Microsoft Word the kite runner docx

party the Shirini-­‐khori-­‐-­‐or "Eating of the Sweets" ceremony. Then an
engagement period would have followed which would have lasted a few months.
Then the wedding, which would be paid for by Baba.
We all agreed that Soraya and I would forgo the Shirini-­‐khori. Everyone
knew the reason, so no one had to actually say it: that Baba didn't have months
to live.
Soraya and I never went out alone together while preparations for the
wedding proceeded-­‐-­‐since we weren't married yet, hadn't even had a Shirini-­‐
khori, it was considered improper. So I had to make do with going over to the
Taheris with Baba for dinner. Sit across from Soraya at the dinner table. Imagine
what it would be like to feel her head on my chest, smell her hair. Kiss her. Make
love to her.
Baba spent $35,000, nearly the balance of his life savings, on the
awroussi, the wedding ceremony. He rented a large Afghan banquet hall in
Fremont-­‐-­‐the man who owned it knew him from Kabul and gave him a
substantial discount. Baba paid for the chilas, our matching wedding bands, and
for the diamond ring I picked out. He bought my tuxedo, and my traditional
green suit for the nika-­‐-­‐the swearing ceremony. For all the frenzied preparations

---

that went into the wedding night-­‐-­‐most of it, blessedly, by Khanum Taheri and
her friends-­‐-­‐I remember only a handful of moments from it.
I remember our nika. We were seated around a table, Soraya and I
dressed in green-­‐-­‐the color of Islam, but also the color of spring and new
beginnings. I wore a suit, Soraya (the only woman at the table) a veiled long-­‐
sleeved dress. Baba, General Taheri (in a tuxedo this time), and several of
Soraya's uncles were also present at the table. Soraya and I looked down,
solemnly respectful, casting only sideways glances at each other. The mullah
questioned the witnesses and read from the Koran. We said our oaths. Signed the
certificates. One of Soraya's uncles from Virginia, Sharif jan, Khanum Taheri's
brother, stood up and cleared his throat. Soraya had told me that he had lived in
the U.S. for more than twenty years. He worked for the INS and had an American
wife. He was also a poet. A small man with a birdlike face and fluffy hair, he read
a lengthy poem dedicated to Soraya, jotted down on hotel stationery paper. "Wah
wah, Sharif jan!" everyone exclaimed when he finished.
I remember walking toward the stage, now in my tuxedo, Soraya a veiled
pan in white, our hands locked. Baba hobbled next to me, the general and his
wife beside their daughter. A procession of uncles, aunts, and cousins followed as
we made our way through the hall, parting a sea of applauding guests, blinking at
flashing cameras. One of Soraya's cousins, Sharif jan's son, held a Koran over our
heads as we inched along. The wedding song, ahesta boro, blared from the
speakers, the same song the Russian soldier at the Mahipar checkpoint had sung
the night Baba and I left Kabul: Make morning into a key and throw it into the
well, Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly. Let the morning sun forget to rise in
the east, Go slowly, my lovely moon, go slowly.
I remember sitting on the sofa, set on the stage like a throne, Soraya's
hand in mine, as three hundred or so faces looked on. We did Ayena Masshaf,
where they gave us a mirror and threw a veil over our heads, so we'd be alone to
gaze at each other's reflection. Looking at Soraya's smiling face in that mirror, in
the momentary privacy of the veil, I whispered to her for the first time that I
loved her. A blush, red like henna, bloomed on her cheeks.
I picture colorful platters of chopan kabob, sholeh-­‐goshti, and wild-­‐orange
rice. I see Baba between us on the sofa, smiling. I remember sweat-­‐drenched
men dancing the traditional attan in a circle, bouncing, spinning faster and faster
with the feverish tempo of the tabla, until all but a few dropped out of the ring
with exhaustion. I remember wishing Rahim Khan were there.

---

And I remember wondering if Hassan too had married. And if so, whose
face he had seen in the mirror under the veil? Whose henna-­‐painted hands had
he held?
AROUND 2 A.M., the party moved from the banquet hall to Baba's apartment. Tea
flowed once more and music played until the neighbors called the cops. Later
that night, the sun less than an hour from rising and the guests finally gone,
Soraya and I lay together for the first time. All my life, I'd been around men. That
night, I discovered the tenderness of a woman.
IT WAS SORAYA who suggested that she move in with Baba and me.
"I thought you might want us to have our own place," I said.
"With Kaka jan as sick as he is?" she replied. Her eyes told me that was no
way to start a marriage. I kissed her. "Thank you."
Soraya dedicated herself to taking care of my father. She made his toast
and tea in the morning, and helped him in and out of bed. She gave him his pain
pills, washed his clothes, read him the international section of the newspaper
every afternoon, She cooked his favorite dish, potato shorwa, though he could
scarcely eat more than a few spoonfuls, and took him out every day for a brief
walk around the block. And when he became bedridden, she turned him on his
side every hour so he wouldn't get a bedsore.
One day, I came home from the pharmacy with Baba's morphine pills. Just
as I shut the door, I caught a glimpse of Soraya quickly sliding something under
Baba's blanket. "Hey, I saw that! What were you two doing?" I said.
"Nothing," Soraya said, smiling.

