by Saima Mir
CHAPTER 43
Nadeem awoke to the sound of his daughter crying. The little girl was standing by his door, clutching the shawl her mother had embroidered before she was born, her hair as red as her grandfather’s. That was where the similarity to Bazigh Khan ended.
‘Sweetie, what is it?’ Nadeem asked.
The little girl rubbed her eyes and swallowed hard. ‘Baba…Baba, there’s a monster in my room. Can I stay here? With you?’ Nadeem pulled the bed covers back and his daughter raced to climb in. She snuggled up to him, her tiny five-year-old feet ice cold. Nadeem rubbed them gently. ‘Haala jaan, did you really see a monster?’ he asked.
‘No. But…Sarah at school told me that Uncle Akbar was a bad man and a monster and now that he is dead he will come and get me.’ Haala stopped. She was embarrassed. ‘She said that’s why the girls won’t come to my birthday party. Is it true, Baba? Is Uncle Akbar a monster?’ The little girl looked up expectantly at her father.
Nadeem kissed the top of his daughter’s head. ‘No, my love. It’s not true.’
‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘I liked him.’ She paused for a moment and then spoke again tentatively. ‘Baba,’ she said. ‘Is Mama a monster too?’ Nadeem hugged the little girl tight and told her to sleep – she had school in the morning. But Haala had more questions. ‘Baba, what is a Parkie? Sarah Mathews said I was a Parkie. I told her we weren’t Parkies, we were Pukhtuns. That’s right, isn’t it, Baba?’
‘Yes, darling. That’s right. Now close your eyes,’ he said. Nadeem looked down at the little girl, who was already starting to drift off in his arms. She was the most beautiful thing in his life. She had her grandmother’s eyes, eyes that he hadn’t seen since his mother died that day in the fire. Growing up without her had been hard. Nadeem had been his mother’s favourite child. He felt her loss infinitely, even now. He’d buried himself in work; taking on other personas brought relief, at least for the time he was on stage. But Haala’s birth had meant having to leave that life.
Nadeem’s girlfriend, the little girl’s mother, had left early on and he had raised Haala alone. Looking back, he didn’t blame her. They had met at work and had fallen fast for each other. Their relationship had been passionate and addictive, drinking each other in and living life to the full. It was a fairground ride on love heroin. But a baby brought change, one that she could not handle. The passionate debates that at one time had ended in sex now became arguments that led to her throwing whatever came to hand. So she had left. But if she’d found the relationship difficult, she found separation from her daughter even harder. Unable to make peace with either option, her addictive personality had led her down dark corridors from which she could not escape.
Unable to sleep, his daughter’s words ran through his head. She was so much like him it made him afraid. He remembered how the cruel words of school children stung hard. And with no mother to run home to for comfort, the stings swelled and multiplied, until eventually you were numb. You had to be to survive. This was the future his daughter faced. He had hoped for better, but all these years on and little had changed in the world for Haala and for other brown children like her. The thoughts gnawed at his wounds. As he brushed the hair from his daughter’s forehead he knew he wanted to protect her innocence. He did not want her to become like him or like Jia Khan. He wanted words like ‘Paki’ and ‘terrorist’, and the negative connotations of her heritage, to be wiped clean from her life path. She was worth slaying monsters for.
He gently moved his arm from behind her neck letting her head rest on the pillow. Covering her with the duvet, he carefully walked across the room so as not to wake her, and into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of milk, gulping it back to ease the heartburn he’d been experiencing for the last few days. He placed the plastic bottle on the worktop and picked up his phone, flicking through for Jia Khan’s number before deciding it was too late to call. He wrote a text and then hit send. ‘I’m all in,’ it said.
Seema pushed the pram along the cobbled street. She didn’t understand why her friends wanted to meet in this part of town. Head down, she quickened her pace as she approached a group of young teenagers. They began to jeer and joke among themselves. One of them spat on the ground before her. The group’s ringleader stepped out behind her and shouted, ‘Oi! you wan’ some o’ this?’ He pointed at his crotch and gestured obscenely.
Seema stopped in her tracks. She turned around, and looked at the boy and his group of friends. They were still laughing. She smiled back at them. ‘Do you want some of this?’ she said.
The ringleader looked confused and then angry. ‘That’s wha’ I said an’ that. You bein’ funny, hain?’ he said.
Seema nodded at him, still smiling. The teenager began walking towards her, his friends close behind, but she stood her ground. Her baby began to cry. As the gang drew closer, she reached under the blanket that was spread across the pram hood. She pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the youngsters. ‘Now. Tell me. Do you want some of this?’ she said.
The ringleader took a step back, walking into his friends.
‘No? Thought not,’ said Seema. Then she turned and carried on striding towards her friend’s house. Behind her she could hear the teenagers.
‘Woah!’ said one of them. ‘Was that thing for real?’
A young girl ran past Seema and up to the dazed group. ‘What was she sayin’a you?’ she asked.
‘Nowt,’ said the ringleader.
‘Good. Yasser Khan’s wife that is. You shoun’t say owt to her unless you want the Verdict to cut off yer balls.’
‘Who the ’ell’s the Verdict?’ asked another kid.
‘Han’t you ’eard? Ma brother an’ his mates all been talkin’ ’bout it. They say it’s time for new blood. A revolution’s comin’! The Jirga’s time is over. Ma brothers, they say they gonna be respectin’ whatever comes.’
CHAPTER 44
‘We can’t have organised crime in a disorganised city. We need law and order restored,’ Jia told the men.
