The Khan

by Saima Mir

  He was right: she was not afraid. There is not much that frightens a woman who has had to fight to live life on her own terms, but experience had taught her when to save her energy and when to pick her battles. The waiter caught her eye, and she gestured for the bill. He came over with the card machine. She continued to ignore Nowak, paying quickly and asking for her lunch to be packed up. The waiter returned moments later with a cardboard box, which Jia thanked him for. She left Nowak alone in that café pondering what had just happened. It was rare for him to be refused, and rarer for him to fail at lighting a fuse. He was not to know that Jia Khan had had years of practice at not rising to the slights of men. She had cultivated the skill of calm. Years of chaos, watching defendants talk themselves into trouble and out of acquittal, meant the skill of diplomacy was second nature to her. She had learnt to let the silence breathe.

  When the verdict came in a few hours later, it was in the defendant’s favour. The evidence had been insufficient. Nowak looked around for Jia, but her colleague informed him that she had left the courthouse earlier to attend to another matter.

  She had in fact gone back to her hotel to pack. She was desperate to get away from this city; it held far too many memories. Little did she know that a year later, she would be back for good.

  CHAPTER 4

  Akbar Khan had raised his eldest daughter like a son, shunning his wife’s advice and ignoring the town talk. She was, after all, both the daughter of a great Pukhtun and a daughter of Great Britain. ‘My child will live on her own terms,’ he had told his wife plainly, repeating it like a daily affirmation, embedding it in his daughter’s bones.

  His wife had not agreed easily. ‘But she is a girl, Akbar jaan, what will people say?’ Sanam Khan’s protests fell on deaf ears. Her husband had made up his mind and when Akbar Khan made up his mind only Allah and His angels could change it.

  ‘We are Muslims,’ he said. ‘Our women were given equality over fourteen centuries ago, yet you want to hold her back? The enemy of women is woman herself.’

  Sanam Khan was no fool; she was well acquainted with the world and its ways. ‘You are the Khan of our people,’ she said, ‘but I’m her mother. And as a woman I know that what you are teaching her will make our people turn against her. She will be shunned for having an opinion and looked down upon for speaking her mind. And what if she goes astray and brings dishonour upon herself?’

  Akbar Khan tried hard to allay her concerns. ‘My blood will not allow her to lose her path. Dignity and honour course through our veins and hers. Have more faith in me and in your child, and in yourself. In any case, every great leader is shunned before they are admired.’ And when he realised that the fear in her eyes was for her child and not for their family honour, his voice softened. ‘My love, my jaanaan, trust me.’ She shook her head, and he whispered terms of endearment, tracing his finger across her forehead and gently moving wisps of hair from over her eyes and tucking them behind her ear. Through the warm tears of a wife and mother, she relented, as she always did.

  ‘My daughter will marry a very important man,’ Akbar Khan had announced to the midwife the first time the baby was bundled up and handed to him. The hours, days, years passed more swiftly than he’d have liked, but he continued to whisper his many plans into his daughter’s small ears, first the right and then the left.

  At just ten months old, Jia Khan waddled around the office, her father discussing business with various men of ill repute. Brushing aside her curly fringe, she would cup her father’s wide, dark face in her chubby hand and try to kiss him, as he unflinchingly made decisions about work and the fates of men. No one dared question the presence of the child or why she was allowed in the quarters of men while they discussed business affairs. She was the daughter of their leader. She was their honour.

  And so, some would say, it was inevitable that things turned out the way they did. ‘Men of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier know better than to question their Khan. Yet you raise your voice to me?’ her father had said the day she left, the day her heart was broken into pieces so small that not even the angels could put them back together.

  ‘It’s a good job I’m not a man,’ she told him. ‘You’re a liar and a murderer. You killed Zan, you destroyed my hope, my marriage, and you have the audacity to tell me that you did all this out of love?’ The last words had, in fact, been more a statement of fact than a question; she had no need of his excuses any more. And with her broken heart, she had smashed his in the way only a daughter can: ‘I hate you.’

