Microsoft Word the kite runner docx

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THE KITE
RUNNER
by KHALED HOSSEINI
Published 2003
Afghan Mellat Online Library
www.afghan-­‐mellat.org.uk

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_December 2001_
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the
winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling
mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago,
but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury
it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been
peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-­‐six years.
One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He
asked me to come see him. Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I
knew it wasn't just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned** sins.
After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of
Golden Gate Park. The early-­‐afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens
of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze. Then I glanced up and saw
a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high
above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by
side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home.
And suddenly Hassan's voice whispered in my head: _For you, a thousand times
over._ Hassan the harelipped kite runner.
I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim
Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an after thought. _There is a way to
be good again._ I looked up at those twin kites. I thought about Hassan. Thought
about Baba. Ali. Kabul. I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975
came and changed everything. And made me what I am today.
TWO
When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the
driveway of my father's house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight
into their homes with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on
a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with

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dried mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate
mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing; I can still see Hassan
up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly
round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose
and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on
the light, gold, green, even sapphire I can still see his tiny low-­‐set ears and that
pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was added as a
mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of midline, where the Chinese doll
maker's instrument may have slipped; or perhaps he had simply grown tired and
careless.
Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his
slingshot at the neighbor's one-­‐eyed German shepherd. Hassan never wanted to,
but if I asked, _really_ asked, he wouldn't deny me. Hassan never denied me
anything. And he was deadly with his slingshot. Hassan's father, Ali, used to catch
us and get mad, or as mad as someone as gentle as Ali could ever get. He would
wag his finger and wave us down from the tree. He would take the mirror and
tell us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone
them to distract Muslims during prayer. "And he laughs while he does it," he
always added, scowling at his son.
"Yes, Father," Hassan would mumble, looking down at his feet. But he
never told on me. Never told that the mirror, like shooting walnuts at the
neighbor's dog, was always my idea.
The poplar trees lined the redbrick driveway, which led to a pair of
wrought-­‐iron gates. They in turn opened into an extension of the driveway into
my father's estate. The house sat on the left side of the brick path, the backyard
at the end of it.
Everyone agreed that my father, my Baba, had built the most beautiful
house in the Wazir Akbar Khan district, a new and affluent neighborhood in the
northern part of Kabul. Some thought it was the prettiest house in all of Kabul. A
broad entryway flanked by rosebushes led to the sprawling house of marble
floors and wide windows. Intricate mosaic tiles, handpicked by Baba in Isfahan,
covered the floors of the four bathrooms. Gold-­‐stitched tapestries, which Baba
had bought in Calcutta, lined the walls; a crystal chandelier hung from the
vaulted ceiling.
Upstairs was my bedroom, Baba's room, and his study, also known as "the
smoking room," which perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. Baba and
his friends reclined on black leather chairs there after Ali had served dinner.

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They stuffed their pipes-­‐-­‐except Baba always called it "fattening the pipe"-­‐-­‐and
discussed their favorite three topics: politics, business, soccer. Sometimes I
asked Baba if I could sit with them, but Baba would stand in the doorway. "Go on,
now," he'd say. "This is grown-­‐ups' time. Why don't you go read one of those
books of yours?" He'd close the door, leave me to wonder why it was always
grown-­‐ups' time with him. I'd sit by the door, knees drawn to my chest.
Sometimes I sat there for an hour, sometimes two, listening to their laughter,
their chatter.
The living room downstairs had a curved wall with custom built cabinets.
Inside sat framed family pictures: an old, grainy photo of my grandfather and
King Nadir Shah taken in 1931, two years before the king's assassination; they
are standing over a dead deer, dressed in knee-­‐high boots, rifles slung over their
shoulders. There was a picture of my parents' wedding night, Baba dashing in his
black suit and my mother a smiling young princess in white. Here was Baba and
his best friend and business partner, Rahim Khan, standing outside our house,
neither one smiling-­‐-­‐I am a baby in that photograph and Baba is holding me,
looking tired and grim. I'm in his arms, but it's Rahim Khan's pinky my fingers
are curled around.
The curved wall led into the dining room, at the center of which was a
mahogany table that could easily sit thirty guests-­‐-­‐and, given my father's taste
for extravagant parties, it did just that almost every week. On the other end of
the dining room was a tall marble fireplace, always lit by the orange glow of a fire
in the wintertime.
A large sliding glass door opened into a semicircular terrace that
overlooked two acres of backyard and rows of cherry trees. Baba and Ali had
planted a small vegetable garden along the eastern wall: tomatoes, mint,
peppers, and a row of corn that never really took. Hassan and I used to call it "the
Wall of Ailing Corn."
On the south end of the garden, in the shadows of a loquat tree, was the
servants' home, a modest little mud hut where Hassan lived with his father.
It was there, in that little shack, that Hassan was born in the winter of
1964, just one year after my mother died giving birth to me.
In the eighteen years that I lived in that house, I stepped into Hassan and
Ali's quarters only a handful of times. When the sun dropped low behind the hills
and we were done playing for the day, Hassan and I parted ways. I went past the

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rosebushes to Baba's mansion, Hassan to the mud shack where he had been
born, where he'd lived his entire life. I remember it was spare, clean, dimly lit by
a pair of kerosene lamps. There were two mattresses on opposite sides of the
room, a worn Herati rug with frayed edges in between, a three-­‐legged stool, and
a wooden table in the corner where Hassan did his drawings. The walls stood
bare, save for a single tapestry with sewn-­‐in beads forming the words _Allah-­‐u-­‐
akbar_. Baba had bought it for Ali on one of his trips to Mashad.
It was in that small shack that Hassan's mother, Sanaubar, gave birth to
him one cold winter day in 1964. While my mother hemorrhaged to death during
childbirth, Hassan lost his less than a week after he was born. Lost her to a fate
most Afghans considered far worse than death: She ran off with a clan of
traveling singers and dancers.
Hassan never talked about his mother, as if she'd never existed. I always
wondered if he dreamed about her, about what she looked like, where she was. I
wondered if he longed to meet her. Did he ache for her, the way I ached for the
mother I had never met? One day, we were walking from my father's house to
Cinema Zainab for a new Iranian movie, taking the shortcut through the military
barracks near Istiqlal Middle School-­‐-­‐Baba had forbidden us to take that
shortcut, but he was in Pakistan with Rahim Khan at the time. We hopped the
fence that surrounded the barracks, skipped over a little creek, and broke into
the open dirt field where old, abandoned tanks collected dust. A group of soldiers
huddled in the shade of one of those tanks, smoking cigarettes and playing cards.
One of them saw us, elbowed the guy next to him, and called Hassan.
"Hey, you!" he said. "I know you."
We had never seen him before. He was a squatly man with a shaved head
and black stubble on his face. The way he grinned at us, leered, scared me. "Just
keep walking," I muttered to Hassan.
"You! The Hazara! Look at me when I'm talking to you!" the soldier
barked. He handed his cigarette to the guy next to him, made a circle with the
thumb and index finger of one hand. Poked the middle finger of his other hand
through the circle. Poked it in and out. In and out. "I knew your mother, did you
know that? I knew her real good. I took her from behind by that creek over
there."
The soldiers laughed. One of them made a squealing sound. I told Hassan
to keep walking, keep walking.