Sher Khan’s eldest son, Razi, listened carefully to her words. He had been tasked with arranging this meeting, inviting handpicked and trusted sons of the Jirga. The men had come eagerly and sat side by side, eating roti and rice with large cuts of mixed grill, as Jia told them of her plan.
She had met with each man personally in advance of this gathering. Idris had done the background checks and collated the information. They had found their cousins ready to speak and amenable to a meeting. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal. The clatter of plates, the sound of freshly cooked karahis being spooned and drinks being downed filled the air. The fragrance of coriander and ginger, tempered with simple spices, made them feel at home. A decade had changed the family dynamic; ideals had been shed, dreams smashed and reality had set in. The men were tired of living under the iron rule of their fathers at work, and then going home to negotiate the arguments of their wives and mothers in the extended family system.
But they had been raised to be respectful, and needed guidance on how to extricate themselves. The emotional blackmail used to keep them in place had started to wear thin. The threats of dishonour and shame upon family were becoming old. This last year, under Jia’s watchful eye, had brought new hope.
She knew that getting the old men of her father’s Jury to retire would be easier if it was their children who asked them to step down. The old men had run the city for too long. Their decisions had started to weaken along with their limbs. Rebellion under the guise of retirement was what she offered her cousins. It meant their fathers would retain their dignity. Further, as each Jirga member was replaced by his own son, he could act as mentor and counsel. But the cousins still needed a little convincing.
The dinner was being held on the first floor of one of the old mills owned by the property-rich Khan family. Land was important to the Pukhtuns and when the city’s old businesses had started to close the family bought up the premises. Unable to get mortgages a
t the start, they had used the old ways of ‘committee’. Large families meant that deposits were accumulated quickly and without the need for interest. The system worked by each person giving a fixed monthly amount over a set period of time. Each month all the money was collected and given to one of the committee members. Weddings were paid for, businesses backed, deposits collected and, more recently, university fees covered in this way.
Some of the buildings had been converted into apartments and kept by men for their mistresses, or second and third wives, and sometimes for gay lovers.
Much of Akbar Khan’s property had been bought in his children’s names. This mill belonged to Jia. In its heyday it had been filled with textile workers and wool merchants. Now, some of it still housed those ghosts and memories of the past, but the rest, Akbar Khan had rented out to an antiques dealer. It was a sentimental move on his part, one of his few indulgences. There wasn’t much call for antiques in this place and the dealer was unable to meet the rent requirements. But Akbar knew of his daughter’s love of antiquities and curiosities and had hoped that when she came to learn of it she would see it as a sign of his affection. And coming into the building today, she had.
As she had made her way up to the first floor, she’d wondered what her father would make of her now.
The mill was a vast expanse of space. Row upon row of grey industrial columns ran down the length of the building and parallel to each other, fixed into the ceiling and floor with heavy metal 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 the case of the white rioters in Ravenscliffe that Raza spoke of had been lenient, something that was widely known in legal circles. Jia had studied them at the time and then put them aside. The thought that she could have helped was acerbic; it grieved her.
‘We want to help,’ Razi said, ‘but we want to make sure everything is done respectfully, you understand?’
‘I understand your concerns. It is time to take responsibility, but we will do it without offending your fathers. Some of us tried to leave this life behind, but the outside world wasn’t as simple as we hoped. Our elders paved a path for us, we can take it further. Maybe one day one among us will be the parent of a government minister or even the prime minister. But until that day comes we are Pukhtuns, we live by our own law and we should die by it. It is time we brought the family business into the new era. But I need your help to do it.’
‘All we ask is this one job to clean up the place,’ said Idris. ‘Then, if you want, we’ll train you, we’ll give you jobs, we’ll pay your tax and your national insurance contributions, everything. The tech centre will give you a step up and a place in society. You have already seen what we are doing. Your children won’t have to lie about what you do. You will live like honourable men but without the boot of white privilege on your necks.’
Razi turned to Jia. ‘White society did not give us justice. If we do this with you
, you will give us justice?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know about justice, but I will give you back your dignity,’ she said. ‘If you want it. The only thing that separates us from the rest of the country is opportunity. The politicians, the wealthy, the people with power – they are not going to give us what we want. We will have to seize it for ourselves.’
She could feel the energy in the room, the dead dreams of men coming alive as she spoke. Sitting so low in the well, surrounded by the skeletons of those who had tried to escape, the men had no idea how to climb out. But she had thrown them a rope and they were going to hold on to it with both hands.
CHAPTER 45
‘I won’t let you do this!’ the woman screamed at the boy, grabbing him by his hood. His feet dragged across the asphalt as she pulled him into the white van that was waiting close by. The door slid shut hard behind her, and she slapped her son for the first time in her life. ‘Beta! They want to kill you! They want to kill you, my flesh and blood! I carried you for nine months inside me, I nursed you for two whole years. Why? Because I love you, and no one will weep for you except me! Do you understand, you little shit?’
The boy pushed his mother aside, trying to clamber over her and out of the van. ‘Mum! Let me out, you crazy woman! What the fuck!’
An old lady, strengthened and fattened by desi ghee, pushed him back into his seat. ‘Tu bai ja,’ she said, telling him to sit in the way only Punjabi grandmothers can, before adding ‘ulloo da patha!’ for good measure.
He’d been called worse than a ‘son of an owl’ before, but the insult, like the push, came with a force that shocked him. He sat back down, rage and embarrassment burning up his cheeks. ‘This in’t our homeland, Mum! We gotta show them what’s what. You should just take me home to Pakistan!’