  The years had passed quickly, blurring together. She hadn’t managed to escape the voice in her head – his voice – and even now, for better or worse, it echoed through the many recesses of her mind. She’d been running away from him so fast she hadn’t noticed how far she’d come. It was only as she packed her bags, ready for the journey home, that Jia realised how much she had changed.

  Akbar and Sanam had raised their daughter to be the wife of a respectable man. But respectable families don’t choose to marry their sons off to the daughters of drug smugglers and money launderers. Her father found this out the hard way, when Jia wept salty tears on to his shirt the first time her heart was broken. ‘It’s not you. But your father…’ the boy had said, his words like ground-up glass. And that day Jia learnt a lesson she would never forget: she would have no control over her honour – her father had seen to that. And although she didn’t believe the things he had said about her father, that young man had laid the first row of bricks in the wall that was to stand between Jia and Akbar Khan.

  Ironic, then, that it was Akbar Khan’s pain that had known no bounds when his daughter wept. He had believed his wealth and power would allow his daughter to find an honourable match. He, who made men bow to his will, had forgotten that the heart is held between Allah’s thumb and forefinger, and it is He who turns it at His will. In the world of arranged marriage, the daughters of criminals married criminals and the daughters of noblemen married nobility. Money was not their concern, bloodline and izzat were. ‘I fix the world’s problems but what can I do for her?’ Akbar Khan said to his wife. ‘I never thought this would happen to our children. They talk of honour, but is this what honourable boys do? Make a young girl cry?’ He did not know that, huddled on the other side of the door, Jia Khan was listening to every word.

  After this, Akbar Khan had taken matters into his own hands and paid a visit to the matchmaker, because a young Pakistani girl is nothing without a husband.

  ‘There isn’t a boy good enough for your daughter on my list, Khan sahib,’ the old lady said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know anyone who would match her.’ The china teacup rattled in her ageing hands as she handed it to him. ‘Sugar?’ she asked.

  Akbar Khan shook his head. ‘We have been good to you,’ he said. He held the dainty cup and saucer awkwardly, ill at ease, and the matchmaker was relieved when he placed it on the table before him.

  ‘You have,’ she said. ‘You have. And I say this with respect, it is a new zamana we live in, sahib.’ She was getting old. Gout had taken hold of her foot and her knees were riddled with arthritis, making her gait more of a waddle than a walk. But none of this stopped her working. She was greeted with respect, fed hot samosas, called constantly and pandered to by her people. Girls’ mothers brought her gifts, while boys’ mothers brought her gossip. She was acquainted with every Pukhtun family in England, Scotland and Wales, and was privy to their intimate affairs, and so she knew none would consent to a union with the daughter of Akbar Khan. Families who had worked hard to hide their histories and bury their bloodstained pasts didn’t want to build alliances with a family so freshly connected to crime.

  Now in her eighties, she had seen too many good women age and wither away in the hope of a good match, sacrificed at the altar of honour, faith and family name. It was a crime to ask a woman to give up her dreams of being a mother and a wife. It was a sin to expect a woman to safeguard her chastity her entire life because a man of appropriate u
pbringing or station could not be found within the system. She knew her ideas would disrupt an age-old system and rain a mighty backlash down upon her, but her children were married and her husband was long dead, and so the courage to speak the truth was not hard to muster. Sitting directly opposite Akbar Khan, she put down her cup and rested her hands on the table. ‘Jia is a good girl. She can be trusted to make her own decisions. Let her find her own husband.’

  Her words broke the dam, and rage spread across Akbar Khan’s face. She had anticipated this and was ready for him. ‘Now, now,’ she said, taking his hand in hers to restrain more than comfort. ‘Spit out the anger and think again. Izzat, honour, both these fade and are nothing in the eyes of Allah. What lasts is love, and you know this better than most.’

  Akbar Khan nodded. Heart heavy and mind muddied, he learnt that day the hardest lesson of fatherhood: even the Khan cannot save his favourite child from the trials God chooses to heap upon her. He knew the world of his heritage well, a world where a woman was considered ‘left on the shelf’ when she turned twenty-five. A world where boys’ mothers visited house upon house, sipping chai and eating sweetmeats and fried savouries as they viewed potential brides as though they were buying cattle. It was a hobby, a time-pass. They forgot that they too had daughters; they gossiped about girls and spread half-truths about families, and the cycle continued from one generation to the next.