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"What a tight little sugary cunt she had!" the soldier was saying, shaking
hands with the others, grinning. Later, in the dark, after the movie had started, I
heard Hassan next to me, croaking. Tears were sliding down his cheeks. I
reached across my seat, slung my arm around him, pulled him close. He rested
his head on my shoulder. "He took you for someone else," I whispered. "He took
you for someone else."
I'm told no one was really surprised when Sanaubar eloped. People _had_
raised their eyebrows when Ali, a man who had memorized the Koran, married
Sanaubar, a woman nineteen years younger, a beautiful but notoriously
unscrupulous woman who lived up to her dishonorable reputation. Like Ali, she
was a Shi'a Muslim and an ethnic Hazara. She was also his first cousin and
therefore a natural choice for a spouse. But beyond those similarities, Ali and
Sanaubar had little in common, least of all their respective appearances. While
Sanaubar's brilliant green eyes and impish face had, rumor has it, tempted
countless men into sin, Ali had a congenital paralysis of his lower facial muscles,
a condition that rendered him unable to smile and left him perpetually grim-­‐
faced. It was an odd thing to see the stone-­‐faced Ali happy, or sad, because only
his slanted brown eyes glinted with a smile or welled with sorrow. People say
that eyes are windows to the soul. Never was that more true than with Ali, who
could only reveal himself through his eyes.
I have heard that Sanaubar's suggestive stride and oscillating hips sent
men to reveries of infidelity. But polio had left Ali with a twisted, atrophied right
leg that was sallow skin over bone with little in between except a paper-­‐thin
layer of muscle. I remember one day, when I was eight, Ali was taking me to the
bazaar to buy some _naan_. I was walking behind him, humming, trying to
imitate his walk. I watched him swing his scraggy leg in a sweeping arc, watched
his whole body tilt impossibly to the right every time he planted that foot. It
seemed a minor miracle he didn't tip over with each step. When I tried it, I
almost fell into the gutter. That got me giggling. Ali turned around, caught me
aping him. He didn't say anything. Not then, not ever. He just kept walking.
Ali's face and his walk frightened some of the younger children in the
neighborhood. But the real trouble was with the older kids. They chased him on
the street, and mocked him when he hobbled by. Some had taken to calling him
_Babalu_, or Boogeyman.
"Hey, Babalu, who did you eat today?" they barked to a chorus of laughter.
"Who did you eat, you flat-­‐nosed Babalu?"

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They called him "flat-­‐nosed" because of Ali and Hassan's characteristic
Hazara Mongoloid features. For years, that was all I knew about the Hazaras, that
they were Mogul descendants, and that they looked a little like Chinese people.
School text books barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in
passing. Then one day, I was in Baba's study, looking through his stuff, when I
found one of my mother's old history books. It was written by an Iranian named
Khorami. I blew the dust off it, sneaked it into bed with me that night, and was
stunned to find an entire chapter on Hazara history. An entire chapter dedicated
to Hassan's people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted and
oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the Pashtuns
in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had "quelled them with unspeakable
violence." The book said that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from
their lands, burned their homes, and sold their women. The book said part of the
reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni
Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi'a. The book said a lot of things I didn't know,
things my teachers hadn't mentioned. Things Baba hadn't mentioned either. It
also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras _mice-­‐eating,
flat-­‐nosed, load-­‐carrying donkeys_. I had heard some of the kids in the
neighborhood yell those names to Hassan.
The following week, after class, I showed the book to my teacher and
pointed to the chapter on the Hazaras. He skimmed through a couple of pages,
snickered, handed the book back. "That's the one thing Shi'a people do well," he
said, picking up his papers, "passing themselves as martyrs." He wrinkled his
nose when he said the word Shi'a, like it was some kind of disease.
But despite sharing ethnic heritage and family blood, Sanaubar joined the
neighborhood kids in taunting Ali. I have heard that she made no secret of her
disdain for his appearance.
"This is a husband?" she would sneer. "I have seen old donkeys better
suited to be a husband."
In the end, most people suspected the marriage had been an arrangement
of sorts between Ali and his uncle, Sanaubar's father. They said Ali had married
his cousin to help restore some honor to his uncle's blemished name, even
though Ali, who had been orphaned at the age of five, had no worldly possessions
or inheritance to speak of.
Ali never retaliated against any of his tormentors, I suppose partly
because he could never catch them with that twisted leg dragging behind him.
But mostly because Ali was immune to the insults of his assailants; he had found

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his joy, his antidote, the moment Sanaubar had given birth to Hassan. It had been
a simple enough affair. No obstetricians, no anesthesiologists, no fancy
monitoring devices. Just Sanaubar lying on a stained, naked mattress with Ali
and a midwife helping her. She hadn't needed much help at all, because, even in
birth, Hassan was true to his nature: He was incapable of hurting anyone. A few
grunts, a couple of pushes, and out came Hassan. Out he came smiling.
As confided to a neighbor's servant by the garrulous midwife, who had
then in turn told anyone who would listen, Sanaubar had taken one glance at the
baby in Ali's arms, seen the cleft lip, and barked a bitter laughter.
"There," she had said. "Now you have your own idiot child to do all your
smiling for you!" She had refused to even hold Hassan, and just five days later,
she was gone.
Baba hired the same nursing woman who had fed me to nurse Hassan. Ali
told us she was a blue-­‐eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan, the city of the giant
Buddha statues. "What a sweet singing voice she had," he used to say to us.
What did she sing, Hassan and I always asked, though we already knew-­‐-­‐
Ali had told us countless times. We just wanted to hear Ali sing.
He'd clear his throat and begin: _On a high mountain I stood, And cried
the name of Ali, Lion of God O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our
sorrowful hearts._ Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood
between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time
could break.
Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the
same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.
Mine was _Baba_.
His was _Amir_. My name.

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Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the
winter of 1975-­‐-­‐and all that followed-­‐-­‐was already laid in those first words.
THREE
Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan with his bare
hands. If the story had been about anyone else, it would have been dismissed as
_laaf_, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate-­‐-­‐sadly, almost a national affliction; if
someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once
passed a biology test in high school. But no one ever doubted the veracity of any
story about Baba. And if they did, well, Baba did have those three parallel scars
coursing a jagged path down his back. I have imagined Baba's wrestling match
countless times, even dreamed about it. And in those dreams, I can never tell
Baba from the bear.
It was Rahim Khan who first referred to him as what eventually became
Baba's famous nickname, _Toophan agha_, or "Mr. Hurricane." It was an apt
enough nickname. My father was a force of nature, a towering Pashtun specimen
with a thick beard, a wayward crop of curly brown hair as unruly as the man
himself, hands that looked capable of uprooting a willow tree, and a black glare
that would "drop the devil to his knees begging for mercy," as Rahim Khan used
to say. At parties, when all six-­‐foot-­‐five of him thundered into the room, attention
shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.
Baba was impossible to ignore, even in his sleep. I used to bury cotton
wisps in my ears, pull the blanket over my head, and still the sounds of Baba's
snoring-­‐-­‐so much like a growling truck engine-­‐-­‐penetrated the walls. And my
room was across the hall from Baba's bedroom. How my mother ever managed
to sleep in the same room as him is a mystery to me. It's on the long list of things
I would have asked my mother if I had ever met her.

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In the late 1960s, when I was five or six, Baba decided to build an
orphanage. I heard the story through Rahim Khan. He told me Baba had drawn
the blueprints himself despite the fact that he'd had no architectural experience
at all. Skeptics had urged him to stop his foolishness and hire an architect. Of
course, Baba refused, and everyone shook their heads in dismay at his obstinate
ways. Then Baba succeeded and everyone shook their heads in awe at his
triumphant ways. Baba paid for the construction of the two-­‐story orphanage, just
off the main strip of Jadeh Maywand south of the Kabul River, with his own
money. Rahim Khan told me Baba had personally funded the entire project,
paying for the engineers, electricians, plumbers, and laborers, not to mention the
city officials whose "mustaches needed oiling."
It took three years to build the orphanage. I was eight by then. I
remember the day before the orphanage opened, Baba took me to Ghargha Lake,
a few miles north of Kabul. He asked me to fetch Hassan too, but I lied and told
him Hassan had the runs. I wanted Baba all to myself. And besides, one time at
Ghargha Lake, Hassan and I were skimming stones and Hassan made his stone
skip eight times. The most I managed was five. Baba was there, watching, and he
patted Hassan on the back. Even put his arm around his shoulder.
We sat at a picnic table on the banks of the lake, just Baba and me, eating
boiled eggs with _kofta_ sandwiches-­‐-­‐meatballs and pickles wrapped in _naan_.
The water was a deep blue and sunlight glittered on its looking glass-­‐clear
surface. On Fridays, the lake was bustling with families out for a day in the sun.
But it was midweek and there was only Baba and me, us and a couple of
longhaired, bearded tourists-­‐-­‐"hippies," I'd heard them called. They were sitting
on the dock, feet dangling in the water, fishing poles in hand. I asked Baba why
they grew their hair long, but Baba grunted, didn't answer. He was preparing his
speech for the next day, flipping through a havoc of handwritten pages, making
notes here and there with a pencil. I bit into my egg and asked Baba if it was true
what a boy in school had told me, that if you ate a piece of eggshell, you'd have to
pee it out. Baba grunted again.
I took a bite of my sandwich. One of the yellow-­‐haired tourists laughed
and slapped the other one on the back. In the distance, across the lake, a truck
lumbered around a corner on the hill. Sunlight twinkled in its side-­‐view mirror.
"I think I have _saratan_," I said. Cancer. Baba lifted his head from the
pages flapping in the breeze. Told me I could get the soda myself, all I had to do
was look in the trunk of the car.