---

"Liar." I lifted Baba's blanket. "What's this?" I said, though as soon as I
picked up the leather-­‐bound book, I knew. I traced my fingers along the gold-­‐
stitched borders. I remembered the fire works the night Rahim Khan had given it
to me, the night of my thirteenth birthday, flares sizzling and exploding into
bouquets of red, green, and yellow.
"I can't believe you can write like this," Soraya said.
Baba dragged his head off the pillow. "I put her up to it. I hope you don't
mind."
I gave the notebook back to Soraya and left the room. Baba hated it when I
cried.
A MONTH AFTER THE WEDDING, the Taheris, Sharif, his wife Suzy, and several
of Soraya's aunts came over to our apartment for dinner. Soraya made sabzi
challow-­‐-­‐white rice with spinach and lamb. After dinner, we all had green tea and
played cards in groups of four. Soraya and I played with Sharif and Suzy on the
coffee table, next to the couch where Baba lay under a wool blanket. He watched
me joking with Sharif, watched Soraya and me lacing our fingers together,
watched me push back a loose curl of her hair. I could see his internal smile, as
wide as the skies of Kabul on nights when the poplars shivered and the sound of
crickets swelled in the gardens.
Just before midnight, Baba asked us to help him into bed. Soraya and I
placed his arms on our shoulders and wrapped ours around his back. When we
lowered him, he had Soraya turn off the bedside lamp. He asked us to lean in,
gave us each a kiss.
"I'll come back with your morphine and a glass of water, Kaka jan," Soraya
said.
"Not tonight," he said. "There is no pain tonight."

---

"Okay," she said. She pulled up his blanket. We closed the door. Baba
never woke up.
THEY FILLED THE PARKING SPOTS at the mosque in Hayward. On the balding
grass field behind the building, cars and SUVs parked in crowded makeshift
rows. People had to drive three or four blocks north of the mosque to find a spot.
The men's section of the mosque was a large square room, covered with
Afghan rugs and thin mattresses placed in parallel lines. Men filed into the room,
leaving their shoes at the entrance, and sat cross-­‐legged on the mattresses. A
mullah chanted surrahs from the Koran into a microphone. I sat by the door, the
customary position for the family of the deceased. General Taheri was seated
next to me.
Through the open door, I could see lines of cars pulling in, sunlight
winking in their windshields. They dropped off passengers, men dressed in dark
suits, women clad in black dresses, their heads covered with traditional white
hijabs.
As words from the Koran reverberated through the room, I thought of the
old story of Baba wrestling a black bear in Baluchistan. Baba had wrestled bears
his whole life. Losing his young wife. Raising a son by himself. Leaving his
beloved homeland, his watan. Poverty. Indignity. In the end, a bear had come that
he couldn't best. But even then, he had lost on his own terms.
After each round of prayers, groups of mourners lined up and greeted me
on their way out. Dutifully, I shook their hands. Many of them I barely knew. I
smiled politely, thanked them for their wishes, listened to whatever they had to
say about Baba.
??helped me build the house in Taimani..." bless him...
??no one else to turn to and he lent me..."

---

"...found me a job... barely knew me..."
"...like a brother to me..."
Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been
defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people's lives. My whole life, I had
been "Baba's son." Now he was gone. Baba couldn't show me the way anymore;
I'd have to find it on my own.
The thought of it terrified me.
Earlier, at the gravesite in the small Muslim section of the cemetery, I had
watched them lower Baba into the hole. The mullah and another man got into an
argument over which was the correct ayat of the Koran to recite at the gravesite.
It might have turned ugly had General Taheri not intervened. The mullah chose
an ayat and recited it, casting the other fellow nasty glances. I watched them toss
the first shovelful of dirt into the grave. Then I left. Walked to the other side of
the cemetery. Sat in the shade of a red maple.
Now the last of the mourners had paid their respects and the mosque was
empty, save for the mullah unplugging the microphone and wrapping his Koran
in green cloth. The general and I stepped out into a late-­‐afternoon sun. We
walked down the steps, past men smoking in clusters. I heard snippets of their
conversations, a soccer game in Union City next weekend, a new Afghan
restaurant in Santa Clara. Life moving on already, leaving Baba behind.
"How are you, bachem?" General Taheri said.
I gritted my teeth. Bit back the tears that had threatened all day. "I'm
going to find Soraya," I said.
"Okay."
I walked to the women's side of the mosque. Soraya was standing on the
steps with her mother and a couple of ladies I recognized vaguely from the

---

wedding. I motioned to Soraya. She said something to her mother and came to
me.
"Can we walk?" I said.
"Sure." She took my hand.
We walked in silence down a winding gravel path lined by a row of low
hedges. We sat on a bench and watched an elderly couple kneeling beside a grave
a few rows away and placing a bouquet of daisies by the headstone. "Soraya?"
"Yes?"
"I'm going to miss him."
She put her hand on my lap. Baba's chila glinted on her ring finger. Behind
her, I could see Baba's mourners driving away on Mission Boulevard. Soon we'd
leave too, and for the first time ever, Baba would be all alone.
Soraya pulled me to her and the tears finally came.
BECAUSE SORAYA AND I never had an engagement period, much of what I
learned about the Taheris I learned after I married into their family. For example,
I learned that, once a month, the general suffered from blinding migraines that
lasted almost a week. When the headaches struck, the general went to his room,
undressed, turned off the light, locked the door, and didn't come out until the
pain subsided. No one was allowed to go in, no one was allowed to knock.
Eventually, he would emerge, dressed in his gray suit once more, smelling of
sleep and bed sheets, his eyes puffy and bloodshot. I learned from Soraya that he
and Khanum Taheri had slept in separate rooms for as long as she could
remember. I learned that he could be petty, such as when he'd take a bite of the
_qurma_ his wife placed before him, sigh, and push it away. "I'll make you
something else," Khanum Taheri would say, but he'd ignore her, sulk, and eat
bread and onion. This made Soraya angry and her mother cry. Soraya told me he

