The Khan Saima Mir (best short novels TXT) 📖

but despair. He had let her down again. If only he had been less proud, if only he had told her how he really felt, and if only he had accepted what she offered as enough, then maybe, just maybe, she would still be here. His head hurt and his throat burned from the petrol fumes. He needed to talk to Ahad, to prepare him. He looked back up at the building where his wife was trapped. There was nothing he could do.

The men were destroying their own city – it had given them more than the place they considered their motherland ever had, and whether they knew it or not, they belonged here. Tomorrow they would awake to the damage they had inflicted and wonder what colour of jinn had possessed them to bring down the apocalyptic fire of hashr on this place. And what would follow would be another day of judgement, one that would see them locked up for decades if history was to repeat itself, one brought about by the legal system that his wife had spent her life defending, but never would again.

On the other side of the city, Benyamin was meeting Sakina, waiting for word that everything had gone according to plan, oblivious to the disaster that was unfolding. He was furious that Jia had refused to let him go along. She had made up some bullshit about needing someone she could trust on the outside in case something went wrong, but he knew she was being overprotective again. She didn’t trust him to keep his nerve. She didn’t get that he wasn’t the kid brother she’d abandoned so many years ago.

‘Can I say something?’ said Sakina. Benyamin nodded. ‘This is never going to end for you.’

Smart, unafraid to do what needed to be done, she reminded him of his sister. He respected her, maybe even cared about her a little. He had no idea what this thing between them was, or what it would become, but in among the chaos that was life, she steadied him.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘Because you’re fighting with people who don’t exist any more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who are you angry with? Your sister, right? But Jia as she is now, or the Jia who left you behind? Because she’s here now, and she has been for some time. When it matters, she is here.’

Dressed in his favourite leather jacket, Benyamin looked the picture of health. His hair jet black and styled to perfection, his cheekbones chiselled, he could have been an Instagram influencer. Hours of physio and days spent at the athletics track meant he had regained his strength fast. The only physical trace of his ordeal with Nowak was a single scar which cut his left eyebrow in two. The scar ran deeper than anyone knew, down into the recesses of his mind where it had begun to fester. The truth was, he had been carrying all this anger around with him even before Nowak, and he was tired. It was time to put this burden down, to pour out the contents of his head in front of Jia, but he didn’t know how. He was hoping Sakina could offer advice.

‘You want to fight with the sister who left you all that time ago, because maybe if she had stayed you wouldn’t have gone looking for Nowak, and things would be different now.’ But she hadn’t stayed, and then she’d returned and stepped up, and somehow that had made him angrier, because he couldn’t hate her. He loved her, and he wanted her acceptance. ‘This is the great tragedy of your life? That you can’t make peace with someone who doesn’t exist any more, because she changed and got better, all without you getting the chance to tell her how you really felt?’ Up until now, Sakina had been respectful to Benyamin Khan, careful of his position as the son of Akbar Khan, brother to Jia Khan. But now he was just wasting her time.

She could still smell the sweat of her clients on her even after she finished scrubbing her skin in the shower at night. When she looked at herself in the mirror, her face gaunt, her skin having lost its shine, all she could think of were the beer guts and flabby bodies that pressed against her as she made her living, the way they heaved and sighed their way to ejaculation, the smell of booze and fags and body odour lingering long after they had left. No one washed for sex workers. Maybe if they did, they wouldn’t need their services. This was her life and she accepted it, not gratefully, and not forever, but for now. She would make plans once her brother had finished university. For now, her life wasn’t about happiness, it was about circumstances. But Benyamin, his circumstances weren’t the problem. He was. Sitting in the warm leather interior of his prestige vehicle, spending more on a bottle of perfume than a punter paid her to suck him off in the back of a beaten-up Toyota Corolla. His bills paid, his belly full, and here he was afraid to talk to his sister about unimportant things.

‘You’re entitled,’ she said. ‘You’re angry because your big sister rescued you. Because the way she looks at you, the things she says, makes you feel like less of a man. Well, guess what, that is all on you. Real men handle shit. So a woman came to rescue you, so what? No one ever came for me.’ She wanted to add, Get over it, just fucking get over yourself, but a knock on the tinted window interrupted her. They both turned and looked through the passenger-side window. It was Khalid the pimp.

Benyamin climbed out of the car. He didn’t care what Khalid thought if he saw Sakina in the car, but he didn’t want him talking over her. Khalid looked distressed, like he was in a hurry to get somewhere. ‘Bro, it’s your sister,’ he