the discovery he has made as Assistant of the Peshawar Museum. The
region is, however, in full ferment, and Qayyum becomes involved
with Ghaffar Khan, an independence activist known for his
non-violent opposition to the British Raj. On April 23, 1930, the
English order a massacre in the Street of Storytellers, injuring Najeeb
and killing dozens of Pashtuns.
As the above plot summary has clearly shown, from the subaltern
perspective, Shamsie has blended fact with fiction to include historical
figures and invented fictional characters who are colonial subjects
serving and rebelling against different empires in history. These
characters could be read as Shamsie’s spokespeople, whose divided
loyalties complicate the way we think of patriotism and
cosmopolitanism. At first sight, they might appear to be patriots who,
like Kim in
Burnt Shadows
, only care about their nations; yet, if we
follow Mignolo’s idea of border thinking and Delanty’s self-
problematization, their patriotism after experiencing divided loyalties
may be reinterpreted with critical cosmopolitan imagination. It is
because these subaltern people’s patriotism, under the impact of the
other and the world, is ultimately geared toward internal societal