---

took antidepressants. I learned that he had kept his family on welfare and had
never held a job in the U.S., preferring to cash government-­‐issued checks than
degrading himself with work unsuitable for a man of his stature-­‐-­‐he saw the flea
market only as a hobby, a way to socialize with his fellow Afghans. The general
believed that, sooner or later, Afghanistan would be freed, the monarchy
restored, and his services would once again be called upon. So every day, he
donned his gray suit, wound his pocket watch, and waited.
I learned that Khanum Taheri-­‐-­‐whom I called Khala Jamila now-­‐-­‐had once
been famous in Kabul for her enchanting singing voice. Though she had never
sung professionally, she had had the talent to-­‐-­‐I learned she could sing folk
songs, ghazals, even raga, which was usually a man's domain. But as much as the
general appreciated listening to music-­‐-­‐he owned, in fact, a considerable
collection of classical ghazal tapes by Afghan and Hindi singers-­‐-­‐he believed the
performing of it best left to those with lesser reputations. That she never sing in
public had been one of the general's conditions when they had married. Soraya
told me that her mother had wanted to sing at our wedding, only one song, but
the general gave her one of his looks and the matter was buried. Khala Jamila
played the lotto once a week and watched Johnny Carson every night. She spent
her days in the garden, tending to her roses, geraniums, potato vines, and
orchids.
When I married Soraya, the flowers and Johnny Carson took a backseat. I
was the new delight in Khala Jamila's life. Unlike the general's guarded and
diplomatic manners-­‐-­‐he didn't correct me when I continued to call him "General
Sahib"-­‐-­‐Khala Jamila made no secret of how much she adored me. For one thing, I
listened to her impressive list of maladies, something the general had long
turned a deaf ear to. Soraya told me that, ever since her mother's stroke, every
flutter in her chest was a heart attack, every aching joint the onset of rheumatoid
arthritis, and every twitch of the eye another stroke. I remember the first time
Khala Jamila mentioned a lump in her neck to me. "I'll skip school tomorrow and
take you to the doctor," I said, to which the general smiled and said, "Then you
might as well turn in your books for good, bachem. Your khala's medical charts
are like the works of Rumi: They come in volumes."
But it wasn't just that she'd found an audience for her monologues of
illness. I firmly believed that if I had picked up a rifle and gone on a murdering
rampage, I would have still had the benefit of her unblinking love. Because I had
rid her heart of its gravest malady. I had relieved her of the greatest fear of every
Afghan mother: that no honorable khastegar would ask for her daughter's hand.
That her daughter would age alone, husbandless, childless. Every woman needed
a husband. Even if he did silence the song in her.

---

And, from Soraya, I learned the details of what had happened in Virginia.
We were at a wedding. Soraya's uncle, Sharif, the one who worked for the
INS, was marrying his son to an Afghan girl from Newark. The wedding was at
the same hall where, six months prior, Soraya and I had had our awroussi. We
were standing in a crowd of guests, watching the bride accept rings from the
groom's family, when we overheard two middle-­‐aged women talking, their backs
to us.
"What a lovely bride," one of them said, "Just look at her. So maghbool,
like the moon."
"Yes," the other said. "And pure too. Virtuous. No boyfriends."
"I know. I tell you that boy did well not to marry his cousin."
Soraya broke down on the way home. I pulled the Ford off to the curb,
parked under a streetlight on Fremont Boulevard.
"It's all right," I said, pushing back her hair. "Who cares?"
"It's so fucking unfair," she barked.
"Just forget it."
"Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends
pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh,
they're just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is
talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of
my life."
I wiped a tear from her jawline, just above her birthmark, with the pad of
my thumb.

---

"I didn't tell you," Soraya said, dabbing at her eyes, "but my father showed
up with a gun that night. He told... him... that he had two bullets in the chamber,
one for him and one for himself if I didn't come home. I was screaming, calling
my father all kinds of names, saying he couldn't keep me locked up forever, that I
wished he were dead." Fresh tears squeezed out between her lids. "I actually said
that to him, that I wished he were dead.
"When he brought me home, my mother threw her arms around me and
she was crying too. She was saying things but I couldn't understand any of it
because she was slurring her words so badly. So my father took me up to my
bedroom and sat me in front of the dresser mirror. He handed me a pair of
scissors and calmly told me to cut off all my hair. He watched while I did it.
"I didn't step out of the house for weeks. And when I did, I heard whispers
or imagined them everywhere I went. That was four years ago and three
thousand miles away and I'm still hearing them."
"Fuck 'em," I said.
She made a sound that was half sob, half laugh. "When I told you about
this on the phone the night of khastegari, I was sure you'd change your mind."
"No chance of that, Soraya."
She smiled and took my hand. "I'm so lucky to have found you. You're so
different from every Afghan guy I've met."
"Let's never talk about this again, okay?"
"Okay."
I kissed her cheek and pulled away from the curb. As I drove, I wondered
why I was different. Maybe it was because I had been raised by men; I hadn't
grown up around women and had never been exposed firsthand to the double
standard with which Afghan society sometimes treated them. Maybe it was
because Baba had been such an unusual Afghan father, a liberal who had lived by