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Outside the orphanage, the next day, they ran out of chairs. A lot of people
had to stand to watch the opening ceremony. It was a windy day, and I sat behind
Baba on the little podium just outside the main entrance of the new building.
Baba was wearing a green suit and a caracul hat. Midway through the speech, the
wind knocked his hat off and everyone laughed. He motioned to me to hold his
hat for him and I was glad to, because then everyone would see that he was my
father, my Baba. He turned back to the microphone and said he hoped the
building was sturdier than his hat, and everyone laughed again. When Baba
ended his speech, people stood up and cheered. They clapped for a long time.
Afterward, people shook his hand. Some of them tousled my hair and shook my
hand too. I was so proud of Baba, of us.
But despite Baba's successes, people were always doubting him. They told
Baba that running a business wasn't in his blood and he should study law like his
father. So Baba proved them all wrong by not only running his own business but
becoming one of the richest merchants in Kabul. Baba and Rahim Khan built a
wildly successful carpet-­‐exporting business, two pharmacies, and a restaurant.
When people scoffed that Baba would never marry well-­‐-­‐after all, he was
not of royal blood-­‐-­‐he wedded my mother, Sofia Akrami, a highly educated
woman universally regarded as one of Kabul's most respected, beautiful, and
virtuous ladies. And not only did she teach classic Farsi literature at the
university she was a descendant of the royal family, a fact that my father
playfully rubbed in the skeptics' faces by referring to her as "my princess."
With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him
to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and
white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a
person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a
little.
When I was in fifth grade, we had a mullah who taught us about Islam. His
name was Mullah Fatiullah Khan, a short, stubby man with a face full of acne
scars and a gruff voice. He lectured us about the virtues of _zakat_ and the duty of
_hadj_; he taught us the intricacies of performing the five daily _namaz_ prayers,
and made us memorize verses from the Koran-­‐-­‐and though he never translated
the words for us, he did stress, sometimes with the help of a stripped willow
branch, that we had to pronounce the Arabic words correctly so God would hear
us better. He told us one day that Islam considered drinking a terrible sin; those
who drank would answer for their sin on the day of _Qiyamat_, Judgment Day. In
those days, drinking was fairly common in Kabul. No one gave you a public
lashing for it, but those Afghans who did drink did so in private, out of respect.

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People bought their scotch as "medicine" in brown paper bags from selected
"pharmacies." They would leave with the bag tucked out of sight, sometimes
drawing furtive, disapproving glances from those who knew about the store's
reputation for such transactions.
We were upstairs in Baba's study, the smoking room, when I told him
what Mullah Fatiullah Khan had taught us in class. Baba was pouring himself a
whiskey from the bar he had built in the corner of the room. He listened, nodded,
took a sip from his drink. Then he lowered himself into the leather sofa, put
down his drink, and propped me up on his lap. I felt as if I were sitting on a pair
of tree trunks. He took a deep breath and exhaled through his nose, the air
hissing through his mustache for what seemed an eternity I couldn't decide
whether I wanted to hug him or leap from his lap in mortal fear.
"I see you've confused what you're learning in school with actual
education," he said in his thick voice.
"But if what he said is true then does it make you a sinner, Baba?"
"Hmm." Baba crushed an ice cube between his teeth. "Do you want to
know what your father thinks about sin?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll tell you," Baba said, "but first understand this and understand it
now, Amir: You'll never learn anything of value from those bearded idiots."
"You mean Mullah Fatiullah Khan?"
Baba gestured with his glass. The ice clinked. "I mean all of them. Piss on
the beards of all those self-­‐righteous monkeys."
I began to giggle. The image of Baba pissing on the beard of any monkey,
self-­‐righteous or otherwise, was too much.

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"They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written
in a tongue they don't even understand." He took a sip. "God help us all if
Afghanistan ever falls into their hands."
"But Mullah Fatiullah Khan seems nice," I managed between bursts of
tittering.
"So did Genghis Khan," Baba said. "But enough about that. You asked
about sin and I want to tell you. Are you listening?"
"Yes," I said, pressing my lips together. But a chortle escaped through my
nose and made a snorting sound. That got me giggling again.
Baba's stony eyes bore into mine and, just like that, I wasn't laughing
anymore.
"I mean to speak to you man to man. Do you think you can handle that for
once?"
"Yes, Baba jan," I muttered, marveling, not for the first time, at how badly
Baba could sting me with so few words. We'd had a fleeting good moment-­‐-­‐it
wasn't often Baba talked to me, let alone on his lap-­‐-­‐and I'd been a fool to waste
it.
"Good," Baba said, but his eyes wondered. "Now, no matter what the
mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin
is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?"
"No, Baba jan," I said, desperately wishing I did. I didn't want to
disappoint him again.
Baba heaved a sigh of impatience. That stung too, because he was not an
impatient man. I remembered all the times he didn't come home until after dark,
all the times I ate dinner alone. I'd ask Ali where Baba was, when he was coming
home, though I knew full well he was at the construction site, overlooking this,
supervising that. Didn't that take patience? I already hated all the kids he was

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building the orphanage for; sometimes I wished they'd all died along with their
parents.
"When you kill a man, you steal a life," Baba said. "You steal his wife's
right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal
someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do
you see?"
I did. When Baba was six, a thief walked into my grandfather's house in
the middle of the night. My grandfather, a respected judge, confronted him, but
the thief stabbed him in the throat, killing him instantly-­‐-­‐and robbing Baba of a
father. The townspeople caught the killer just before noon the next day; he
turned out to be a wanderer from the Kunduz region. They hanged him from the
branch of an oak tree with still two hours to go before afternoon prayer. It was
Rahim Khan, not Baba, who had told me that story. I was always learning things
about Baba from other people.
"There is no act more wretched than stealing, Amir," Baba said. "A man
who takes what's not his to take, be it a life or a loaf of _naan_... I spit on such a
man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him. Do you understand?"
I found the idea of Baba clobbering a thief both exhilarating and terribly
frightening. "Yes, Baba."
"If there's a God out there, then I would hope he has more important
things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork. Now, hop down. All
this talk about sin has made me thirsty again."
I watched him fill his glass at the bar and wondered how much time
would pass before we talked again the way we just had. Because the truth of it
was, I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I _had_ killed
his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn't I? The least I could have done was
to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn't
turned out like him. Not at all.

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IN SCHOOL, we used to play a game called _Sherjangi_, or "Battle of the Poems."
The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went something like this: You recited a
verse from a poem and your opponent had sixty seconds to reply with a verse
that began with the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my class wanted
me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could recite dozens of
verses from Khayyam, Hafez, or Rumi's famous _Masnawi_. One time, I took on
the whole class and won. I told Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded,
muttered, "Good."
That was how I escaped my father's aloofness, in my dead mother's
books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything, Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, Victor
Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming. When I had finished my mother's
books-­‐-­‐not the boring history ones, I was never much into those, but the novels,
the epics-­‐-­‐I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a week from
the bookstore near Cinema Park, and stored them in cardboard boxes when I ran
out of shelf room.
Of course, marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who
preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting... well, that wasn't how
Baba had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn't read poetry-­‐-­‐and God forbid
they should ever write it! Real men-­‐-­‐real boys-­‐-­‐played soccer just as Baba had
when he had been young. Now _that_ was something to be passionate about. In
1970, Baba took a break from the construction of the orphanage and flew to
Tehran for a month to watch the World Cup games on television, since at the
time Afghanistan didn't have TVs yet. He signed me up for soccer teams to stir
the same passion in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own
team, always in the way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking an open
lane. I shambled about the field on scraggy legs, squalled for passes that never
came my way. And the harder I tried, waving my arms over my head frantically
and screeching, "I'm open! I'm open!" the more I went ignored. But Baba
wouldn't give up. When it became abundantly clear that I hadn't inherited a
shred of his athletic talents, he settled for trying to turn me into a passionate
spectator. Certainly I could manage that, couldn't I? I faked interest for as long as
possible. I cheered with him when Kabul's team scored against Kandahar and
yelped insults at the referee when he called a penalty against our team. But Baba
sensed my lack of genuine interest and resigned himself to the bleak fact that his
son was never going to either play or watch soccer.
I remember one time Baba took me to the yearly _Buzkashi_ tournament
that took place on the first day of spring, New Year's Day. Buzkashi was, and still
is, Afghanistan's national passion. A _chapandaz_, a highly skilled horseman
usually patronized by rich aficionados, has to snatch a goat or cattle carcass from
the midst of a melee, carry that carcass with him around the stadium at full
gallop, and drop it in a scoring circle while a team of other _chapandaz_ chases
him and does everything in its power-­‐-­‐kick, claw, whip, punch-­‐-­‐to snatch the

