The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

with death on a daily basis do not fear much, and so bribery was out of the question. That said, the coroner was a fair man and had agreed to issue an interim death certificate so that the burial could take place within the three days recommended under Islamic law. It wasn’t an unusual request in this city.

Michael held the door of the Range Rover open, ready for Jia to take her seat. The Bentley was in the police compound, being examined for evidence. They were on their way to meet her father’s men. The car’s music system began playing old Rafi songs as the engine turned. Michael moved to turn them off but she stopped him, hoping her father’s favourite tunes would ease her discomfort. The old memories kept on coming.

Row upon row of small terraced houses came into sight, then the roads widened to open green fields. The landscape brought a mix of melancholy and nostalgia. With its dry-stone walls and winding roads, its green and grey and brown countryside, its cold, crisp air, this would always be home to Jia. And though the hills and valleys merged with ease, she knew that people who lived here stood apart.

It was an apartness that had begun when men like her father had crossed sea and land to come here in search of a better life. Her father. The thought of him brought a sudden, sharp shot of sadness, but she had no time to indulge the emotion and she knocked it back.

She thought of the tangas and taxis and ships and planes carrying their passengers from rural parts of sixties Pakistan. They had settled slowly, some marrying here and others ‘back home’, and their families had grown. Their sons and daughters, the next generation, were born and raised in the city, and schooled in places that would later be described as ‘enclaves’. They’d worried they’d lose their heritage, their language, their way. But that hadn’t happened.

Instead, the next generation of children had become something else, something caught between the land of their heritage and the place of their birth. Something that would find more acceptance in the village of their forefathers than in the green fields of the county where they were born. Cocky and confident, the boys held on to tribal divisions, speaking of them with pride in their own form of patois. Using the same mash-up of English and Punjabi, Pashto or Mirpuri, and dressed in the vibrant pinks and parrot greens belonging to the bright shine of the Indian sub-continent, the girls were caught in an even bigger crossfire. The East gave them grace, the West gave them freedom. And of course they wanted both. They were proud to call themselves Pakistani, wearing the cricket shirts and flying the flag of the crescent moon on Eid, but their mindset belonged to the land where they were born.

Their patriotism was lost on Jia. She wondered why they boasted about a nation that was built on blood, sweat and rape, run by power-hungry, money-grabbing misogynists. What did it offer them? Life would be simpler without the troublesome burden of her bloodline, without the battle for identity that drove young people to places like Syria to fight a war that was never theirs to begin with, for a people that would slaughter them, given half the chance. How easy it would be to change her name to something more European and lose herself in the majority society. But she was a Pukhtun and to the Khans that meant more than patriotism. It meant heritage and responsibility. It meant loyalty and love of nation. It meant changing the world for the better.

She had believed she was chosen. Her father had told her as much. Repeatedly. Tell someone something enough times and they believe it. But somewhere along the road to being the favourite child, their paths had diverged. And now, travelling to meet her father’s men, she had to summon all the old ways and values and sacredness of that choosing. She wondered what she was doing in this rundown, forsaken city, a place whose children, according to the media, had run into the arms of extremists overseas. Even the men and women who ran agencies of intelligence, who possessed ‘in-depth information’, couldn’t tell them why these children were strapping bombs to their bodies. But Jia knew why. She knew what it was to run, and a part of her could sense the desperation that had pushed people so far into the wrong, just to find understanding and identity.

It was a long way from what Akbar Khan had wanted for his children. He had wanted them to do well, and in order to do that he understood that they had to integrate with the country into which they had been born. He had impressed this upon them and encouraged them. Both he and her mother were keen for them to leave the family business behind and start anew on unsullied lines and cleaner foundations.

The push and pull of old and new flooded back in through the windows as the car entered the city, threading its way through streets lined with sand-coloured buildings, ice-cream parlours, shisha bars and boarded-up pubs.

She leaned back into the warm leather of the seats, reminding herself that she had always been a good daughter. She had tried to live life the way her family had wanted, even though it had meant breaking away from them, and to some extent she had succeeded. But things had changed so suddenly, and now it seemed the life that had opened up to her was closing back in.

CHAPTER 22

A guard sat reading an Urdu paper in a small outbuilding by the iron gates. The emblem of the Jirga was set in the centre of the gates, its red and gold roses both warning and welcoming visitors. The guard glanced up and then quickly rose to attention as he recognised the approaching vehicle’s licence plates. The heavy black gates swung