---

his own rules, a maverick who had disregarded or embraced societal customs as
he had seen fit.
But I think a big part of the reason I didn't care about Soraya's past was
that I had one of my own. I knew all about regret.
SHORTLY AFTER BABA'S DEATH, Soraya and I moved into a one-­‐bedroom
apartment in Fremont, just a few blocks away from the general and Khala
Jamila's house.
Soraya's parents bought us a brown leather couch and a set of Mikasa
dishes as housewarming presents. The general gave me an additional present, a
brand new IBM typewriter. In the box, he had slipped a note written in Farsi:
Amir jan, I hope you discover many tales on these keys.
General Iqbal Taheri
I sold Baba's VW bus and, to this day, I have not gone back to the flea market. I
would drive to his gravesite every Friday, and, sometimes, I'd find a fresh
bouquet of freesias by the headstone and know Soraya had been there too.
Soraya and I settled into the routines-­‐-­‐and minor wonders-­‐-­‐of married
life. We shared toothbrushes and socks, passed each other the morning paper.
She slept on the right side of the bed, I preferred the left. She liked fluffy pillows,
I liked the hard ones. She ate her cereal dry, like a snack, and chased it with milk.
I got my acceptance at San Jose State that summer and declared an
English major. I took on a security job, swing shift at a furniture warehouse in
Sunnyvale. The job was dreadfully boring, but its saving grace was a
considerable one: When everyone left at 6 P.M. and shadows began to crawl
between aisles of plastic-­‐covered sofas piled to the ceiling, I took out my books

---

and studied. It was in the Pine-­‐Sol-­‐scented office of that furniture warehouse
that I began my first novel.
Soraya joined me at San Jose State the following year and enrolled, to her
father's chagrin, in the teaching track.
"I don't know why you're wasting your talents like this," the general said
one night over dinner. "Did you know, Amir jan, that she earned nothing but A's
in high school?" He turned to her. "An intelligent girl like you could become a
lawyer, a political scientist. And, _Inshallah_, when Afghanistan is free, you could
help write the new constitution. There would be a need for young talented
Afghans like you. They might even offer you a ministry position, given your
family name."
I could see Soraya holding back, her face tightening. "I'm not a girl, Padar.
I'm a married woman. Besides, they'd need teachers too."
"Anyone can teach."
"Is there any more rice, Madar?" Soraya said.
After the general excused himself to meet some friends in Hayward, Khala
Jamila tried to console Soraya. "He means well," she said. "He just wants you to
be successful."
"So he can boast about his attorney daughter to his friends. Another
medal for the general," Soraya said.
"Such nonsense you speak!"
"Successful," Soraya hissed. "At least I'm not like him, sitting around while
other people fight the Shorawi, waiting for when the dust settles so he can move
in and reclaim his posh little government position. Teaching may not pay much,

---

but it's what I want to do! It's what I love, and it's a whole lot better than
collecting welfare, by the way."
Khala Jamila bit her tongue. "If he ever hears you saying that, he will
never speak to you again."
"Don't worry," Soraya snapped, tossing her napkin on the plate. "I won't
bruise his precious ego."
IN THE SUMMER of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from
Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-­‐son story set in Kabul, written
mostly with the typewriter the general had given me. I sent query letters to a
dozen agencies and was stunned one August day when I opened our mailbox and
found a request from a New York agency for the completed manuscript. I mailed
it the next day. Soraya kissed the carefully wrapped manuscript and Khala Jamila
insisted we pass it under the Koran. She told me that she was going to do nazr for
me, a vow to have a sheep slaughtered and the meat given to the poor if my book
was accepted.
"Please, no nazn, Khala jan," I said, kissing her face. "Just do _zakat_, give
the money to someone in need, okay? No sheep killing."
Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt called from New York
and offered to represent me. I only told Soraya about it. "But just because I have
an agent doesn't mean I'll get published. If Martin sells the novel, then we'll
celebrate."
A month later, Martin called and informed me I was going to be a
published novelist. When I told Soraya, she screamed.
We had a celebration dinner with Soraya's parents that night. Khala
Jamila made kofta-­‐-­‐meatballs and white rice-­‐-­‐and white ferni. The general, a
sheen of moisture in his eyes, said that he was proud of me. After General Taheri
and his wife left, Soraya and I celebrated with an expensive bottle of Merlot I had
bought on the way home-­‐-­‐the general did not approve of women drinking
alcohol, and Soraya didn't drink in his presence.

---

"I am so proud of you," she said, raising her glass to mine. "Kaka would
have been proud too."
"I know," I said, thinking of Baba, wishing he could have seen me.
Later that night, after Soraya fell asleep-­‐-­‐wine always made her sleepy-­‐-­‐I
stood on the balcony and breathed in the cool summer air. I thought of Rahim
Khan and the little note of support he had written me after he'd read my first
story. And I thought of Hassan. Some day, _Inshallah_, you will be a great writer,
he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was
so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved
any of it.
The novel was released in the summer of that following year, 1989, and
the publisher sent me on a five-­‐city book tour. I became a minor celebrity in the
Afghan community. That was the year that the Shorawi completed their
withdrawal from Afghanistan. It should have been a time of glory for Afghans.
Instead, the war raged on, this time between Afghans, the Mujahedin, against the
Soviet puppet government of Najibullah, and Afghan refugees kept flocking to
Pakistan. That was the year that the cold war ended, the year the Berlin Wall
came down. It was the year of Tiananmen Square. In the midst of it all,
Afghanistan was forgotten. And General Taheri, whose hopes had stirred awake
after the Soviets pulled out, went back to winding his pocket watch.
That was also the year that Soraya and I began trying to have a child.
THE IDEA OF FATHERHOOD unleashed a swirl of emotions in me. I found it
frightening, invigorating, daunting, and exhilarating all at the same time. What
sort of father would I make, I wondered. I wanted to be just like Baba and I
wanted to be nothing like him.
But a year passed and nothing happened. With each cycle of blood, Soraya
grew more frustrated, more impatient, more irritable. By then, Khala Jamila's
initially subtle hints had become overt, as in "Kho dega!" So! "When am I going to
sing alahoo for my little nawasa?" The general, ever the Pashtun, never made any