---

carcass from him. That day, the crowd roared with excitement as the horsemen
on the field bellowed their battle cries and jostled for the carcass in a cloud of
dust. The earth trembled with the clatter of hooves. We watched from the upper
bleachers as riders pounded past us at full gallop, yipping and yelling, foam flying
from their horses' mouths.
At one point Baba pointed to someone. "Amir, do you see that man sitting
up there with those other men around him?"
I did.
"That's Henry Kissinger."
"Oh," I said. I didn't know who Henry Kissinger was, and I might have
asked. But at the moment, I watched with horror as one of the _chapandaz_ fell
off his saddle and was trampled under a score of hooves. His body was tossed
and hurled in the stampede like a rag doll, finally rolling to a stop when the
melee moved on. He twitched once and lay motionless, his legs bent at unnatural
angles, a pool of his blood soaking through the sand.
I began to cry.
I cried all the way back home. I remember how Baba's hands clenched
around the steering wheel. Clenched and unclenched. Mostly, I will never forget
Baba's valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted look on his face as he drove in
silence.
Later that night, I was passing by my father's study when I overheard him
speaking to Rahim Khan. I pressed my ear to the closed door.
"-­‐-­‐grateful that he's healthy," Rahim Khan was saying.
"I know, I know. But he's always buried in those books or shuffling
around the house like he's lost in some dream."

---

"And?"
"I wasn't like that." Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry.
Rahim Khan laughed. "Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill
them with your favorite colors."
"I'm telling you," Baba said, "I wasn't like that at all, and neither were any
of the kids I grew up with."
"You know, sometimes you are the most self-­‐centered man I know,"
Rahim Khan said. He was the only person I knew who could get away with saying
something like that to Baba.
"It has nothing to do with that."
"Nay?"
"Nay."
"Then what?"
I heard the leather of Baba's seat creaking as he shifted on it. I closed my
eyes, pressed my ear even harder against the door, wanting to hear, not wanting
to hear. "Sometimes I look out this window and I see him playing on the street
with the neighborhood boys. I see how they push him around, take his toys from
him, give him a shove here, a whack there. And, you know, he never fights back.
Never. He just... drops his head and..."
"So he's not violent," Rahim Khan said.
"That's not what I mean, Rahim, and you know it," Baba shot back. "There
is something missing in that boy."

---

"Yes, a mean streak."
"Self-­‐defense has nothing to do with meanness. You know what always
happens when the neighborhood boys tease him? Hassan steps in and fends
them off. I've seen it with my own eyes. And when they come home, I say to him,
'How did Hassan get that scrape on his face?' And he says, 'He fell down.' I'm
telling you, Rahim, there is something missing in that boy."
"You just need to let him find his way," Rahim Khan said.
"And where is he headed?" Baba said. "A boy who won't stand up for
himself becomes a man who can't stand up to anything."
"As usual you're oversimplifying."
"I don't think so."
"You're angry because you're afraid he'll never take over the business for
you."
"Now who's oversimplifying?" Baba said. "Look, I know there's a fondness
between you and him and I'm happy about that. Envious, but happy. I mean that.
He needs someone who...understands him, because God knows I don't. But
something about Amir troubles me in a way that I can't express. It's like..." I could
see him searching, reaching for the right words. He lowered his voice, but I heard
him anyway. "If I hadn't seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own
eyes, I'd never believe he's my son."
THE NEXT MORNING, as he was preparing my breakfast, Hassan asked if
something was bothering me. I snapped at him, told him to mind his own
business.

---

Rahim Khan had been wrong about the mean streak thing.
FOUR
In 1933, the year Baba was born and the year Zahir Shah began his forty-­‐year
reign of Afghanistan, two brothers, young men from a wealthy and reputable
family in Kabul, got behind the wheel of their father's Ford roadster. High on
hashish and _mast_ on French wine, they struck and killed a Hazara husband and
wife on the road to Paghman. The police brought the somewhat contrite young
men and the dead couple's five-­‐year-­‐old orphan boy before my grandfather, who
was a highly regarded judge and a man of impeccable reputation. After hearing
the brothers' account and their father's plea for mercy, my grandfather ordered
the two young men to go to Kandahar at once and enlist in the army for one year-­‐
-­‐this despite the fact that their family had somehow managed to obtain them
exemptions from the draft. Their father argued, but not too vehemently, and in
the end, everyone agreed that the punishment had been perhaps harsh but fair.
As for the orphan, my grandfather adopted him into his own household, and told
the other servants to tutor him, but to be kind to him. That boy was Ali.
Ali and Baba grew up together as childhood playmates-­‐-­‐at least until polio
crippled Ali's leg-­‐-­‐just like Hassan and I grew up a generation later. Baba was
always telling us about the mischief he and Ali used to cause, and Ali would
shake his head and say, "But, Agha sahib, tell them who was the architect of the
mischief and who the poor laborer?" Baba would laugh and throw his arm
around Ali.
But in none of his stories did Baba ever refer to Ali as his friend.
The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either.
Not in the usual sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a
bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functional homemade camera out of a
cardboard box. Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, running

---

kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-­‐
boned frame, a shaved head, and low-­‐set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face
perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.
Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome.
Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni
and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.
But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history,
ethnicity, society, or religion was going to change that either. I spent most of the
first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan. Sometimes, my entire childhood
seems like one long lazy summer day with Hassan, chasing each other between
tangles of trees in my father's yard, playing hide-­‐and-­‐seek, cops and robbers,
cowboys and Indians, insect torture-­‐-­‐with our crowning achievement undeniably
the time we plucked the stinger off a bee and tied a string around the poor thing
to yank it back every time it took flight.
We chased the _Kochi_, the nomads who passed through Kabul on their
way to the mountains of the north. We would hear their caravans approaching
our neighborhood, the mewling of their sheep, the baaing of their goats, the
jingle of bells around their camels' necks. We'd run outside to watch the caravan
plod through our street, men with dusty, weather-­‐beaten faces and women
dressed in long, colorful shawls, beads, and silver bracelets around their wrists
and ankles. We hurled pebbles at their goats. We squirted water on their mules.
I'd make Hassan sit on the Wall of Ailing Corn and fire pebbles with his slingshot
at the camels' rears.
We saw our first Western together, _Rio Bravo_ with John Wayne, at the
Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore. I remember begging
Baba to take us to Iran so we could meet John Wayne. Baba burst out in gales of
his deep-­‐throated laughter-­‐-­‐a sound not unlike a truck engine revving up-­‐-­‐and,
when he could talk again, explained to us the concept of voice dubbing. Hassan
and I were stunned. Dazed. John Wayne didn't really speak Farsi and he wasn't
Iranian! He was American, just like the friendly, longhaired men and women we
always saw hanging around in Kabul, dressed in their tattered, brightly colored
shirts. We saw _Rio Bravo_ three times, but we saw our favorite Western, _The
Magnificent Seven_, thirteen times. With each viewing, we cried at the end when
the Mexican kids buried Charles Bronson-­‐-­‐who, as it turned out, wasn't Iranian
either.
We took strolls in the musty-­‐smelling bazaars of the Shar-­‐e-­‐Nau section of
Kabul, or the new city, west of the Wazir Akbar Khan district. We talked about

