The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

brown glasses back with her forefinger. He noticed how grubby the lenses were. She was fifteen at the time, dressed in blue jeans and an oversized jumper she’d borrowed from her father’s wardrobe. She buried her nose in its neckline – it smelt of stale tobacco and her father’s aftershave – and she shook her head. ‘I definitely can’t take it.’ Black-and-red wrapping paper lay strewn around her as she sat cross-legged under the large pine tree in the garden. ‘My mother won’t like it,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘OK,’ was all he’d managed to say, his face reddening. He’d spent months saving up to buy the perfume, and she’d rejected it in seconds. He got up to leave. ‘You really shouldn’t sit out here when it’s so cold,’ he said, and then left. He took the gift home and handed it to his mother, who wiped his tears and listened to his heartbreak and told him there was plenty of time for girls after studying and travelling. She nudged him towards other things, and after that Elyas stopped visiting Pukhtun House.

They’d run into each other by chance, years later. It was at a pro-Palestine demo in London. She was dressed in skinny black jeans and a fur-lined parka, placard in hand. He recognised her instantly. He’d just finished his journalism qualification and was looking for a story; she was an idealistic student. He spent the day following her, with her consent, to document the events. She had lost none of her fire and she still held tight the strings that tugged at his heart. When he found himself sharing the same train home with her, he convinced himself fate was contriving to show him his future.

She also thought fate had brought them together, but for very different reasons. The arrest, and university life, had made Zan distant. She missed him and she missed her old self. On the rare occasions they were in a room together, he was silent, his eyes full of thoughts to which she was not party. Seeing Elyas walk through the crowds towards her on that rainy November afternoon, was like finding some part of what she had lost.

The train journey home placed them in a sea of nostalgia. Like the foam that sits on the ocean, it lapped her up. Elyas was easy company. He entertained her with stories of Zan and their escapades, things she’d not known. She laughed at his tales of their ineptness and their failed attempts to ‘get girls’. He walked the length of the train and brought her back sandwiches and biscuits from the buffet bar. He surprised her with his memory of her favourite crisps, and he made her laugh in a way she realised she hadn’t for a long time. And as she listened to him talk she noticed all the ways in which he was like her brother. And all the ways he wasn’t. Zan before the arrest. Zan now. Zan happy and sad, good and bad.

Over the coming weeks they saw more and more of each other. Jia’s questions about her brother were incessant but Elyas stayed patient, waiting, hoping that she would see him, really see him. And then one day she did.

She found herself thinking about Elyas more and more. She could still smell him after they’d spent the day together, like cinnamon cookies and Hugo Boss. He reminded her of home, which raised an ache within her. He was a warm glass of milk in a world full of cheap wine: innocent, easy and good for her.

The world looked broadly the same to them both, only differing in its minutiae. But youth has always argued over the trivial. Philosophical and political, literary or culinary, they debated with a certainty blind to all alternatives, a certainty drawn from the bottomless pit of passion that is only found at the start of life. They were young and time had yet to set its limits, disappointment yet to curb their passions. Brick by brick, crack by crack, the dam that Jia had painstakingly built around her heart broke. The passion of ideologies spilled over into love of another kind, the kind that is hard to stop. They talked. They fought. They laughed. They kissed. She pushed him away. But he would not be dissuaded.

‘We live in a world that holds romantic love up as the ideal, over everything else. Romeo and Juliet, Heer Ranjha and Laila Majnu – our culture is steeped in this notion that love is a drug that makes us blind to our differences.’

‘I get the feeling you’re trying to tell me something, Jia.’

‘I don’t know, I’m trying to figure us out. I never expected to be with someone like you.’

‘What do you mean, “like me”?’

‘I’ve lived like the Virgin Mary, I expected only ever to be with one guy, the guy my parents introduced me to, and yet here I am. You’ve lived a totally different life, been out with lots of women, had so many more options – and yet here you are.’

‘I’m confused. Does that bother you? Because it doesn’t bother me or change how I feel. What are you saying?’

‘I have no idea!’ she said. The truth was she didn’t know what it was about her that made him want her. She was difficult, her family was hard work, and things were complicated, so why on earth would someone like Elyas choose her? It didn’t make sense.

‘You don’t think love has anything to do with it?’ he said. ‘Human beings are not logical creatures. We’re emotional.’

‘Yes, exactly. And how do you trust those feelings? We’ve had such different upbringings and there’s nothing wrong with that, but wouldn’t you rather be with someone who gets all of you?’

‘Maybe, but that’s asking the impossible, and love doesn’t work like that. I like that you challenge my ideas.’

Jia saw things in black and white; there was no room for grey. She was clear and consistent and hard work, but he loved that about