---

queries-­‐-­‐doing so meant alluding to a sexual act between his daughter and a
man, even if the man in question had been married to her for over four years. But
his eyes perked up when Khala Jamila teased us about a baby.
"Sometimes, it takes a while," I told Soraya one night.
"A year isn't a while, Amir!" she said, in a terse voice so unlike her.
"Something's wrong, I know it."
"Then let's see a doctor."
DR. ROSEN, a round-­‐bellied man with a plump face and small, even teeth, spoke
with a faint Eastern European accent, some thing remotely Slavic. He had a
passion for trains-­‐-­‐his office was littered with books about the history of
railroads, model locomotives, paintings of trains trundling on tracks through
green hills and over bridges. A sign above his desk read, LIFE IS A TRAIN. GET
ON BOARD.
He laid out the plan for us. I'd get checked first. "Men are easy," he said,
fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. "A man's plumbing is like his mind:
simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand... well, God put a lot of
thought into making you." I wondered if he fed that bit about the plumbing to all
of his couples.
"Lucky us," Soraya said.
Dr. Rosen laughed. It fell a few notches short of genuine. He gave me a lab
slip and a plastic jar, handed Soraya a request for some routine blood tests. We
shook hands. "Welcome aboard," he said, as he showed us out.

---

I PASSED WITH FLYING COLORS.
The next few months were a blur of tests on Soraya: Basal body
temperatures, blood tests for every conceivable hormone, urine tests, something
called a "Cervical Mucus Test," ultrasounds, more blood tests, and more urine
tests.
Soraya underwent a procedure called a hysteroscopy-­‐-­‐Dr. Rosen inserted
a telescope into Soraya's uterus and took a look around. He found nothing. "The
plumbing's clear," he announced, snapping off his latex gloves. I wished he'd stop
calling it that-­‐-­‐we weren't bathrooms. When the tests were over, he explained
that he couldn't explain why we couldn't have kids. And, apparently, that wasn't
so unusual. It was called "Unexplained Infertility."
Then came the treatment phase. We tried a drug called Clomiphene, and
hMG, a series of shots which Soraya gave to herself. When these failed, Dr. Rosen
advised in vitro fertilization. We received a polite letter from our HMO, wishing
us the best of luck, regretting they couldn't cover the cost.
We used the advance I had received for my novel to pay for it. IVF proved
lengthy, meticulous, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. After months of
sitting in waiting rooms reading magazines like Good Housekeeping and
Reader's Digest, after endless paper gowns and cold, sterile exam rooms lit by
fluorescent lights, the repeated humiliation of discussing every detail of our sex
life with a total stranger, the injections and probes and specimen collections, we
went back to Dr. Rosen and his trains.
He sat across from us, tapped his desk with his fingers, and used the word
"adoption" for the first time. Soraya cried all the way home.
Soraya broke the news to her parents the weekend after our last visit
with Dr. Rosen. We were sitting on picnic chairs in the Taheris' backyard, grilling
trout and sipping yogurt dogh. It was an early evening in March 1991. Khala
Jamila had watered the roses and her new honeysuckles, and their fragrance
mixed with the smell of cooking fish. Twice already, she had reached across her
chair to caress Soraya's hair and say, "God knows best, bachem. Maybe it wasn't
meant to be."

---

Soraya kept looking down at her hands. She was tired, I knew, tired of it
all.
"The doctor said we could adopt," she murmured.
General Taheri's head snapped up at this. He closed the barbecue lid. "He
did?"
"He said it was an option," Soraya said.
We'd talked at home about adoption. Soraya was ambivalent at best. "I
know it's silly and maybe vain," she said to me on the way to her parents' house,
"but I can't help it. I've always dreamed that I'd hold it in my arms and know my
blood had fed it for nine months, that I'd look in its eyes one day and be startled
to see you or me, that the baby would grow up and have your smile or mine.
Without that... Is that wrong?"
"No," I had said.
"Am I being selfish?"
"No, Soraya."
"Because if you really want to do it..."
"No," I said. "If we're going to do it, we shouldn't have any doubts at all
about it, and we should both be in agreement. It wouldn't be fair to the baby
otherwise."
She rested her head on the window and said nothing else the rest of the
way.

---

Now the general sat beside her. "Bachem, this adoption... thing, I'm not so
sure it's for us Afghans." Soraya looked at me tiredly and sighed.
"For one thing, they grow up and want to know who their natural parents
are," he said. "Nor can you blame them. Sometimes, they leave the home in which
you labored for years to provide for them so they can find the people who gave
them life. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, never forget that."
"I don't want to talk about this anymore," Soraya said.
"I'll say one more thing," he said. I could tell he was getting revved up; we
were about to get one of the general's little speeches. "Take Amir jan, here. We all
knew his father, I know who his grandfather was in Kabul and his great-­‐
grandfather before him, I could sit here and trace generations of his ancestors for
you if you asked. That's why when his father-­‐-­‐God give him peace-­‐-­‐came
khastegari, I didn't hesitate. And believe me, his father wouldn't have agreed to
ask for your hand if he didn't know whose descendant you were. Blood is a
powerful thing, bachem, and when you adopt, you don't know whose blood
you're bringing into your house.
"Now, if you were American, it wouldn't matter. People here marry for
love, family name and ancestry never even come into the equation. They adopt
that way too, as long as the baby is healthy, everyone is happy. But we are
Afghans, bachem."
"Is the fish almost ready?" Soraya said. General Taheri's eyes lingered on
her.
He patted her knee. "Just be happy you have your health and a good
husband."
"What do you think, Amir jan?" Khala Jamila said.
I put my glass on the ledge, where a row of her potted geraniums were
dripping water. "I think I agree with General Sahib."