---

whatever film we had just seen and walked amid the bustling crowds of
_bazarris_. We snaked our way among the merchants and the beggars, wandered
through narrow alleys cramped with rows of tiny, tightly packed stalls. Baba
gave us each a weekly allowance of ten Afghanis and we spent it on warm Coca-­‐
Cola and rosewater ice cream topped with crushed pistachios.
During the school year, we had a daily routine. By the time I dragged
myself out of bed and lumbered to the bathroom, Hassan had already washed up,
prayed the morning _namaz_ with Ali, and prepared my breakfast: hot black tea
with three sugar cubes and a slice of toasted _naan_ topped with my favorite sour
cherry marmalade, all neatly placed on the dining table. While I ate and
complained about homework, Hassan made my bed, polished my shoes, ironed
my outfit for the day, packed my books and pencils. I'd hear him singing to
himself in the foyer as he ironed, singing old Hazara songs in his nasal voice.
Then, Baba and I drove off in his black Ford Mustang-­‐-­‐a car that drew envious
looks everywhere because it was the same car Steve McQueen had driven in
_Bullitt_, a film that played in one theater for six months. Hassan stayed home
and helped Ali with the day's chores: hand-­‐washing dirty clothes and hanging
them to dry in the yard, sweeping the floors, buying fresh _naan_ from the
bazaar, marinating meat for dinner, watering the lawn.
After school, Hassan and I met up, grabbed a book, and trotted up a bowl-­‐
shaped hill just north of my father's property in Wazir Akbar Khan. There was an
old abandoned cemetery atop the hill with rows of unmarked headstones and
tangles of brushwood clogging the aisles. Seasons of rain and snow had turned
the iron gate rusty and left the cemetery's low white stone walls in decay. There
was a pomegranate tree near the entrance to the cemetery. One summer day, I
used one of Ali's kitchen knives to carve our names on it: "Amir and Hassan, the
sultans of Kabul." Those words made it formal: the tree was ours. After school,
Hassan and I climbed its branches and snatched its blood-­‐red pomegranates.
After we'd eaten the fruit and wiped our hands on the grass, I would read to
Hassan.
Sitting cross-­‐legged, sunlight and shadows of pomegranate leaves dancing
on his face, Hassan absently plucked blades of grass from the ground as I read
him stories he couldn't read for himself. That Hassan would grow up illiterate
like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been born,
perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in Sanaubar's un-­‐welcoming
womb-­‐-­‐after all, what use did a servant have for the written word? But despite
his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan was drawn to the mystery of words,
seduced by a secret world forbidden to him. I read him poems and stories,
sometimes riddles-­‐-­‐though I stopped reading those when I saw he was far better
at solving them than I was. So I read him unchallenging things, like the
misadventures of the bumbling Mullah Nasruddin and his donkey. We sat for

---

hours under that tree, sat there until the sun faded in the west, and still Hassan
insisted we had enough daylight for one more story, one more chapter.
My favorite part of reading to Hassan was when we came across a big
word that he didn't know. I'd tease him, expose his ignorance. One time, I was
reading him a Mullah Nasruddin story and he stopped me. "What does that word
mean?"
"Which one?"
"Imbecile."
"You don't know what it means?" I said, grinning.
"Nay, Amir agha."
"But it's such a common word!"
"Still, I don't know it." If he felt the sting of my tease, his smiling face
didn't show it.
"Well, everyone in my school knows what it means," I said. "Let's see.
'Imbecile.' It means smart, intelligent. I'll use it in a sentence for you.
'When it comes to words, Hassan is an imbecile.'"
"Aaah," he said, nodding.
I would always feel guilty about it later. So I'd try to make up for it by
giving him one of my old shirts or a broken toy. I would tell myself that was
amends enough for a harmless prank.

---

Hassan's favorite book by far was the _Shahnamah_, the tenth-­‐century
epic of ancient Persian heroes. He liked all of the chapters, the shahs of old,
Feridoun, Zal, and Rudabeh. But his favorite story, and mine, was "Rostam and
Sohrab," the tale of the great warrior Rostam and his fleet-­‐footed horse, Rakhsh.
Rostam mortally wounds his valiant nemesis, Sohrab, in battle, only to discover
that Sohrab is his long-­‐lost son. Stricken with grief, Rostam hears his son's dying
words: If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-­‐
blood of thy son. And thou did'st it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee
unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the
tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is
the time gone for meeting...
"Read it again please, Amir agha," Hassan would say. Sometimes tears
pooled in Hassan's eyes as I read him this passage, and I always wondered whom
he wept for, the grief-­‐stricken Rostam who tears his clothes and covers his head
with ashes, or the dying Sohrab who only longed for his father's love? Personally,
I couldn't see the tragedy in Rostam's fate. After all, didn't all fathers in their
secret hearts harbor a desire to kill their sons? One day, in July 1973, I played
another little trick on Hassan. I was reading to him, and suddenly I strayed from
the written story. I pretended I was reading from the book, flipping pages
regularly, but I had abandoned the text altogether, taken over the story, and
made up my own. Hassan, of course, was oblivious to this. To him, the words on
the page were a scramble of codes, indecipherable, mysterious. Words were
secret doorways and I held all the keys. After, I started to ask him if he'd liked the
story, a giggle rising in my throat, when Hassan began to clap.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"That was the best story you've read me in a long time," he said, still
clapping.
I laughed. "Really?"
"Really."
"That's fascinating," I muttered. I meant it too. This was... wholly
unexpected.

---

"Are you sure, Hassan?"
He was still clapping. "It was great, Amir agha. Will you read me more of it
tomorrow?"
"Fascinating," I repeated, a little breathless, feeling like a man who
discovers a buried treasure in his own backyard. Walking down the hill, thoughts
were exploding in my head like the fireworks at Chaman. _Best story you've read
me in a long time_, he'd said. I had read him a lot of stories. Hassan was asking
me something.
"What?" I said.
"What does that mean, 'fascinating'?"
I laughed. Clutched him in a hug and planted a kiss on his cheek.
"What was that for?" he said, startled, blushing.
I gave him a friendly shove. Smiled. "You're a prince, Hassan. You're a
prince and I love you."
That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It
was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he
wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always
been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make
himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did
his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls,
knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body
in his arms.
That evening, I climbed the stairs and walked into Baba's smoking room,
in my hands the two sheets of paper on which I had scribbled the story. Baba and
Rahim Khan were smoking pipes and sipping brandy when I came in.

---

"What is it, Amir?" Baba said, reclining on the sofa and lacing his hands
behind his head. Blue smoke swirled around his face. His glare made my throat
feel dry. I cleared it and told him I'd written a story.
Baba nodded and gave a thin smile that conveyed little more than feigned
interest. "Well, that's very good, isn't it?" he said. Then nothing more. He just
looked at me through the cloud of smoke.
I probably stood there for under a minute, but, to this day, it was one of
the longest minutes of my life. Seconds plodded by, each separated from the next
by an eternity. Air grew heavy damp, almost solid. I was breathing bricks. Baba
went on staring me down, and didn't offer to read.
As always, it was Rahim Khan who rescued me. He held out his hand and
favored me with a smile that had nothing feigned about it. "May I have it, Amir
jan? I would very much like to read it." Baba hardly ever used the term of
endearment _jan_ when he addressed me.
Baba shrugged and stood up. He looked relieved, as if he too had been
rescued by Rahim Khan. "Yes, give it to Kaka Rahim. I'm going upstairs to get
ready." And with that, he left the room. Most days I worshiped Baba with an
intensity approaching the religious. But right then, I wished I could open my
veins and drain his cursed blood from my body.
An hour later, as the evening sky dimmed, the two of them drove off in my
father's car to attend a party. On his way out, Rahim Khan hunkered before me
and handed me my story and another folded piece of paper. He flashed a smile
and winked. "For you. Read it later." Then he paused and added a single word
that did more to encourage me to pursue writing than any compliment any
editor has ever paid me. That word was _Bravo_.
When they left, I sat on my bed and wished Rahim Khan had been my
father. Then I thought of Baba and his great big chest and how good it felt when
he held me against it, how he smelled of Brut in the morning, and how his beard
tickled my face. I was overcome with such sudden guilt that I bolted to the
bathroom and vomited in the sink.
Later that night, curled up in bed, I read Rahim Khan's note over and over.
It read like this:

---

Amir jan, I enjoyed your story very much. _Mashallah_, God has granted
you a special talent. It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who
wastes his God-­‐given talents is a donkey. You have written your story with sound
grammar and interesting style. But the most impressive thing about your story is
that it has irony. You may not even know what that word means. But you will
someday. It is something that some writers reach for their entire careers and
never attain. You have achieved it with your first story.
My door is and always will be open to you, Amir jan. I shall hear any story
you have to tell. Bravo.
Your friend,
Rahim
Buoyed by Rahim Khan's note, I grabbed the story and hurried downstairs to the
foyer where Ali and Hassan were sleeping on a mattress. That was the only time
they slept in the house, when Baba was away and Ali had to watch over me. I
shook Hassan awake and asked him if he wanted to hear a story.
He rubbed his sleep-­‐clogged eyes and stretched. "Now? What time is it?"
"Never mind the time. This story's special. I wrote it myself," I whispered,
hoping not to wake Ali. Hassan's face brightened.
"Then I _have_ to hear it," he said, already pulling the blanket off him.
I read it to him in the living room by the marble fireplace. No playful
straying from the words this time; this was about me! Hassan was the perfect
audience in many ways, totally immersed in the tale, his face shifting with the
changing tones in the story. When I read the last sentence, he made a muted
clapping sound with his hands.

