The Khan

by Saima Mir

  ‘You can still stay out of all of this, Jia – keep your head down and your hands clean. I will stay to make sure that happens. And I will stay so that the rest of you don’t have to. It’s OK – I want this, don’t you see? I finally feel like Akbar Khan’s eldest son, and I am a Pukhtun: my place is with my family. Baba knows his world, and I know this one. Together, we can find a way forward.’

  Jia wanted to make him see that sacrificing himself was no answer, that their father loved him and he did not need to prove himself to him, but she could tell that he was gone; he was too far down the rabbit hole to come back.

  The money, the education, the status, it had all failed to protect him. His dreams, his intelligence, his manners all amounted to nothing. White privilege had pushed him one finger at a time to the edge of the cliff and he had jumped. And as he fell, Zan promised himself that the day would come when his people would have justice. He would make sure of it. This would never happen to him or his family again.

  CHAPTER 16

  Two years later Jia took Zan’s place. She left home for Oxford University and quickly fell for its prestige and privilege. Privilege divided people into them and us, and was celebrated among the spires of Oxford.

  Handing in essay after essay left little time for anything other than work, and it made the forgetting easier. Falling asleep before her head hit the pillow, or at her desk, there was little time to think of the troubles of family and home. Words like debate, discussion, opinion, argument – all considered unbefitting of a young woman in the culture of her parents – were encouraged here. Slowly, she began to revel in them. Her father’s pride in her achievements and her mother’s concern for her virtue were fed to her in equal measure. She took both on board; they kept each other in check.

  Zan, who had remained true to his plans, enrolled at a university closer to home and continued living with his parents. The police had dropped their investigation, citing a lack of evidence. His evenings were now spent locked in his father’s study, learning the family business. Life seemed to return to normal, but the constant fear of a knock at the door stayed with them, as if a part of them had remained in suspended animation and could reanimate at any time.

  When, four years later, Jia Khan came home and announced she had married, her mother, standing in the kitchen up to her elbows in flour, took the news with grace. Sanam Khan had been preparing for a storm, but in the end what had come was drizzle. Her daughter had brought home a young man. It would have been shameful in generations gone by, but it had come to be expected of Jia Khan.

  Sanam Khan was reassured to see her daughter scarlet with shame, having dragged her chador from her bosom to her head. ‘A woman’s chador is her honour,’ was something she’d said often to her daughters, a way of reminding them of what was expected of them. She had predicted this day years earlier. ‘A woman knows her children, Akbar Khan,’ she had said as she packed Jia’s belongings for university. ‘And that daughter of yours will be the end of us!’ But she had been young once, and she knew the fears a young girl harbours before her parents. So when she saw Jia’s shame, she took her hand gently and asked to be taken to her son-in-law.

  Elyas waited quietly in the living room, trying to look suitably respectful. His face glowed golden and Sanam Khan was pleased at what she saw. At least the girl had had the good sense to pick a Pukhtun and one who had grown up with her own brother. ‘Women have been known to give their hearts to one-legged donkeys,’ she said to her daughter. ‘But you have chosen well. Your heart and head are one.’ With warmth and speed she ushered the couple into the dining room.

  ‘It’s a lovely room,’ said Elyas, looking around, trying to hide his nerves. White flowers filled the place. Even years later the smell of jasmine would make him feel sick.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said. ‘My husband had the furnishings brought over from his home city in Pakistan. He loves to bring bits of Peshawar back with him. You must have such things in your house?’

  ‘Our furniture is more Ikea, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘My grandfather came to England to study at the Bar when he was young and never went back. He said he liked the weather here too much, but I suspect it was my grandmother, and the whisky…’ Elyas stopped, thinking he shouldn’t have mentioned his grandfather’s liking of the haram. But Sanam Khan knew there were worse things than a family that drank.

