The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

her. She was the most interesting woman he knew, and while they had a similar outlook on life, her experiences meant that she came at things with a unique perspective that intrigued him.

‘It’s sad,’ he said, ‘that you feel that love is a compromise, or shaped by thought processes rather than passion and instinct. Me, I believe in crack-cocaine love, addictive and maddening. It does happen to people, you know. Maybe it’ll happen to you. One day.’

‘Yes, well, it shouldn’t.’

‘You’re crazy,’ he said. ‘But I love you.’ He leaned in to kiss her. She placed her hand between his lips and hers and pushed him away.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.

‘It makes no sense to you, I know. But I love you. Do we have to go through this every time I want to kiss you?’

He was a junkie and she was his addiction. ‘There is nothing I can do about it,’ he told her over and over again. His words wore down her defences and slowly she succumbed. She loved him but was afraid to admit it, choosing instead to put up obstacles and hide behind practicalities.

When, eventually, the question of telling her family about their relationship came up, Jia knew, sure as one and one equals two, that Elyas Ahmad loved her. Even so, he sensed her reluctance.

‘So what’s the problem?’ he’d asked.

‘You know the problem. You can’t be my boyfriend. I can have a husband and a friend but not a boyfriend. It’s just not done. How would I face my mother? And what would I tell my father? I can’t lie to them.’ They had been arguing for hours and she couldn’t get Elyas to understand her predicament.

‘We don’t need permission to live our lives! Why do you still care what your father thinks? Are you afraid of him?’

‘This is not about my father. I may love you and I may have crossed some lines by being in a relationship with you, but I am still a Muslim woman.’

‘And this is why you still refuse to stay the night? No one will know, Jia, so no one will care.’

‘I’ll know and God will know. It doesn’t matter about anyone else.’ Jia knew that this made little sense to the world in which they lived but she had expected Elyas to understand. He didn’t.

Elyas had no ties to his beliefs. He was raised Muslim but most of that fell by the wayside when he discovered girls. But he’d never met anyone like Jia before. Her black-and-white life left him seeing red. ‘You’re a maulvi in a mini-skirt!’ he told her. ‘You seem like the kind of girl who will, but really you’re the kind of girl who won’t, wouldn’t and doesn’t. How can someone so open-minded about the world be so closed-minded about sex?’ She didn’t reply, but he kept trying in the hope that she would thaw.

Admitting that she loved him had been an excruciating process. Before him, work and family had consumed her, and her thoughts had never wandered to anything else. Love affairs and lust were for the weak-willed. Life was to be planned and those plans implemented for the attainment of long-term goals beyond any childish infatuation. The men she knew were complicated, secretive creatures. Admitting that she had defied logic and fallen for one of their kind wasn’t easy.

Elyas was honest and handsome, good-natured yet strong-willed, and he loved her, but he was a divergence from her plans and a reminder that she too was at the mercy of chemical reactions, just like the rest of the human race. Her falling for him had surprised her. She’d pushed him, turned him this way and that, and tested him constantly. He had not come up wanting.

‘There’s nothing sordid about any of this,’ he went on. ‘How can there be? You’ve not even let me come near you! And yet still I’m here!’

‘Go, then. I won’t stop you.’

‘I don’t want to go. I want to be with you! You drive me crazy sometimes!’ Exhausted, Elyas collapsed on to the sofa. He’d tried so hard to make her understand but nothing seemed to convince her. How could he make her see that he was all in? Hook, line and sinker, the works, done for, and all the other clichés reserved for a man who has lost his heart and found his head. He had no choice but to see it through.

‘I get it,’ he said. ‘I understand your sensibilities. I love you for them not in spite of them. And I’m not like him. I’m not like Akbar Khan. I’m a straight-down-the-line, honest-to-goodness guy. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. And I can promise you this… I will never ever hurt you, on purpose, or otherwise. What else can I possibly do to make you understand? Marry you?’ He stopped.

That was it. He had been ignoring the obvious and not listening to her. He’d seen her as an indie chick, a debating diva, a girl like any other, but in among it all she was still a young Muslim woman and the way to get a young Muslim woman to stay was to make her your wife.

After all the times she had turned him down, her change of mind took him by surprise. His hormones racing, he wasted little time. The nikaah was conducted that evening. The imam was an old school friend, and Zan was ‘wali’ for his sister, standing in as her guardian until Elyas met Akbar Khan, which happened the very next morning…

The silence was rich, brimming with the unsaid. Sanam Khan had pulled her kameez straight over and over again, as if removing the creases would somehow iron out the problems that lay ahead. Her mind raced from obstacle to obstacle, aware that women and their honour had caused great wars among the Khans. Elyas knew her concerns. His grandfather’s stories had not been pretty, and he knew that Jia’s reluctance was in part due to them. Tight-lipped, her mother beside