---

"_Mashallah_, Amir agha. Bravo!" He was beaming.
"You liked it?" I said, getting my second taste-­‐-­‐and how sweet it was-­‐-­‐of a
positive review.
"Some day, _Inshallah_, you will be a great writer," Hassan said. "And
people all over the world will read your stories."
"You exaggerate, Hassan," I said, loving him for it.
"No. You will be great and famous," he insisted. Then he paused, as if on
the verge of adding something. He weighed his words and cleared his throat.
"But will you permit me to ask a question about the story?" he said shyly.
"Of course."
"Well..." he started, broke off.
"Tell me, Hassan," I said. I smiled, though suddenly the insecure writer in
me wasn't so sure he wanted to hear it.
"Well," he said, "if I may ask, why did the man kill his wife? In fact, why
did he ever have to feel sad to shed tears? Couldn't he have just smelled an
onion?"
I was stunned. That particular point, so obvious it was utterly stupid,
hadn't even occurred to me. I moved my lips soundlessly. It appeared that on the
same night I had learned about one of writing's objectives, irony, I would also be
introduced to one of its pitfalls: the Plot Hole. Taught by Hassan, of all people.
Hassan who couldn't read and had never written a single word in his entire life.
A voice, cold and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear, _What does he know, that
illiterate Hazara? He'll never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you?_
"Well," I began. But I never got to finish that sentence.

---

Because suddenly Afghanistan changed forever.
FIVE
Something roared like thunder. The earth shook a little and we heard the _rat-­‐a-­‐
tat-­‐tat_ of gunfire. "Father!" Hassan cried. We sprung to our feet and raced out of
the living room. We found Ali hobbling frantically across the foyer.
"Father! What's that sound?" Hassan yelped, his hands outstretched
toward Ali. Ali wrapped his arms around us. A white light flashed, lit the sky in
silver. It flashed again and was followed by a rapid staccato of gunfire.
"They're hunting ducks," Ali said in a hoarse voice. "They hunt ducks at
night, you know. Don't be afraid."
A siren went off in the distance. Somewhere glass shattered and someone
shouted. I heard people on the street, jolted from sleep and probably still in their
pajamas, with ruffled hair and puffy eyes. Hassan was crying. Ali pulled him
close, clutched him with tenderness. Later, I would tell myself I hadn't felt
envious of Hassan. Not at all.
We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The
shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us
badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were
foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would
know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born. Huddled
together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any
notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life. If not quite yet, then at least it
was the beginning of the end. The end, the _official_ end, would come first in
April 1978 with the communist coup d'etat, and then in December 1979, when

---

Russian tanks would roll into the very same streets where Hassan and I played,
bringing the death of the Afghanistan I knew and marking the start of a still
ongoing era of bloodletting.
Just before sunrise, Baba's car peeled into the driveway. His door
slammed shut and his running footsteps pounded the stairs. Then he appeared in
the doorway and I saw something on his face. Something I didn't recognize right
away because I'd never seen it before: fear. "Amir! Hassan!" he exclaimed as he
ran to us, opening his arms wide. "They blocked all the roads and the telephone
didn't work. I was so worried!"
We let him wrap us in his arms and, for a brief insane moment, I was glad
about whatever had happened that night.
THEY WEREN'T SHOOTING ducks after all. As it turned out, they hadn't shot
much of anything that night of July 17, 1973. Kabul awoke the next morning to
find that the monarchy was a thing of the past. The king, Zahir Shah, was away in
Italy. In his absence, his cousin Daoud Khan had ended the king's forty-­‐year reign
with a bloodless coup.
I remember Hassan and I crouching that next morning outside my father's
study, as Baba and Rahim Khan sipped black tea and listened to breaking news of
the coup on Radio Kabul.
"Amir agha?" Hassan whispered.
"What?"
"What's a 'republic'?"
I shrugged. "I don't know." On Baba's radio, they were saying that word,
"republic," over and over again.

---

"Amir agha?"
"What?"
"Does 'republic' mean Father and I will have to move away?"
"I don't think so," I whispered back.
Hassan considered this. "Amir agha?"
"What?"
"I don't want them to send me and Father away."
I smiled. "_Bas_, you donkey. No one's sending you away."
"Amir agha?"
"What?"
"Do you want to go climb our tree?"
My smile broadened. That was another thing about Hassan. He always
knew when to say the right thing-­‐-­‐the news on the radio was getting pretty
boring. Hassan went to his shack to get ready and I ran upstairs to grab a book.
Then I went to the kitchen, stuffed my pockets with handfuls of pine nuts, and
ran outside to find Hassan waiting for me. We burst through the front gates and
headed for the hill.
We crossed the residential street and were trekking through a barren
patch of rough land that led to the hill when, suddenly, a rock struck Hassan in

---

the back. We whirled around and my heart dropped. Assef and two of his friends,
Wali and Kamal, were approaching us.
Assef was the son of one of my father's friends, Mahmood, an airline pilot.
His family lived a few streets south of our home, in a posh, high-­‐walled
compound with palm trees. If you were a kid living in the Wazir Akbar Khan
section of Kabul, you knew about Assef and his famous stainless-­‐steel brass
knuckles, hopefully not through personal experience. Born to a German mother
and Afghan father, the blond, blue-­‐eyed Assef towered over the other kids. His
well-­‐earned reputation for savagery preceded him on the streets. Flanked by his
obeying friends, he walked the neighborhood like a Khan strolling through his
land with his eager-­‐to-­‐please entourage. His word was law, and if you needed a
little legal education, then those brass knuckles were just the right teaching tool.
I saw him use those knuckles once on a kid from the Karteh-­‐Char district. I will
never forget how Assef's blue eyes glinted with a light not entirely sane and how
he grinned, how he _grinned_, as he pummeled that poor kid unconscious. Some
of the boys in Wazir Akbar Khan had nicknamed him Assef _Goshkhor_, or Assef
"the Ear Eater." Of course, none of them dared utter it to his face unless they
wished to suffer the same fate as the poor kid who had unwittingly inspired that
nickname when he had fought Assef over a kite and ended up fishing his right ear
from a muddy gutter. Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that
Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: "sociopath."
Of all the neighborhood boys who tortured Ali, Assef was by far the most
relentless. He was, in fact, the originator of the Babalu jeer, _Hey, Babalu, who did
you eat today? Huh? Come on, Babalu, give us a smile! _ And on days when he felt
particularly inspired, he spiced up his badgering a little, _Hey, you flat-­‐nosed
Babalu, who did you eat today? Tell us, you slant-­‐eyed donkey!_ Now he was
walking toward us, hands on his hips, his sneakers kicking up little puffs of dust.
"Good morning, _kunis_!" Assef exclaimed, waving. "Fag," that was
another of his favorite insults. Hassan retreated behind me as the three older
boys closed in. They stood before us, three tall boys dressed in jeans and T-­‐
shirts. Towering over us all, Assef crossed his thick arms on his chest, a savage
sort of grin on his lips. Not for the first time, it occurred to me that Assef might
not be entirely sane. It also occurred to me how lucky I was to have Baba as my
father, the sole reason, I believe, Assef had mostly refrained from harassing me
too much.
He tipped his chin to Hassan. "Hey, Flat-­‐Nose," he said. "How is Babalu?"
Hassan said nothing and crept another step behind me.