  Elyas and Zan had been friends since primary school, but apart from a smile at the school gates Sanam Khan knew little about his parents. ‘Both my parents were born in England,’ Elyas said. ‘I’m really sorry, Mrs Khan, I don’t know anything about the protocols of our culture. I’m sorry.’ He was babbling and he knew it. He should have brought his parents with him, but everything had happened so quickly that he hadn’t had time. And he doubted they would have fared any better.

  Elyas had been in love with Jia for as long as he could remember. She was his friend’s little sister, goofy and geeky and funny. Buried under books and her head filled with song lyrics, she was oblivious to him. It was only when he confessed his love one Valentine’s Day by giving her a bottle of perfume that she realised.

  ‘I can’t accept that,’ she’d said, pushing her chunky brown glasses back with her forefinger. He noticed how grubby the lenses were. She was fifteen at the time, dressed in blue jeans and an oversized jumper she’d borrowed from her father’s wardrobe. She buried her nose in its neckline – it smelt of stale tobacco and her father’s aftershave – and she shook her head. ‘I definitely can’t take it.’ Black-and-red wrapping paper lay strewn around her as she sat cross-legged under the large pine tree in the garden. ‘My mother won’t like it,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  ‘OK,’ was all he’d managed to say, his face reddening. He’d spent months saving up to buy the perfume, and she’d rejected it in seconds. He got up to leave. ‘You really shouldn’t sit out here when it’s so cold,’ he said, and then left. He took the gift home and handed it to his mother, who wiped his tears and listened to his heartbreak and told him there was plenty of time for girls after studying and travelling. She nudged him towards other things, and after that Elyas stopped visiting Pukhtun House.

  They’d run into each other by chance, years later. It was at a pro-Palestine demo in London. She was dressed in skinny black jeans and a fur-lined parka, placard in hand. He recognised her instantly. He’d just finished his journalism qualification and was looking for a story; she was an idealistic student. He spent the day following her, with her consent, to document the events. She had lost none of her fire and she still held tight the strings that tugged at his heart. When he found himself sharing the same train home with her, he convinced himself fate was contriving to show him his future.

  She also thought fate had brought them together, but for very different reasons. The arrest, and university life, had made Zan distant. She missed him and she missed her old self. On the rare occasions they were in a room together, he was silent, his eyes full of thoughts to which she was not party. Seeing Elyas walk through the crowds towards her on that rainy November afternoon, was like finding some part of what she had lost.

  The train journey home placed them in a sea of nostalgia. Like the foam that sits on the ocean, it lapped her up. Elyas was easy company. He entertained her with stories of Zan and their escapades, things she’d not known. She laughed at his tales of their ineptness and their failed attempts to ‘get girls’. He walked the length of the train and brought her back sandwiches and biscuits from the buffet bar. He surprised her with his memory of her favourite crisps, and he made her laugh in a way she realised she hadn’t for a long time. And as she listened to him talk she noticed all the ways in which he was like her brother. And all the ways he wasn’t. Zan before the arrest. Zan now. Zan happy and sad, good and bad.

  Over the coming weeks they saw more and more of each other. Jia’s questions about her brother were incessant but Elyas stayed patient, waiting, hoping that she would see him, really see him. And then one day she did. />
  She found herself thinking about Elyas more and more. She could still smell him after they’d spent the day together, like cinnamon cookies and Hugo Boss. He reminded her of home, which raised an ache within her. He was a warm glass of milk in a world full of cheap wine: innocent, easy and good for her.

  The world looked broadly the same to them both, only differing in its minutiae. But youth has always argued over the trivial. Philosophical and political, literary or culinary, they debated with a certainty blind to all alternatives, a certainty drawn from the bottomless pit of passion that is only found at the start of life. They were young and time had yet to set its limits, disappointment yet to curb their passions. Brick by brick, crack by crack, the dam that Jia had painstakingly built around her heart broke. The passion of ideologies spilled over into love of another kind, the kind that is hard to stop. They talked. They fought. They laughed. They kissed. She pushed him away. But he would not be dissuaded.

