The Khan by Saima Mir (read e books online free TXT) 📕

his children, and the remains of his wife, Liza. My father said his howls were heard across the valleys and hills that night. I still remember the fire engines and the faces of the two little boys, one three and one five, who survived. They were huddled in a corner together, their faces grubby with smoke. My father and his brother went to the police. Bazigh Khan begged them for help. They said the officer in charge whispered “Paki” to his colleague and told them to go home. It was the last time either man would ask anyone for anything again, and then they turned to the old ways for justice. The police had no trouble figuring out the fires in the white parts of town were arson. The men who had threatened Bazigh Khan died. Their families died. Their wives died. And their parents died. The places where the men had worked were destroyed. The places where the men drank were destroyed. The fires raged for three days.’

Elyas wondered if her detachment was due to countless retellings of the story, so that the events had lost their power over her, or whether the pain was still so fresh that she could not allow herself to feel it. Either way, as she spoke, Elyas was reminded of the boy soldiers he’d met in Afghanistan, the ones who knew no other life than death and despair.

‘Are you saying he killed all those people?’ he asked slowly.

‘I’m simply stating the facts. And the facts are that, for the three days the fires raged, Bazigh Khan was at my father’s house mourning the loss of his family, as is prescribed under Islamic law. The police suspected him, they even arrested him, but eleven men stepped forward to say he had not left the house in days.’

‘And his children? What happened to them?’ Elyas asked.

Jia pointed at Idris and Nadeem. Elyas looked from the brothers to their father. Bazigh Khan was across the garden, greeting some guests. He thought of his own son and what he would do to anyone who dared to hurt him. He thought of what Jia’s leaving had done to him. And he wondered what damage lay within Bazigh Khan and his sons. He couldn’t even begin to fathom.

In the distance, Bazigh Khan was shaking hands with the men of the Jirga. No one knew exactly how many police officers had tried and failed to bring them to justice, how many lives they had taken to achieve their ends or what it was that drove them. They embraced and laughed raucously, like any other group of greying old uncles at a wedding, making merry and over-indulging.

CHAPTER 13

Jia watched Benyamin from afar. Even from a distance she could tell he was flirting with the young girl in the emerald green. She wondered what Zan would have made of their little brother. Things had been so very different when she and Zan were young.

Zan Khan had been fiercely loyal, with his mother’s charm and his father’s intelligence, but he had been a lot less carefree than Benyamin was. The absence of her eldest sibling was a constant knot in her stomach. She wished he was here, to pick over food and family gossip with, and to help her make peace with her father, because she couldn’t bring herself to do it. But Zan wasn’t here, and he never would be. Akbar Khan had seen to that. Time unrolled and wrapped like a ribbon around her and she could almost feel his presence; there he was taking his mother by the arm, laughing, making her smile in that way only he could. He was eighteen again, captain of the debate team, playing cricket at county level and getting straight As. She remembered how he’d argued with his school when they’d asked a student to remove her hijab. He’d won, and his name appeared in all the national press, making him a celebrity for a while. Girls her age worshipped popstars, but Jia worshipped Zan; in her eyes, he was matchless and fearless. But Zan was not quite fearless enough to tell his father about his own plans. Maybe if he had, things would have been different. She was deep in thought when Benyamin walked by. Caught up in the past, she instinctively reached out to stop him.

But he answered her abruptly. ‘What do you want, Sis?’ He was annoyed, and his gaze kept drifting towards the girl in the emerald green. ‘I’ve got things to do.’ This wasn’t the right time to talk. The right time had been aeons ago. She let him go.

‘I just wanted to make sure you’d be here for the rukhsati.’

‘I’ll be here,’ he said. ‘Some of us have always been here.’ He walked away, his words stinging gently, like antiseptic on a cut. Is this what healing felt like?

Jia turned and walked towards the house, making her way up the stairs to her parents’ bedroom. She remembered how she and her siblings would hide in here when extended family overstayed their welcome. She stopped by her mother’s dressing table: a picture of the Khan children stood beside the perfumes and powders. She ran her fingers over their faces. Zan would never have spoken to her like that.

He was full of practicalities, but he knew about the power of kindness. He had been a budding astrophysicist, drawing constellations and carrying out calculations on scraps of paper, on napkins, notebooks – and then on walls, after his sister asked him to. Tall, tanned and sociable, to Jia’s pale and introverted, everything came easy to Zan, including grades and girls. Nothing came easy to Jia. Except, of course, her father’s love.

Jia opened her mother’s armoire and took out the old photograph albums. She flicked through them slowly. Pictures of holidays, and Eid, Christmas and birthdays. They had travelled so much, mainly to Pakistan and the US. Zan had loved it. He had planned to take a gap year and see