The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

bolts. The twelve men had been standing around an industrial kitchen when Jia had entered the room, their voices low, punctuated by the occasional laugh. They watched as a portly chef stood behind a huge hotplate, getting ready to cook, an array of tomatoes, red onions and green chillies to one side of him, a butchery of entrails to the other.

Jia Khan was hungry. She had been waiting patiently and could wait no more. She asked the chef how much longer it would be, and he handed her the cleavers, gesturing for her to take over. He was a jovial man, respectful, but also one who liked to tease his cousin.

‘Can you even cook?’ Malik had asked. Jia didn’t answer. She took the cleavers and nudged the chef aside. She folded back her sleeves and stepped up to the hotplate. She could see it was blackened from years of serving kat-a-kat and parathas and masala fish; she could tell the spices and butter had seeped into it and seasoned it through and through. She poured oil on to the plate and waited for it to smoke. She reached over and took the raw meat, adding it to the plate and watching it sizzle, measuring spices, adding tomatoes and fresh chillies. She used the cleavers to cut through the hearts, lungs, liver and brain, chopping them until they were tiny, and cutting them further until they resembled minced meat. The days of quinoa and oat milk felt a lifetime away.

‘You know how to cook,’ said the men. And they tucked in, the food giving them heart for the discussion at hand.

‘So you want us to fight for you, and to turn on our fathers,’ Razi said. ‘Why should we trust you?’

Jia spoke slowly, her words measured. ‘Trust is not something one can convince another to have; it is earned. The fact that you are here shows that I have earned it already. I will ask you to make hard choices; these are hard times, but then you already know that too.’

Jia had asked Idris to tell the men of the plan to kill Nowak. Their coming to her with questions reassured her that they held her in high esteem, and she knew that once won, their loyalty would be unwavering.

She listened intently. ‘I spent a lot of time inside because of this kind of thing,’ said Razi.

She nodded. ‘The system let you down. I will not.’

Razi picked up one of the deep serving dishes from the centre of the table. It was filled with large chunks of mutton, cooked with potatoes and fat and seasoned with salt and lemon juice. He passed the dum pukht to Jia, who took it graciously. She filled her plate and ate heartily, the taste of mutton reminding her of the dinner parties her mother would throw when she was a child, how they would all sit around a dastarkhan on the floor together, eating nothing but boti and tikka and occasionally rice, and the elders would ask her to bring toothpicks to fetch out the bits of meat that had caught between their teeth.

Razi had been little when Jia had left for university. She used to carry him off to the garden on her hip whenever Sher Khan and his wife visited. She could tell from his face that what he was about to say was difficult. His words came slow and separated.

‘My brother and me, we trusted our parents,’ he said. ‘They trusted the British justice system but they locked us up for throwing one stone. One stone! Almost identical case in Ravenscliffe a week earlier and the kid got a non-custodial sentence. You know why? Because he was white. The system is stacked against us. It’s a game, a big fucking game of dress-up and fancy barristers getting fat on it.’ His eyes were full of anger, the rest of his face contorted as he spoke. ‘You know how old I was? Nineteen. I was nineteen. He was eighteen just a week before it all kicked off. They fuckin’ locked us up for time. We stopped trusting.’

‘The Jirga let you down,’ Jia said. ‘My father let you down. He was a good man but he lacked knowledge of the British way of doing things, systems that we have worked in and have access to and now control. We’ve become more powerful in the last year than our fathers did in twenty. We understand the white mind and we can manipulate it.’

Razi shook his head, not at her words, but at his own pain. He pointed at his brother, Raza, who hadn’t looked up from his plate since they sat down. He was eating in silence, a spoon in one hand, the other resting on a battered notebook that lay next to his plate.

‘He was a good kid,’ said Razi. ‘He was just walking the wrong way home from college that day. Art college, he was at – I fought Mum and Dad to let him go, and for what? Here, pass me that,’ he said to Raza.

Raza reluctantly handed over the book.

‘Look, look what he does. Draws these all day.’ Razi handed the notebook to Jia. She opened it, carefully turning each page as if looking at a priceless artefact. Page upon page of grotesque images confronted her, bearing witness to the effects of the so-called British justice system on boys with brown skin and Arabic names. She stopped at a self-portrait. It was a sketch of a head cut open and a hand pouring guns and pills into it. Closing the book and putting it down in front of her, she leaned back in her chair. The boy had had talent once but the system had damaged him. Less melanin in his skin, and art teachers and lecturers would have given character statements and told tales of future promise at the Crown Court on his behalf. He would have walked away with a bruised ego and a lesson learnt. The verdicts in