  ‘We live in a world that holds romantic love up as the ideal, over everything else. Romeo and Juliet, Heer Ranjha and Laila Majnu – our culture is steeped in this notion that love is a drug that makes us blind to our differences.’

  ‘I get the feeling you’re trying to tell me something, Jia.’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m trying to figure us out. I never expected to be with someone like you.’

  ‘What do you mean, “like me”?’

  ‘I’ve lived like the Virgin Mary, I expected only ever to be with one guy, the guy my parents introduced me to, and yet here I am. You’ve lived a totally different life, been out with lots of women, had so many more options – and yet here you are.’

  ‘I’m confused. Does that bother you? Because it doesn’t bother me or change how I feel. What are you saying?’

  ‘I have no idea!’ she said. The truth was she didn’t know what it was about her that made him want her. She was difficult, her family was hard work, and things were complicated, so why on earth would someone like Elyas choose her? It didn’t make sense.

  ‘You don’t think love has anything to do with it?’ he said. ‘Human beings are not logical creatures. We’re emotional.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. And how do you trust those feelings? We’ve had such different upbringings and there’s nothing wrong with that, but wouldn’t you rather be with someone who gets all of you?’

  ‘Maybe, but that’s asking the impossible, and love doesn’t work like that. I like that you challenge my ideas.’

  Jia saw things in black and white; there was no room for grey. She was clear and consistent and hard work, but he loved that about her. She was the most interesting woman he knew, and while they had a similar outlook on life, her experiences meant that she came at things with a unique perspective that intrigued him.

  ‘It’s sad,’ he said, ‘that you feel that love is a compromise, or shaped by thought processes rather than passion and instinct. Me, I believe in crack-cocaine love, addictive and maddening. It does happen to people, you know. Maybe it’ll happen to you. One day.’

  ‘Yes, well, it shouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said. ‘But I love you.’ He leaned in to kiss her. She placed her hand between his lips and hers and pushed him away.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.

  ‘It makes no sense to you, I know. But I love you. Do we have to go through this every time I want to kiss you?’

  He was a junkie and she was his addiction. ‘There is nothing I can do about it,’ he told her over and over again. His words wore down her defences and slowly she succumbed. She loved him but was afraid to admit it, choosing instead to put up obstacles and hide behind practicalities.

  When, eventually, the question of telling her family about their relationship came up, Jia knew, sure as one and one equals two, that Elyas Ahmad loved her. Even so, he sensed her reluctance.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ he’d asked.

  ‘You know the problem. You can’t be my boyfriend. I can have a husband and a friend but not a boyfriend. It’s just not done. How would I face my mother? And what would I tell my father? I can’t lie to them.’ They had been arguing for hours and she couldn’t get Elyas to understand her predicament.

  ‘We don’t need permission to live our lives! Why do you still care what your father thinks? Are you afraid of him?’

  ‘This is not about my father. I may love you and I may have crossed some lines by being in a relationship with you, but I am still a Muslim woman.’

  ‘And this is why you still refuse to stay the night? No one will know, Jia, so no one will care.’

  ‘I’ll know and God will know. It doesn’t matter about anyone else.’ Jia knew that this made little sense to the world in which they lived but she had expected Elyas to understand. He didn’t.

  Elyas had no ties to his beliefs. He was raised Muslim but most of that fell by the wayside when he discovered girls. But he’d never met anyone like Jia before. Her black-and-white life left him seeing red. ‘You’re a maulvi in a mini-skirt!’ he told her. ‘You seem like the kind of girl who will, but really you’re the kind of girl who won’t, wouldn’t and doesn’t. How can someone so open-minded about the world be so closed-minded about sex?’ She didn’t reply, but he kept trying in the hope that she would thaw.

  Admitting that she loved him had been an excruciating process. Before him, work and family had consumed her, and her thoughts had never wandered to anything else. Love affairs and lust were for the weak-willed. Life was to be planned and those plans implemented for the attainment of long-term goals beyond any childish infatuation. The men she knew were complicated, secretive creatures. Admitting that she had defied logic and fallen for one of their kind wasn’t easy.