---

"Have you heard the news, boys?" Assef said, his grin never faltering. "The
king is gone. Good riddance. Long live the president! My father knows Daoud
Khan, did you know that, Amir?"
"So does my father," I said. In reality, I had no idea if that was true or not.
"So does my father," Assef mimicked me in a whining voice. Kamal and
Wali cackled in unison. I wished Baba were there.
"Well, Daoud Khan dined at our house last year," Assef went on. "How do
you like that, Amir?"
I wondered if anyone would hear us scream in this remote patch of land.
Baba's house was a good kilometer away. I wished we'd stayed at the house.
"Do you know what I will tell Daoud Khan the next time he comes to our
house for dinner?" Assef said. "I'm going to have a little chat with him, man to
man, _mard_ to _mard_. Tell him what I told my mother. About Hitler. Now, there
was a leader. A great leader. A man with vision. I'll tell Daoud Khan to remember
that if they had let Hitler finish what he had started, the world be a better place
now"
"Baba says Hitler was crazy, that he ordered a lot of innocent people
killed," I heard myself say before I could clamp a hand on my mouth.
Assef snickered. "He sounds like my mother, and she's German; she
should know better. But then they want you to believe that, don't they? They
don't want you to know the truth."
I didn't know who "they" were, or what truth they were hiding, and I
didn't want to find out. I wished I hadn't said anything. I wished again I'd look up
and see Baba coming up the hill.

---

"But you have to read books they don't give out in school," Assef said. "I
have. And my eyes have been opened. Now I have a vision, and I'm going to share
it with our new president. Do you know what it is?"
I shook my head. He'd tell me anyway; Assef always answered his own
questions.
His blue eyes flicked to Hassan. "Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It
always has been, always will be. We are the true Afghans, the pure Afghans, not
this Flat-­‐Nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our
blood." He made a sweeping, grandiose gesture with his hands. "Afghanistan for
Pashtuns, I say. That's my vision."
Assef shifted his gaze to me again. He looked like someone coming out of a
good dream. "Too late for Hitler," he said. "But not for us."
He reached for something from the back pocket of his jeans. "I'll ask the
president to do what the king didn't have the quwat to do. To rid Afghanistan of
all the dirty, Kasseef Hazaras."
"Just let us go, Assef," I said, hating the way my voice trembled. "We're not
bothering you."
"Oh, you're bothering me," Assef said. And I saw with a sinking heart what
he had fished out of his pocket. Of course. His stainless-­‐steel brass knuckles
sparkled in the sun. "You're bothering me very much. In fact, you bother me
more than this Hazara here. How can you talk to him, play with him, let him
touch you?" he said, his voice dripping with disgust. Wali and Kamal nodded and
grunted in agreement. Assef narrowed his eyes. Shook his head. When he spoke
again, he sounded as baffled as he looked. "How can you call him your 'friend'?"
_But he's not my friend!_ I almost blurted. _He's my servant!_ Had I really
thought that? Of course I hadn't. I hadn't. I treated Hassan well, just like a friend,
better even, more like a brother. But if so, then why, when Baba's friends came to
visit with their kids, didn't I ever include Hassan in our games? Why did I play
with Hassan only when no one else was around? Assef slipped on the brass
knuckles. Gave me an icy look. "You're part of the problem, Amir. If idiots like
you and your father didn't take these people in, we'd be rid of them by now.

---

They'd all just go rot in Hazarajat where they belong. You're a disgrace to
Afghanistan."
I looked in his crazy eyes and saw that he meant it. He _really_ meant to
hurt me. Assef raised his fist and came for me.
There was a flurry of rapid movement behind me. Out of the corner of my
eye, I saw Hassan bend down and stand up quickly. Assef's eyes flicked to
something behind me and widened with surprise. I saw that same look of
astonishment on Kamal and Wali's faces as they too saw what had happened
behind me.
I turned and came face to face with Hassan's slingshot. Hassan had pulled
the wide elastic band all the way back. In the cup was a rock the size of a walnut.
Hassan held the slingshot pointed directly at Assef's face. His hand trembled with
the strain of the pulled elastic band and beads of sweat had erupted on his brow.
"Please leave us alone, Agha," Hassan said in a flat tone. He'd referred to
Assef as "Agha," and I wondered briefly what it must be like to live with such an
ingrained sense of one's place in a hierarchy.
Assef gritted his teeth. "Put it down, you motherless Hazara."
"Please leave us be, Agha," Hassan said.
Assef smiled. "Maybe you didn't notice, but there are three of us and two
of you."
Hassan shrugged. To an outsider, he didn't look scared. But Hassan's face
was my earliest memory and I knew all of its subtle nuances, knew each and
every twitch and flicker that ever rippled across it. And I saw that he was scared.
He was scared plenty.
"You are right, Agha. But perhaps you didn't notice that I'm the one
holding the slingshot. If you make a move, they'll have to change your nickname
from Assef 'the Ear Eater' to 'One-­‐Eyed Assef,' because I have this rock pointed at

---

your left eye." He said this so flatly that even I had to strain to hear the fear that I
knew hid under that calm voice.
Assef's mouth twitched. Wali and Kamal watched this exchange with
something akin to fascination. Someone had challenged their god. Humiliated
him. And, worst of all, that someone was a skinny Hazara. Assef looked from the
rock to Hassan. He searched Hassan's face intently. What he found in it must
have convinced him of the seriousness of Hassan's intentions, because he
lowered his fist.
"You should know something about me, Hazara," Assef said gravely. "I'm a
very patient person. This doesn't end today, believe me." He turned to me. "This
isn't the end for you either, Amir. Someday, I'll make you face me one on one."
Assef retreated a step. His disciples followed.
"Your Hazara made a big mistake today, Amir," he said. They then turned
around, walked away. I watched them walk down the hill and disappear behind a
wall.
Hassan was trying to tuck the slingshot in his waist with a pair of
trembling hands. His mouth curled up into something that was supposed to be a
reassuring smile. It took him five tries to tie the string of his trousers. Neither
one of us said much of anything as we walked home in trepidation, certain that
Assef and his friends would ambush us every time we turned a corner. They
didn't and that should have comforted us a little. But it didn't. Not at all.
FOR THE NEXT COUPLE of years, the words _economic development_ and
_reform_ danced on a lot of lips in Kabul. The constitutional monarchy had been
abolished, replaced by a republic, led by a president of the republic. For a while,
a sense of rejuvenation and purpose swept across the land. People spoke of
women's rights and modern technology.
And for the most part, even though a new leader lived in _Arg_-­‐-­‐the royal
palace in Kabul-­‐-­‐life went on as before. People went to work Saturday through
Thursday and gathered for picnics on Fridays in parks, on the banks of Ghargha
Lake, in the gardens of Paghman. Multicolored buses and lorries filled with
passengers rolled through the narrow streets of Kabul, led by the constant

---

shouts of the driver assistants who straddled the vehicles' rear bumpers and
yelped directions to the driver in their thick Kabuli accent. On _Eid_, the three
days of celebration after the holy month of Ramadan, Kabulis dressed in their
best and newest clothes and visited their families. People hugged and kissed and
greeted each other with "_Eid Mubarak_." Happy Eid. Children opened gifts and
played with dyed hard-­‐boiled eggs.
Early that following winter of 1974, Hassan and I were playing in the yard
one day, building a snow fort, when Ali called him in. "Hassan, Agha sahib wants
to talk to you!" He was standing by the front door, dressed in white, hands
tucked under his armpits, breath puffing from his mouth.
Hassan and I exchanged a smile. We'd been waiting for his call all day: It
was Hassan's birthday. "What is it, Father, do you know? Will you tell us?"
Hassan said. His eyes were gleaming.
Ali shrugged. "Agha sahib hasn't discussed it with me."
"Come on, Ali, tell us," I pressed. "Is it a drawing book? Maybe a new
pistol?"
Like Hassan, Ali was incapable of lying. Every year, he pretended not to
know what Baba had bought Hassan or me for our birthdays. And every year, his
eyes betrayed him and we coaxed the goods out of him. This time, though, it
seemed he was telling the truth.
Baba never missed Hassan's birthday. For a while, he used to ask Hassan
what he wanted, but he gave up doing that because Hassan was always too
modest to actually suggest a present. So every winter Baba picked something out
himself. He bought him a Japanese toy truck one year, an electric locomotive and
train track set another year. The previous year, Baba had surprised Hassan with
a leather cowboy hat just like the one Clint Eastwood wore in _The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly_-­‐-­‐which had unseated _The Magnificent Seven_ as our favorite
Western. That whole winter, Hassan and I took turns wearing the hat, and belted
out the film's famous music as we climbed mounds of snow and shot each other
dead.
We took off our gloves and removed our snow-­‐laden boots at the front
door. When we stepped into the foyer, we found Baba sitting by the wood-­‐

