The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

to the point of melting; the synthetic shirt was a bad decision. ‘You’re the only person I let get away with that kind of rudeness,’ said Jia, and the woman smiled, her rouged lips wide over her yellow teeth.

‘It’s already done, my darling, take a look at your app. You know I always do you first,’ she said, winking.

Michael watched as Jia checked her phone, before thanking the stocky woman.

She led him back to the car park, where the parking attendant was waiting with a small suitcase and an overcoat. He handed Jia the coat and she slipped it on before getting into the car.

‘We’ll give you a lift, Ali. I need to say hello to your mother.’ she said. ‘Come on, get in.’

She gave Michael directions as they drove. Half an hour later, they reached an old council estate. The kind haunted by the smell of fried bacon and the sound of dogs barking, and where Union Jacks hung out of windows. It looked uninviting to people like them, and as Michael pulled up, he worried for their safety and that of the car.

‘Wait here, I’ll only be a few minutes,’ Jia told Michael. His phone rang just as she began walking with Ali to his front door. It was Akbar Khan.

‘Yes, Khan Baba, she is with me. We have made a slight detour.’ Michael watched as Jia waited outside a ground-floor flat, while the parking attendant disappeared inside. He returned a moment later with a tired-looking woman in a crinkled dupatta. She looked grateful to see Jia. A young boy hovered behind her. Ali said something that made the woman take her mobile from her cardigan pocket. She pressed it against Jia’s phone before hugging her tightly, gratitude spreading across her face. From the car, Michael could see Jia’s discomfort, her arms hanging limply as she tolerated the show of emotion. ‘I don’t know, Baba, I think it is a family your daughter helps.’

Jia was subdued when she returned to the car. They sat in silence all the way to her apartment building, where Jia needed to pick up her bags.

Michael waited in the hallway as she unlocked the door to her apartment. It was the first time he’d really looked at her. She’d tied her brown hair up in the car. Her eyes were like rum-soaked almonds, her skin golden and soft. She took off her shoes and stepped barefoot on to the parquet floor of the entrance hall. A crystal chandelier hung in the centre of the room, and stairs curved up one side.

‘Why don’t you wait in there,’ she said, pointing to an open door. ‘I’ll be down shortly.’

He did as she asked, and found himself in a large hexagonal library. Four of the walls were covered in shelves stretching from floor to ceiling. Books by writers as diverse as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chuck Palahniuk, Manto, Byron, Bukowski and Ghalib reached up to the ornate mouldings of the ceiling. A moleskin chesterfield stood to one side of the room. A glass wall adjacent to it looked out over a courtyard garden. Photographs, mainly in sepia and black and white, but the occasional colour image too, hung on the opposite wall.

Michael felt suddenly small, a rare occurrence for a man who stood six foot two. He had retained the lankiness that teenage boys have when their arms outgrow the rest of their body, and found himself awkward as he tried to sit in one of the armchairs. He stood up again and waited.

He wanted Jia Khan to be impressed by him. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because she was so different to him. Privileged and self-assured, she knew her place in the world and how to move through it. He was a mixed-race medical student in his early twenties, and still trying to figure out what that meant.

The Khan’s daughter was infamous among his father’s people, spoken about in hushed tones; the rumours about her were many. She was the only person known to have challenged, confronted and abandoned the Khan and lived to tell the tale.

He was lost in thought when she walked in. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked, startling him. He pulled his eyes into focus, took off his glasses, wiped them on his shirt and put them back on to study the image he’d absentmindedly been staring at. It was a copy of Life magazine, framed, mounted and hanging on the wall. The photograph on the cover – one he’d seen hanging in chai shops across Pakistan – was of an old man with aquiline features wearing a peaked hat of the kind worn by the people of Kabul. The sight of the qaraqul resting on Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s head always left him queasy. What kind of people used aborted sheep foetuses to make headwear?

‘It’s from 1948,’ said Jia. ‘That particular one took quite a lot of effort to track down.’

Michael was surprised. His Pakistani heritage had not served him well and he’d dropped all ties to it, other than his father. It was one less moth-eaten coat in his cupboard. This woman was not like him. She hung her heritage on her wall for everyone to see and judge and question. He didn’t know anyone second-generation who did that.

‘My sister thinks I’m overcompensating for my “polite white lifestyle”.’ She tilted her head slightly as she spoke, and he could see traces of her father in her face. He noticed that she’d changed into a sari blouse and petticoat under the shawl she’d wrapped herself in. She turned back to the picture. ‘Who knows, maybe I am. A little.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t mix with Pakistanis or Pathans much. Not unless I’m defending them in court. You’d be surprised how much one can miss those ways… Shall we go?’

She handed him her case. He nodded.

‘So, what did the good people of our city tell you about me?’ she asked as he placed the bag in the car. He didn’t answer,