  Elyas was honest and handsome, good-natured yet strong-willed, and he loved her, but he was a divergence from her plans and a reminder that she too was at the mercy of chemical reactions, just like the rest of the human race. Her falling for him had surprised her. She’d pushed him, turned him this way and that, and tested him constantly. He had not come up wanting.

  ‘There’s nothing sordid about any of this,’ he went on. ‘How can there be? You’ve not even let me come near you! And yet still I’m here!’

  ‘Go, then. I won’t stop you.’

  ‘I don’t want to go. I want to be with you! You drive me crazy sometimes!’ Exhausted, Elyas collapsed on to the sofa. He’d tried so hard to make her understand but nothing seemed to convince her. How could he make her see that he was all in? Hook, line and sinker, the works, done for, and all the other clichés reserved for a man who has lost his heart and found his head. He had no choice but to see it through.

  ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘I understand your sensibilities. I love you for them not in spite of them. And I’m not like him. I’m not like Akbar Khan. I’m a straight-down-the-line, honest-to-goodness guy. I’ve never even had a speeding ticket. And I can promise you this… I will never ever hurt you, on purpose, or otherwise. What else can I possibly do to make you understand? Marry you?’ He stopped.

  That was it. He had been ignoring the obvious and not listening to her. He’d seen her as an indie chick, a debating diva, a girl like any other, but in among it all she was still a young Muslim woman and the way to get a young Muslim woman to stay was to make her your wife.

  After all the times she had turned him down, her change of mind took him by surprise. His hormones racing, he wasted little time. The nikaah was conducted that evening. The imam was an old school friend, and Zan was ‘wali’ for his sister, standing in as her guardian until Elyas met Akbar Khan, which happened the very next morning…

  The silence was rich, brimming with the unsaid. Sanam Khan had pulled her kameez straight over and over again, as if removing the creases would somehow iron out the problems that lay ahead. Her mind raced from obstacle to obstacle, aware that women and their honour had caused great wars among the Khans. Elyas knew her concerns. His grandfather’s stories had not been pretty, and he knew that Jia’s re
luctance was in part due to them. Tight-lipped, her mother beside her, her husband adjacent on the soft cream cushions of the carved wooden sofa, Jia sat, waiting for her father to arrive.

  The silence was broken by a clatter of plates from the kitchen. Sanam Khan took her daughter’s hand. ‘It will be OK,’ she said. And for the first time Elyas noted how similar mother and daughter were. Tall and slim, Sanam Khan was an elegant woman. When she laughed, her eyes were more hazel than green, and when she stopped they darkened to emerald. This they did with the arrival of Akbar Khan. Everyone got to their feet. He looked from his daughter to the young man.

  ‘Who is this?’ he asked. The room remained silent, tempered only by the sounds of activity coming from the kitchen. It ended with the arrival of the manservant, who came in balancing plates of buttered naan in one hand and fried eggs in the other. The old man’s vision was poor. He didn’t see Akbar Khan standing in the doorway, and as he sidestepped to avoid him, he lost his balance, almost losing one of the plates. Sanam Khan moved swiftly forward and rescued it.

  ‘Chilli Chacha, how many times have I told you to use the trolley?’ she said. The old servant nodded in short, sharp bursts before scuttling off back to the kitchen. ‘Here, sit here,’ Sanam Khan said to her husband, directing him towards the table and beckoning Jia and Elyas over.

  Legs crossed, his eyes low, Akbar Khan waited as everyone sat down. The room was pregnant with tension, the waiting unbearable. Sanam Khan finally spoke. ‘This is our guest, Elyas,’ she said.

  Akbar Khan looked up at his daughter. ‘Jia jaan, you know our ways well enough to know that women in our family do not have male friends, and you have brought one to the dinner table?’ he said. He waited for her reply but none was forthcoming. He softened his tone a little. ‘Bacha, speak to your father.’