  The daughter of the Khan had struggle upon struggle heaped upon her. Like water dripping on a rock, it slowly wore away at her, revealing someone new beneath.

  And so it was that, with time, Jia Khan developed a thicker skin. She built a wall around herself and tried to do the same for Maria, planting her feet firmly between the world and her sister. Maria could not be allowed to feel the pain she had felt. ‘Let me raise my children my way,’ her mother had shouted at a nineteen-year-old Jia. ‘Why do you think it is your place to always play lawyer for everyone else in my house?’

  ‘Because if you’d had faith in me instead of worrying about the rest of the world and what it has to say, I wouldn’t be cleaning up the mess my life has become,’ Jia had said. Head down and gloves up, she stood her ground. Her actions meant the world in which her younger siblings grew up was less restrictive than the one she had experienced. Having learnt his lesson with Jia, Akbar Khan had allowed his wife to raise Maria in ways she saw fit without interfering, and Sanam, seeing the hurt heaped upon her older children by others, had softened her approach.

  One day Jia walked away from that life without looking back. But years later, memories of the wagging tongues and pointing fingers could still make her smart a little.

  There had been a time when her wardrobe, like her manners, had been neatly divided into two sections, one half for polite white life and the other for Pakistani society. The two parts of her life ran in parallel like the lines of latitude on a map, the space between widened by language and custom. The number of occasions she’d heard old aunties gossip about some poor girl or other, before turning to Jia and reminding her that ‘nice girls speak quietly, nice girls are patient, nice girls don’t answer back’. So-called ‘nice girls’ were demure and non-confrontational, their opinions of no threat to the status quo. But England was full of not-so-nice girls, because white society demanded each person speak up to be heard.

  After the matchmaker’s failed attempts, Jia had tired of the balancing act of being a Brit Pak girl. There came a day when her heart felt heavy as she looked into the long mirror beside her after finishing her Isha prayers. The soft drape of the chador across her hair and shoulders made her feel safe and she’d pulled it tighter. Then, remembering her father’s words – ‘I fix the world’s problems but what can I do for her?’ – she’d pulled the shawl from her head, leaving her brown hair exposed.

  From then on the two parts of her wardrobe, and the east and west of her, became as one: she’d wear kurta and jeans, shalwar and buttoned-down shirt; she’d laugh loudly when the urge took her, ask impatiently for what she felt was her right. She showed the nice Pakistani girl the door.

  And so it was a very different Jia who stood in front of the mirror, taking off her make-up, the eve of her first trip home in fifteen years. She wondered how she had managed to keep away from her mother for so long. As a child she had loved her family wholly and greedily, but the loss of Zan left the air thin, making it hard for her to breathe, and the people she had loved most become the people she could bear least.

  The divide that now separated them had opened up unexpectedly; no one could have predicted its coming. But she knew life to be dangerous that way, bringing one’s worst fears forward and setting alternate plans in motion. But as the Quran stated, and as she herself had learnt, with hardship comes ease. And so here she was, less than twenty-four hours away from the car journey that would take her back to the arms of the family who had wiped her tears, nursed her through childhood fevers, promised to love her without condition, and then made it impossible for her to stay when she needed them most.

  CHAPTER 5

  Elyas Ahmad was packing when his son called to him. He put down the shirt he’d been folding and went to the boy. He was sitting up in bed, exhausted and unable to focus. The squint he’d had in infancy returned whenever he had a migraine. ‘I’m so tired, Dad,’ he said. Elyas felt that familiar pang of helplessness that comes with finding yourself unable to solve your child’s problems. The gruelling schedule of babyhood was nothing compared with this.

  He sat down beside the boy. ‘You shouldn’t be reading,’ he said, taking the book from his son’s lap and glancing at it before placing it on the bedside table. ‘The Dark Web? No wonder you have a headache.’ He gently pressed his fingertips over the boy’s forehead, the way he used to do for Jia all those years ago. The tiny, almost invisible dimple on his son’s chin wasn’t all he shared with his mother. He also had her eyes, and her drive. But stubborn and prone to overstimulation, Ahad had inherited his mother’s worst qualities as well as her best. ‘I’m bored and I’m sick of being sick,’ he said.