---

Reassured, the general nodded and went back to the grill.
We all had our reasons for not adopting. Soraya had hers, the general his,
and I had this: that perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to
deny me fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment,
and perhaps justly so. It wasn't meant to be, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it
was meant not to be.
A FEW MONTHS LATER, we used the advance for my second novel and placed a
down payment on a pretty, two-­‐bedroom Victorian house in San Francisco's
Bernal Heights. It had a peaked roof, hardwood floors, and a tiny backyard which
ended in a sun deck and a fire pit. The general helped me refinish the deck and
paint the walls. Khala Jamila bemoaned us moving almost an hour away,
especially since she thought Soraya needed all the love and support she could
get-­‐-­‐oblivious to the fact that her well-­‐intended but overbearing sympathy was
precisely what was driving Soraya to move.
SOMETIMES, SORAYA SLEEPING NEXT TO ME, I lay in bed and listened to the
screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in
the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a
living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our
laughs, and our lovemaking. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd
feel it rising from Soraya and settling between us. Sleeping between us.
Like a newborn child.
FOURTEEN

---

_June 2001_
I lowered the phone into the cradle and stared at it for a long time. It wasn't until
Aflatoon startled me with a bark that I realized how quiet the room had become.
Soraya had muted the television.
"You look pale, Amir," she said from the couch, the same one her parents
had given us as a housewarming gift for our first apartment. She'd been lying on
it with Aflatoon's head nestled on her chest, her legs buried under the worn
pillows. She was half-­‐watching a PBS special on the plight of wolves in
Minnesota, half-­‐correcting essays from her summer-­‐school class-­‐-­‐she'd been
teaching at the same school now for six years. She sat up, and Aflatoon leapt
down from the couch. It was the general who had given our cocker spaniel his
name, Farsi for "Plato," because, he said, if you looked hard enough and long
enough into the dog's filmy black eyes, you'd swear he was thinking wise
thoughts.
There was a sliver of fat, just a hint of it, beneath Soraya's chin now The
past ten years had padded the curves of her hips some, and combed into her coal
black hair a few streaks of cinder gray. But she still had the face of a Grand Ball
princess, with her bird-­‐in-­‐flight eyebrows and nose, elegantly curved like a letter
from ancient Arabic writings.
"You took pale," Soraya repeated, placing the stack of papers on the table.
"I have to go to Pakistan."
She stood up now. "Pakistan?"
"Rahim Khan is very sick." A fist clenched inside me with those words.
"Kaka's old business partner?" She'd never met Rahim Khan, but I had
told her about him. I nodded.

---

"Oh," she said. "I'm so sorry, Amir."
"We used to be close," I said. "When I was a kid, he was the first grown-­‐up
I ever thought of as a friend." I pictured him and Baba drinking tea in Baba's
study, then smoking near the window, a sweetbrier-­‐scented breeze blowing from
the garden and bending the twin columns of smoke.
"I remember you telling me that," Soraya said. She paused. "How long will
you be gone?"
"I don't know. He wants to see me."
"Is it..."
"Yes, it's safe. I'll be all right, Soraya." It was the question she'd wanted to
ask all along-­‐-­‐fifteen years of marriage had turned us into mind readers. "I'm
going to go for a walk."
"Should I go with you?"
"Nay, I'd rather be alone."
I DROVE TO GOLDEN GATE PARK and walked along Spreckels Lake on the
northern edge of the park. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon; the sun sparkled
on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp San
Francisco breeze. I sat on a park bench, watched a man toss a football to his son,
telling him to not sidearm the ball, to throw over the shoulder. I glanced up and
saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails. They floated high above the trees on
the west end of the park, over the windmills.
I thought about a comment Rahim Khan had made just before we hung up.
Made it in passing, almost as an afterthought. I closed my eyes and saw him at
the other end of the scratchy long-­‐distance line, saw him with his lips slightly

---

parted, head tilted to one side. And again, something in his bottomless black eyes
hinted at an unspoken secret between us. Except now I knew he knew. My
suspicions had been right all those years. He knew about Assef, the kite, the
money, the watch with the lightning bolt hands. He had always known.
Come. There is a way to be good again, Rahim Khan had said on the phone
just before hanging up. Said it in passing, almost as an afterthought.
A way to be good again.
WHEN I CAME HOME, Soraya was on the phone with her mother. "Won't be long,
Madarjan. A week, maybe two... Yes, you and Padar can stay with me."
Two years earlier, the general had broken his right hip. He'd had one of
his migraines again, and emerging from his room, bleary-­‐eyed and dazed, he had
tripped on a loose carpet edge. His scream had brought Khala Jamila running
from the kitchen. "It sounded like a jaroo, a broomstick, snapping in half," she
was always fond of saying, though the doctor had said it was unlikely she'd heard
anything of the sort. The general's shattered hip-­‐-­‐and all of the ensuing
complications, the pneumonia, blood poisoning, the protracted stay at the
nursing home-­‐-­‐ended Khala Jamila's long-­‐running soliloquies about her own
health. And started new ones about the general's. She'd tell anyone who would
listen that the doctors had told them his kidneys were failing. "But then they had
never seen Afghan kidneys, had they?" she'd say proudly. What I remember most
about the general's hospital stay is how Khala Jamila would wait until he fell
asleep, and then sing to him, songs I remembered from Kabul, playing on Baba's
scratchy old transistor radio.
The general's frailty-­‐-­‐and time-­‐-­‐had softened things between him and
Soraya too. They took walks together, went to lunch on Saturdays, and,
sometimes, the general sat in on some of her classes. He'd sit in the back of the
room, dressed in his shiny old gray suit, wooden cane across his lap, smiling.
Sometimes he even took notes.

