The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

head up the drugs. Quality control, alternative ways of distribution and bringing the product over.’

The sun was getting low. The light was turning the stone buildings the colour of chamcham, and it made Jia think of the Sweet Centre, where her father used to take them on Sunday mornings for halva and puri. There would be rows and rows of sweetmeats, squares of barfi, round and fat gulab jamun steeped in syrup, and soft milky rasmalai. It seemed like only yesterday. Memories of Akbar Khan had been coming thick and fast over the last two months as she figured out her place and her plan.

She pulled the black collar of her coat up high. The bitter wind bit hard.

‘And while we’re talking, I have some more advice for you,’ said Idris. ‘Buy some warmer clothes now that you’re sticking around. You look like you’re fucking freezing in that southerner get-up!’ Jia laughed at his outburst and he joined her. Idris so rarely said anything unmeasured it eased the tension. Things were about to get harder, and without a sense of humour they’d lose themselves to the darkness they were stepping into. Idris had her back and she had his. Jia was glad he was here, especially now that they were going to war.

‘You would have made your mother proud, you know,’ she told him, when they stopped laughing.

‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

They crossed the road to their car, where a group of young men were deep in laughter and conversation.

The man in the grey suit, who had been waiting in reception earlier, was with them. He asked for a light. ‘You should quit,’ Idris said, handing over his silver Zippo. ‘And so should I. But not today. Today we smoke.’

‘I know, you’re right,’ said the man in the suit. ‘But there’s not much else to do round here. Unless you want to deal drugs.’ He lit his cigarette and took a long drag, then handed the lighter back to Idris, who lit his own. Jia took a step back from the smoke.

‘What kind of work are you looking for?’ Idris asked.

‘Anything. Most of us are trained developers,’ the man replied, nodding towards his friends. ‘UX, apps, software, you name it and one of us can do it. But there’s no jobs around here and some of us have got family – we’ve tried applying everywhere. It’s all a bit shit. I probably shouldn’t complain. I’m sure something will come up.’

The men weren’t much older than Zan was when he died. They weren’t much older than Ahad. They were eager, intelligent, streetwise and smart, but living in a city that was dying had placed them on the bottom rung of life. Even those who’d moved away found themselves judged when they told people where they had grown up and gone to school. No matter where they went, others stepped on their knuckles to rise to the top. So in the end they came home. They were somebody’s brothers and somebody’s sons, but the rest of the world didn’t see it that way. Jia did. She understood. She understood that they lived in a restricted world, and that it was the world, not their abilities, which held them back.

The smell of Jia’s own son as he had been lowered into her arms still lived in her memory, as did the overwhelming need to protect him, and with that, of course, the overwhelming fear that she would somehow fail to. ‘He will teach you what love is in its purest form,’ her mother had said. Jia had held on to him tightly, tormented by the fear that she would lose him the way she had lost Zan, that he would disappoint her the way her father had disappointed her, petrified at the thought that love like this was fleeting. She was convinced that love was no longer something she did well.

So when they told her he’d died, she’d been oddly relieved. The doctors had blamed MRSA. She knew it to be a lie – that wasn’t how he had died, or how she thought he’d died – but she had stayed silent, worried they might blame her. Then, of course, years later her father told her Ahad had survived and that he had taken him, as he had taken all that was good in her life.

She wondered what kind of man Ahad was becoming. Was he kind, like Elyas, able to forgive? Was he whole, intact, or had the world damaged him the way it had her? She felt a pang of regret, wishing she’d held on to the letters Elyas had sent. She wished she’d opened them, had a taste of her son’s life, experienced his childhood. But she hadn’t. She’d sent them back, one by one. She’d blamed Elyas for Zan’s death as much as her father, and she had wanted him to suffer as much as she did. But meeting Ahad now, seeing how much he reminded her of her brother, she wished she hadn’t. He would have helped fill the void Zan had left. What kind of a mother was she? How cold? How disinterested must she have seemed to him?

He was waiting for answers but she didn’t have any to give, not yet. As she stood under the street lights with these young men, contemplating her takeover of Akbar Khan’s world, she realised her father had done the right thing. Elyas was a better parent than she could ever have been.

Idris, on the other hand, was like her. Broken, unflinching and unforgiving. His past had stolen away the privilege of forgetting; that was for other people. He believed in little, but he believed in Jia Khan, and he made her want to be the mother the city needed.

‘It is time for change,’ she told Idris as they drove back to Pukhtun House. ‘We have to help our own people. Pakistani families only help those who toe the line. If you want to do something different, there’s no one