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

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