The Khan by Saima Mir (best thriller novels of all time .txt) 📗

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 upbringing 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