The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

‘You didn’t answer my calls, or reply to the letters I sent. I thought you blamed me for Zan.’ He was afraid of what she might say but he also had to know. He tightened the lid on his need, knowing it to be futile. None of it would bring back what he really wanted, the life he had wanted with her.

‘Maybe I did,’ she said. The air in her lungs felt musty; it was time to speak. ‘I needed time to process everything. But by the time I was ready, too much of it had passed, and for that I will always be sorry.’

‘I waited for you. We waited for you…to hear from you.’

‘I know. Believe me, I know what I have lost.’ As if on cue, the door opened and Ahad came in. He looked oddly small, and Elyas was overcome with the desire to scoop him up and take him home, to avoid the questions and conflicts that were to come, to halt the heartbreak on this path. But they were here now, and there was no turning back.

Jia watched her son walk around his grandfather’s study, stopping at a collection of photographs. He picked up a faded picture of Akbar Khan, their resemblance undeniable. The answer to so many questions had been buried today, alongside him.

While it was true that some of what he had learnt about his mother’s family was difficult to accept, he respected his father’s decision to tell him. Better to know your grandfather is a criminal than hear it in whispers on the day of his funeral from news crews and reporters.

Ahad’s paternal family were nothing like the people he had seen at the funeral today. The pomp and circumstance of the mourning, the array of expensive cars, the over-groomed women: it was all very different to the world of his buttoned-down grandparents.

He was thinking about all this and more when he felt Jia’s eyes on him. ‘My grandfather says your people are cruel. He said that when they fled Afghanistan, they slaughtered their wives and children.’

Jia had readied herself for difficult questions from her son, but this was not one of them. She considered her words carefully. ‘I am a proud Pukhtun, and you and I have the same blood – are you cruel?’

‘Is it true?’ he asked.

‘Bravery requires difficult decisions. To do good for the many, one must sometimes do questionable things to the few. If your grandfather knew the Pukhtun ways he would understand why the women and their children were killed. Every action has a reason, a measured reason. If you wait long enough, time reveals it. The men believed that their womenfolk would slow them down, allowing the enemy to catch up, and death at their hands was a kinder end than what that enemy would have done to them. Life demands harsh payments and difficult decisions. Those who don’t understand that, don’t understand life,’ she said. The conversation was intense but Jia considered it best to be honest with her son.

She was acutely aware that, despite giving birth to him, she had not had the opportunity to be his mother. She knew that the foundation parenthood is built on, the endless drudgery that proves and causes love to swell and grow, was missing between them. Their absence of history left her feeling stilted.

Ahad reflected on her words. Had his mother just lectured him? He had waited years to meet her. The way his father had described her, she was warm and gentle; but Jia did not seem to have been awaiting him with open arms. He looked across at his father, hoping to find some anchor, and Elyas responded, nodding, nudging him on to say what he had come to say.

But Ahad was frustrated by the situation, by it not being the way he wanted it to be. Years of anger, confusion and unanswered questions bubbled under his skin and stopped him from speaking.

It was Jia who finally broke the silence. ‘I hear you’ve been in trouble with the police,’ she said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Why does everyone think it’s my fault?’ he said, his anger finding an outlet. ‘The bastards were picking on me for no reason!’

She looked into his eyes, eyes she’d last seen on her eldest brother the day he’d died. ‘Well, we’ll have to do something about that,’ she said, leaning forward and touching his arm.

‘You can’t say things like that to him,’ said Elyas.

‘Like what?’

‘He’s a teenager and you were offering to solve his problems the way your father would have done.’

‘I was just talking.’

‘He’s a kid. He believes everything.’

‘He’s nearly legally old enough to leave home or get married. I think you’re being a bit overprotective.’

Elyas realised Jia hadn’t been around children since she was one herself, and as a result she was ill-equipped to speak to anyone who wasn’t an adult. He had expected too much of her. But her words forced him to recognise that, though he disagreed with her method, she might be right about some things. He was overprotective. He had told himself it was because he was doing the work of two parents, but maybe his approach had been wrong, and maybe, despite his best efforts, he had let his son down.

Although the conversation between mother and son was strange, their interaction awkward, Jia knew that there was no other way it could have played out. She knew that the strained circumstances and her reluctant honesty made it difficult for Ahad to like her, but she hoped that her trust in him and her obvious loyalty to her bloodline would go some way to calm the waters.

Her mother asked her about it later that evening, once Elyas and Ahad had left. ‘A woman is incomplete without her child,’ she told Jia.

‘Will I ever forgive myself?’ Jia replied. She thought about the things she couldn’t talk openly about with her mother, the darkness that had once consumed her, and that was again knocking at the