---

THAT NIGHT, Soraya and I lay in bed, her back pressed to my chest, my face
buried in her hair. I remembered when we used to lay forehead to forehead,
sharing afterglow kisses and whispering until our eyes drifted closed,
whispering about tiny, curled toes, first smiles, first words, first steps. We still
did sometimes, but the whispers were about school, my new book, a giggle over
someone's ridiculous dress at a party. Our lovemaking was still good, at times
better than good, but some nights all I'd feel was a relief to be done with it, to be
free to drift away and forget, at least for a while, about the futility of what we'd
just done. She never said so, but I knew sometimes Soraya felt it too. On those
nights, we'd each roll to our side of the bed and let our own savior take us away.
Soraya's was sleep. Mine, as always, was a book.
I lay in the dark the night Rahim Khan called and traced with my eyes the
parallel silver lines on the wall made by moonlight pouring through the blinds.
At some point, maybe just before dawn, I drifted to sleep. And dreamed of
Hassan running in the snow, the hem of his green chapan dragging behind him,
snow crunching under his black rubber boots. He was yelling over his shoulder:
For you, a thousand times over!
A WEEK LATER, I sat on a window seat aboard a Pakistani International Airlines
flight, watching a pair of uniformed airline workers remove the wheel chocks.
The plane taxied out of the terminal and, soon, we were airborne, cutting
through the clouds. I rested my head against the window. Waited, in vain, for
sleep.
FIFTEEN
Three hours after my flight landed in Peshawar, I was sitting on shredded
upholstery in the backseat of a smoke-­‐filled taxicab. My driver, a chain-­‐smoking,
sweaty little man who introduced himself as Gholam, drove nonchalantly and

---

recklessly, averting collisions by the thinnest of margins, all without so much as a
pause in the incessant stream of words spewing from his mouth: ??terrible what
is happening in your country, yar. Afghani people and Pakistani people they are
like brothers, I tell you. Muslims have to help Muslims so..."
I tuned him out, switched to a polite nodding mode. I remembered
Peshawar pretty well from the few months Baba and I had spent there in 1981.
We were heading west now on Jamrud road, past the Cantonment and its lavish,
high-­‐walled homes. The bustle of the city blurring past me reminded me of a
busier, more crowded version of the Kabul I knew, particularly of the Kocheh
Morgha, or Chicken Bazaar, where Hassan and I used to buy chutney-­‐dipped
potatoes and cherry water. The streets were clogged with bicycle riders, milling
pedestrians, and rickshaws popping blue smoke, all weaving through a maze of
narrow lanes and alleys. Bearded vendors draped in thin blankets sold animal
skin lampshades, carpets, embroidered shawls, and copper goods from rows of
small, tightly jammed stalls. The city was bursting with sounds; the shouts of
vendors rang in my ears mingled with the blare of Hindi music, the sputtering of
rickshaws, and the jingling bells of horse-­‐drawn carts. Rich scents, both pleasant
and not so pleasant, drifted to me through the passenger window, the spicy
aroma of pakora and the nihari Baba had loved so much blended with the sting of
diesel fumes, the stench of rot, garbage, and feces.
A little past the redbrick buildings of Peshawar University, we entered an
area my garrulous driver referred to as "Afghan Town." I saw sweetshops and
carpet vendors, kabob stalls, kids with dirt-­‐caked hands selling cigarettes, tiny
restaurants-­‐-­‐maps of Afghanistan painted on their windows-­‐-­‐all interlaced with
backstreet aid agencies. "Many of your brothers in this area, yar. They are
opening businesses, but most of them are very poor." He tsk'ed his tongue and
sighed. "Anyway, we're getting close now."
I thought about the last time I had seen Rahim Khan, in 1981. He had
come to say good-­‐bye the night Baba and I had fled Kabul. I remember Baba and
him embracing in the foyer, crying softly. When Baba and I arrived in the U.S., he
and Rahim Khan kept in touch. They would speak four or five times a year and,
sometimes, Baba would pass me the receiver. The last time I had spoken to
Rahim Khan had been shortly after Baba's death. The news had reached Kabul
and he had called. We'd only spoken for a few minutes and lost the connection.
The driver pulled up to a narrow building at a busy corner where two
winding streets intersected. I paid the driver, took my lone suitcase, and walked
up to the intricately carved door. The building had wooden balconies with open
shutters-­‐-­‐from many of them, laundry was hanging to dry in the sun. I walked up