  ‘I know. Hopefully the change of air will put an end to the headaches,’ said Elyas, and then he watched as Ahad’s face turned suddenly pale. He grabbed a bucket, bringing it swiftly to his son’s mouth. The boy threw up violently, then tired and clammy, clutching his head, he leaned back on to the pillows, the exhaustion leaving him grey.

  Elyas’s concern was evident across his face; he’d never been able to hide his feelings when it came to his son. ‘That settles it, I’m not leaving you like this,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be fine. And I’ll catch you up the day after. I’m an adult now, I can do this.’ But his words did little to allay Elyas’s worry. Both of them were booked on the 11.10A.M. from King’s Cross out of London tomorrow, as Elyas was due to start his new job in the next few days. But Ahad came first. He always came first. He was also the reason Elyas had accepted the position.

  ‘Son, you’re only fifteen. You don’t want to be in any hurry to take on the responsibility of adulthood, trust me,’ Elyas said. He pulled the duvet up, tucking Ahad in, and then leaned in to kiss his head. Illness was the only time the boy allowed his father to look after him – it had a way of pushing people back to infancy. His father’s touch soothed him and the pain ebbed a little. So too did some of Elyas’s concerns. The migraines didn’t worry him so much as what might be underlying them. Elyas wondered what demons were yet to appear. He wished Jia could see how much of her was in their son. He knew she’d be proud of the man Ahad was becoming, despite the problems he’d been having at school and with the police. But she had made no effort to see him and, as yet, Elyas had no way to explain her absence.

  He wiped the boy’s forehead and helped him to take a sip of water. Sometimes he worried he was trying too hard, but guilt and parenting seemed to go hand in hand, and he reminded himself that some things were beyond his control. He was doing the best he could.

  Ahad finally asleep, he slipped quietly out of his bedroom,
breathing a sigh of relief in the hallway. He paused to look at the row of pictures and awards that hung on the walls. The British Press Association’s ‘Foreign Reporter of the Year’ for five consecutive years, ‘Journalist of the Year’ for the Foreign Press Association, one of Time magazine’s ‘Most Influential People’. He was privileged. He had worked in television and film, doing the things he loved. And the offers were still there, but after the events of this week, he was looking forward to the simplicity of print.

  ‘You want to close the production company because of some trainee camerawoman?’ His business partner had been livid, refusing to accept what he was hearing. ‘You’ve known me for twenty years. You’ve known her for twenty days. Come on.’

  ‘I do know you. And I know that this partnership is over,’ Elyas had said. He remained steady, trying to maintain some dignity in front of the man he’d once regarded as a friend, the man he had started his company with, who’d handled the business side so that Elyas could make the films he wanted. They’d won awards and accolades together, broken stories and changed lives. But accusations were being made and it was clear that his partner had crossed a line, one he could not come back from. ‘When I return, I want you gone,’ said Elyas.

  ‘You’ve lost your mind. If we fold now, we’ll never work in the industry again. No one will commission us.’

  Elyas leaned forward. ‘You took advantage of a defenceless woman,’ he said. ‘You got off on a technicality.’ He paused, waiting for some response. Waiting for his partner to fill the silence. ‘I’ve spoken to her. I’ve seen the police report. You belong in jail.’

  His partner’s face showed no remorse. ‘She was asking for it,’ he said. ‘She wanted to climb the ladder, and I helped her.’

  Elyas stood up and walked towards the door. He needed to leave the room; if he didn’t he was worried he would punch him. He wanted to pummel him until he was bloody and broken, but he wouldn’t. That’s not the kind of man he was. The once-friend’s inability to keep it in his pants, his inability to take no for an answer, had landed them here, in a place where the thing he had toiled over, poured blood, sweat and tears into, was about to die. This was business. But it was also personal. That was Elyas’s line: if it wasn’t personal, it wasn’t worth doing.