The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

the painted stars. ‘Still two hundred and eighty-two,’ he whispered. ‘Some things do not change. Take one down when I die?’ he said.

‘Must we be so melodramatic?’ she said, equally irritated and frightened. She wanted to lighten things but couldn’t, and they found themselves sitting in silence. Zan’s gaze remained on the floor as he tried to process the past few days of his life. The silence was only broken when the family manservant came in, clumsily carrying a tray of more milky chai and parathas. He placed it on the floor in front of Jia and left. Jia marvelled at her mother’s abilities; she was aware of every waking soul in the house and knew exactly what they needed.

‘Tea?’ she said, and Zan nodded. He took the cup, and their eyes met for the first time since his homecoming. It gave her the courage to ask the thing most on her mind. ‘What happened at the police station?’ she said.

‘More than you want to know…’ His voice was measured, but his tone was low, as if the act of merely speaking the words would awaken a nightmare again.

‘Tell me…please?’ she said. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘You don’t need to be. I’m fine. I really am.’

‘It’s his fault, isn’t it?’ Jia said. ‘It’s to do with the things they say at school about Baba, isn’t it?’ Her words hung in the air like the speech bubbles in a comic book. They had never discussed their father’s line of work. They had heard people say things, but had left them on the other side of the door when they came home from school, falling instead into homework and TV. Some things were too immense to be processed by children. The mind had a way of compartmentalising and filing them away in order to survive. Now, though, one of them had fallen victim to Akbar Khan’s business dealings and there was no way to avoid what was being said in the wider world, and what, on some level, they already knew. Their father was all the things people said he was – Jia knew it and Zan knew it. Nevertheless, she waited for him to speak the words. But he didn’t. His silence was deafening.

Jia’s love for her father was as encompassing as the ocean, but her brother was the cloudless sky above her. Zan was a spiritual soul who seemed out of place in the Khan’s life. There was no doubt that their father loved him, but this didn’t stop him from trying to toughen him up. Zan never complained, and Jia was always ready to defend him. But now Akbar Khan had hurt him in ways that she could not have envisaged.

‘Our father is a good man,’ Zan said slowly. ‘He’s not what you think he is.’ Something in his voice wavered, and it was all Jia needed for rage to take root. Like spitting masala in an earthenware pot, this rage would grow with time until it bubbled out of control and consumed her.

‘They arrested you because of him!’

Impassive, dispassionate, Zan sat cross-legged, his back against the wall. ‘He’s my father. I’m his eldest son,’ he said. ‘He trusts me. I know that now. It’s time you realised that too.’ Despite all that happened, Zan had managed to wipe his father’s slate clean. His forgiveness was lost on Jia.

‘I’m going to kill him,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘A lot happened, a lot of things you don’t know about.’ And he began slowly to unravel his story, of recently opened bank accounts, of their father’s business interests, of the business Akbar Khan had set up in Zan’s name for tax purposes, without Zan’s knowledge, of the money laundering the police suspected him of being involved in, and of much darker, graver things. ‘That was why they took me in for questioning,’ he said. ‘They wanted me to help them put Baba behind bars. They showed me photographs, so…many…photographs. Pictures of people they said were missing under mysterious circumstances, of wives and children of men dead as a result of vendettas, drugs and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of the pictures were brutal, others were just sad. They said Dad was responsible. They thought I would turn against him.’

The images were etched into his mind. He saw them every time he closed his eyes. He thought about what the officers had said, how they had stared at him from across the desk as though looking down the barrel of a gun. ‘They talked to me like I was shit on the street, Jia. I was born here. I’ve been to better schools than they have. I speak better English. But they didn’t see any of that. All they saw was what they wanted to see, a dirty Paki with a criminal for a father.’

‘They can’t talk to you like that! They should be reported!’

‘They can, Jia. Don’t you get it? We are nothing but who they say we are. They don’t hear us. They only hear their own privilege. They’ve been getting away with it for years. Look at the riots. Segregation, poverty, deprivation, no jobs, no future. Those guys had no chance, still have no chance. Add to it trying to navigate a white world with brown sensibilities and Muslim pressure – it was a melting pot for disaster. Is it any wonder the kids kicked off? And when they did, Asian kids got years more than the white kids did for the same crimes. You and I, we just ignore these things because we think we’re better, because we go to a good school and wear expensive clothes and live in a nice house. But to white people we’re all just filthy Pakis who wear bling and live in cramped terraced houses. They’ve been tormenting me for days before this. They tried to make me afraid. They…touched me.’ He stopped, watching her for some reaction. She swallowed hard, not wanting to understand. ‘They had power and I