---

the creaky stairs to the second floor, down a dim hallway to the last door on the
right. Checked the address on the piece of stationery paper in my palm. Knocked.
Then, a thing made of skin and bones pretending to be Rahim Khan
opened the door.
A CREATIVE WRITING TEACHER at San Jose State used to say about cliches:
"Avoid them like the plague." Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed
along with him, but I always thought cliches got a bum rap. Because, often,
they're dead-­‐on. But the aptness of the cliched saying is overshadowed by the
nature of the saying as a cliche. For example, the "elephant in the room" saying.
Nothing could more correctly describe the initial moments of my reunion with
Rahim Khan.
We sat on a wispy mattress set along the wall, across the window
overlooking the noisy street below. Sunlight slanted in and cast a triangular
wedge of light onto the Afghan rug on the floor. Two folding chairs rested against
one wall and a small copper samovar sat in the opposite corner. I poured us tea
from it.
"How did you find me?" I asked.
"It's not difficult to find people in America. I bought a map of the U.S., and
called up information for cities in Northern California," he said. "It's wonderfully
strange to see you as a grown man."
I smiled and dropped three sugar cubes in my tea. He liked his black and
bitter, I remembered. "Baba didn't get the chance to tell you but I got married
fifteen years ago." The truth was, by then, the cancer in Baba's brain had made
him forgetful, negligent.
"You are married? To whom?"

---

"Her name is Soraya Taheri." I thought of her back home, worrying about
me. I was glad she wasn't alone.
"Taheri... whose daughter is she?"
I told him. His eyes brightened. "Oh, yes, I remember now. Isn't General
Taheri married to Sharif jan's sister? What was her name..."
"Jamila jan."
"Balay!" he said, smiling. "I knew Sharif jan in Kabul, long time ago, before
he moved to America."
"He's been working for the INS for years, handles a lot of Afghan cases."
"Haiiii," he sighed. "Do you and Soraya jan have children?"
"Nay."
"Oh." He slurped his tea and didn't ask more; Rahim Khan had always
been one of the most instinctive people I'd ever met.
I told him a lot about Baba, his job, the flea market, and how, at the end,
he'd died happy. I told him about my schooling, my books-­‐-­‐four published novels
to my credit now. He smiled at this, said he had never had any doubt. I told him I
had written short stories in the leather-­‐bound notebook he'd given me, but he
didn't remember the notebook.
The conversation inevitably turned to the Taliban.
"Is it as bad as I hear?" I said.

---

"Nay, it's worse. Much worse," he said. "They don't let you be human." He
pointed to a scar above his right eye cutting a crooked path through his bushy
eyebrow. "I was at a soccer game in Ghazi Stadium in 1998. Kabul against Mazar-­‐
i-­‐Sharif, I think, and by the way the players weren't allowed to wear shorts.
Indecent exposure, I guess." He gave a tired laugh. "Anyway, Kabul scored a goal
and the man next to me cheered loudly. Suddenly this young bearded fellow who
was patrolling the aisles, eighteen years old at most by the look of him, he
walked up to me and struck me on the forehead with the butt of his Kalashnikov.
'Do that again and I'll cut out your tongue, you old donkey!' he said." Rahim Khan
rubbed the scar with a gnarled finger. "I was old enough to be his grandfather
and I was sitting there, blood gushing down my face, apologizing to that son of a
dog."
I poured him more tea. Rahim Khan talked some more. Much of it I knew
already, some not. He told me that, as arranged between Baba and him, he had
lived in Baba's house since 1981-­‐-­‐this I knew about. Baba had "sold" the house to
Rahim Khan shortly before he and I fled Kabul. The way Baba had seen it those
days, Afghanistan's troubles were only a temporary interruption of our way of
life-­‐-­‐the days of parties at the Wazir Akbar Khan house and picnics in Paghman
would surely return. So he'd given the house to Rahim Khan to keep watch over
until that day.
Rahim Khan told me how, when the Northern Alliance took over Kabul
between 1992 and 1996, different factions claimed different parts of Kabul. "If
you went from the Shar-­‐e-­‐Nau section to Kerteh-­‐Parwan to buy a carpet, you
risked getting shot by a sniper or getting blown up by a rocket-­‐-­‐if you got past all
the checkpoints, that was. You practically needed a visa to go from one
neighborhood to the other. So people just stayed put, prayed the next rocket
wouldn't hit their home." He told me how people knocked holes in the walls of
their homes so they could bypass the dangerous streets and would move down
the block from hole to hole. In other parts, people moved about in underground
tunnels.
"Why didn't you leave?" I said.
"Kabul was my home. It still is." He snickered. "Remember the street that
went from your house to the Qishla, the military barracks next to Istiqial**
School?"
"Yes." It was the shortcut to school. I remembered the day Hassan and I
crossed it and the soldiers had teased Hassan about his mother. Hassan had cried
in the cinema later, and I'd put an arm around him.

---

"When the Taliban rolled in and kicked the Alliance out of Kabul, I actually
danced on that street," Rahim Khan said. "And, believe me, I wasn't alone. People
were celebrating at _Chaman_, at Deh-­‐Mazang, greeting the Taliban in the streets,
climbing their tanks and posing for pictures with them. People were so tired of
the constant fighting, tired of the rockets, the gunfire, the explosions, tired of
watching Gulbuddin and his cohorts firing on anything that moved. The Alliance
did more damage to Kabul than the Shorawi. They destroyed your father's
orphanage, did you know that?"
"Why?" I said. "Why would they destroy an orphanage?" I remembered
sitting behind Baba the day they opened the orphanage. The wind had knocked
off his caracul hat and everyone had laughed, then stood and clapped when he'd
delivered his speech. And now it was just another pile of rubble. All the money
Baba had spent, all those nights he'd sweated over the blueprints, all the visits to
the construction site to make sure every brick, every beam, and every block was
laid just right...
"Collateral damage," Rahim Khan said. "You don't want to know, Amir jan,
what it was like sifting through the rubble of that orphanage. There were body