The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

his inability to take no for an answer, had landed them here, in a place where the thing he had toiled over, poured blood, sweat and tears into, was about to die. This was business. But it was also personal. That was Elyas’s line: if it wasn’t personal, it wasn’t worth doing.

The young woman had come to him in confidence, frightened that speaking up would spell the end of her career. But Elyas had spent enough years as a journalist to know the truth from a lie. She’d broken down when he’d said he believed her.

‘She’s a fucking liar,’ his partner said to him as he was about to leave. ‘You and your fucking feminist rhetoric. You always were a pussy.’

‘Daniel, you’ve mistaken my kindness for weakness again,’ Elyas replied, taking a breath and turning round. ‘I’ve already spoken to our lawyers and instructed them to begin the process of dissolving the company.’ His voice was as calm as still waters. ‘Or I can buy you out. It’s your choice.’

It was decided: the company would fold. It was a blow that Elyas would accept willingly. His life was built on knowing when to duck and when to take the hit. He would start over. His reputation was intact, and that was all he needed. He tucked ten pairs of identical black socks into his suitcase before closing the zip. Single fatherhood had made a practical man out of him. That eternal problem of the disappearing sock was not one he had time to deal with.

He was about to spend six months at the paper where he had started out as a trainee. It was a world away from documentaries, but the memories of his first proper job in news were so strong that he was unable to turn down the offer to guest edit the paper. Returning as the boss was something his younger self could never have imagined. In a city where white media dominated, a brown editor was an interesting proposition, even if the paper was failing.

It was more than twenty years on from his first day, but he remembered well the smell of freshly inked news-sheets, the hard-won camaraderie of old school hacks. The sound of news editors pouring curse words over grammar and the whine of highly strung sub-editors still filled his dreams.

It had been a tough place to be but a great place to be. In a city of brown ghettos, it was a white enclave, but that made the victories, when they came, even sweeter. He’d not found anything to match those highs or those lows, except Ahad’s mother.

Losing her had driven him to the edges of war-torn Afghanistan and the fringes of Pakistan. He’d fought hard to make sense of his loss and understand the ways of her family. His Urdu, Punjabi and Pashto had come in handy and he had found himself spoken of with respect among locals and journalists alike.

The awards had come and so had the women, but they meant little to a man who was hiding from life. Elyas Ahmad had the kind of face that betrayed him, a face that held no secrets. Some said it was because his heart was pure, and he liked that idea, but others saw it as a weakness: a man unable to control his feelings was a liability. His eyes invited admiring glances and whispered wants, his olive skin kept time at bay. But success and admiration did little to fill the loneliness left by his wife’s departure.

The guest editorship at the paper in West Yorkshire was a well-timed excuse to spend time with his son. Taking Ahad out of London would give them an opportunity to reconnect, away from the place they had come to call home, away from his friends and from the trouble that seemed to seek him out there.

They lived in a terraced house on a south-west London street lined with cherry trees. It was a quiet neighbourhood, full of ‘French Grey’ doors and Guardian readers. The kind of place that was home to people Time Out referred to as ‘intelligentsia’. As idyllic as it seemed, this middle-class existence wasn’t without its problems, and the absence of brown people had troubled Elyas.

At the back of his mind, flowed a steady stream of concerns. Some were the sort that all parents have about their children, things like falling in with the wrong crowd, dabbling in illicit substances – and Ahad had given him reason to be worried. But there were other, more niche concerns, to do with raising a brown son, and one who was Muslim. He worried about Ahad’s self-esteem and how he saw himself. He hoped that being around youngsters of similar racial background would help him make sense of his place in the world.

In a couple of months Ahad would be starting sixth form at one of the best colleges in Yorkshire. Ahad was bright – bright enough to have been bumped up a school year at the age of thirteen – one of those kids who gave the impression he avoided learning all year but always came out with excellent grades. Elyas had never been that kind of student. Elyas had had to work hard for everything in life.

The early years of raising a child alone had been particularly challenging, but once Ahad started school Elyas discovered that, under the surface of the world of paid work, there was a network of fellow parents, people who raised you up on tired days, picked your child up when meetings overran and offered understanding words when you felt yourself failing at every step. He could hardly believe his son was now a teenager: in a few years Ahad would swap their home for university digs. That time would fly fast on the wings of A levels and campus visits, application forms and interviews. The empty nest was approaching.

The spectre of reflection hovered close by, and Elyas knew it would result in the raising of the dead. He