---

burning cast-­‐iron stove with a short, balding Indian man dressed in a brown suit
and red tie.
"Hassan," Baba said, smiling coyly, "meet your birthday present."
Hassan and I traded blank looks. There was no gift-­‐wrapped box in sight.
No bag. No toy. Just Ali standing behind us, and Baba with this slight Indian
fellow who looked a little like a mathematics teacher.
The Indian man in the brown suit smiled and offered Hassan his hand. "I
am Dr. Kumar," he said. "It's a pleasure to meet you." He spoke Farsi with a thick,
rolling Hindi accent.
"_Salaam alaykum_," Hassan said uncertainly. He gave a polite tip of the
head, but his eyes sought his father behind him. Ali moved closer and set his
hand on Hassan's shoulder.
Baba met Hassan's wary-­‐-­‐and puzzled-­‐-­‐eyes. "I have summoned Dr.
Kumar from New Delhi. Dr. Kumar is a plastic surgeon."
"Do you know what that is?" the Indian man-­‐-­‐Dr. Kumar-­‐-­‐said.
Hassan shook his head. He looked to me for help but I shrugged. All I
knew was that you went to a surgeon to fix you when you had appendicitis. I
knew this because one of my classmates had died of it the year before and the
teacher had told us they had waited too long to take him to a surgeon. We both
looked to Ali, but of course with him you could never tell. His face was impassive
as ever, though something sober had melted into his eyes.
"Well," Dr. Kumar said, "my job is to fix things on people's bodies.
Sometimes their faces."
"Oh," Hassan said. He looked from Dr. Kumar to Baba to Ali. His hand
touched his upper lip. "Oh," he said again.

---

"It's an unusual present, I know," Baba said. "And probably not what you
had in mind, but this present will last you forever."
"Oh," Hassan said. He licked his lips. Cleared his throat. "Agha sahib, will
it... will it-­‐-­‐"
"Nothing doing," Dr. Kumar intervened, smiling kindly. "It will not hurt
you one bit. In fact, I will give you a medicine and you will not remember a
thing."
"Oh," Hassan said. He smiled back with relief. A little relief anyway. "I
wasn't scared, Agha sahib, I just..." Hassan might have been fooled, but I wasn't. I
knew that when doctors said it wouldn't hurt, that's when you knew you were in
trouble. With dread, I remembered my circumcision the year prior. The doctor
had given me the same line, reassured me it wouldn't hurt one bit. But when the
numbing medicine wore off later that night, it felt like someone had pressed a
red hot coal to my loins. Why Baba waited until I was ten to have me circumcised
was beyond me and one of the things I will never forgive him for.
I wished I too had some kind of scar that would beget Baba's sympathy. It
wasn't fair. Hassan hadn't done anything to earn Baba's affections; he'd just been
born with that stupid harelip.
The surgery went well. We were all a little shocked when they first
removed the bandages, but kept our smiles on just as Dr. Kumar had instructed
us. It wasn't easy, because Hassan's upper lip was a grotesque mesh of swollen,
raw tissue. I expected Hassan to cry with horror when the nurse handed him the
mirror. Ali held his hand as Hassan took a long, thoughtful look into it. He
muttered something I didn't understand. I put my ear to his mouth. He
whispered it again.
"_Tashakor_." Thank you.
Then his lips twisted, and, that time, I knew just what he was doing. He
was smiling. Just as he had, emerging from his mother's womb.
The swelling subsided, and the wound healed with time. Soon, it was just
a pink jagged line running up from his lip. By the following winter, it was only a

---

faint scar. Which was ironic. Because that was the winter that Hassan stopped
smiling.
SIX
Winter.
Here is what I do on the first day of snowfall every year: I step out of the
house early in the morning, still in my pajamas, hugging my arms against the
chill. I find the driveway, my father's car, the walls, the trees, the rooftops, and
the hills buried under a foot of snow. I smile. The sky is seamless and blue, the
snow so white my eyes burn. I shovel a handful of the fresh snow into my mouth,
listen to the muffled stillness broken only by the cawing of crows. I walk down
the front steps, barefoot, and call for Hassan to come out and see.
Winter was every kid's favorite season in Kabul, at least those whose
fathers could afford to buy a good iron stove. The reason was simple: They shut
down school for the icy season. Winter to me was the end of long division and
naming the capital of Bulgaria, and the start of three months of playing cards by
the stove with Hassan, free Russian movies on Tuesday mornings at Cinema
Park, sweet turnip _qurma_ over rice for lunch after a morning of building
snowmen.
And kites, of course. Flying kites. And running them.
For a few unfortunate kids, winter did not spell the end of the school year.
There were the so-­‐called voluntary winter courses. No kid I knew ever
volunteered to go to these classes; parents, of course, did the volunteering for
them. Fortunately for me, Baba was not one of them. I remember one kid,
Ahmad, who lived across the street from us. His father was some kind of doctor, I

---

think. Ahmad had epilepsy and always wore a wool vest and thick black-­‐rimmed
glasses-­‐-­‐he was one of Assef's regular victims. Every morning, I watched from my
bedroom window as their Hazara servant shoveled snow from the driveway,
cleared the way for the black Opel. I made a point of watching Ahmad and his
father get into the car, Ahmad in his wool vest and winter coat, his schoolbag
filled with books and pencils. I waited until they pulled away, turned the corner,
then I slipped back into bed in my flannel pajamas. I pulled the blanket to my
chin and watched the snowcapped hills in the north through the window.
Watched them until I drifted back to sleep.
I loved wintertime in Kabul. I loved it for the soft pattering of snow
against my window at night, for the way fresh snow crunched under my black
rubber boots, for the warmth of the cast-­‐iron stove as the wind screeched
through the yards, the streets. But mostly because, as the trees froze and ice
sheathed the roads, the chill between Baba and me thawed a little. And the
reason for that was the kites. Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different
spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper thin slice of intersection between
those spheres.
EVERY WINTER, districts in Kabul held a kite-­‐fighting tournament. And if you
were a boy living in Kabul, the day of the tournament was undeniably the
highlight of the cold season. I never slept the night before the tournament. I'd roll
from side to side, make shadow animals on the wall, even sit on the balcony in
the dark, a blanket wrapped around me. I felt like a soldier trying to sleep in the
trenches the night before a major battle. And that wasn't so far off. In Kabul,
fighting kites was a little like going to war.
As with any war, you had to ready yourself for battle. For a while, Hassan
and I used to build our own kites. We saved our weekly allowances in the fall,
dropped the money in a little porcelain horse Baba had brought one time from
Herat. When the winds of winter began to blow and snow fell in chunks, we
undid the snap under the horse's belly. We went to the bazaar and bought
bamboo, glue, string, and paper. We spent hours every day shaving bamboo for
the center and cross spars, cutting the thin tissue paper which made for easy
dipping and recovery And then, of course, we had to make our own string, or tar.
If the kite was the gun, then _tar_, the glass-­‐coated cutting line, was the bullet in
the chamber. We'd go out in the yard and feed up to five hundred feet of string
through a mixture of ground glass and glue. We'd then hang the line between the
trees, leave it to dry. The next day, we'd wind the battle-­‐ready line around a
wooden spool. By the time the snow melted and the rains of spring swept in,
every boy in Kabul bore telltale horizontal gashes on his fingers from a whole

---

winter of fighting kites. I remember how my classmates and I used to huddle,
compare our battle scars on the first day of school. The cuts stung and didn't heal
for a couple of weeks, but I didn't mind. They were reminders of a beloved
season that had once again passed too quickly. Then the class captain would
blow his whistle and we'd march in a single file to our classrooms, longing for
winter already, greeted instead by the specter of yet another long school year.
But it quickly became apparent that Hassan and I were better kite fighters
than kite makers. Some flaw or other in our design always spelled its doom. So
Baba started taking us to Saifo's to buy our kites. Saifo was a nearly blind old
man who was a _moochi_ by profession-­‐-­‐a shoe repairman. But he was also the
city's most famous kite maker, working out of a tiny hovel on Jadeh Maywand,
the crowded street south of the muddy banks of the Kabul River. I remember you
had to crouch to enter the prison cell-­‐sized store, and then had to lift a trapdoor
to creep down a set of wooden steps to the dank basement where Saifo stored
his coveted kites. Baba would buy us each three identical kites and spools of
glass string. If I changed my mind and asked for a bigger and fancier kite, Baba
would buy it for me-­‐-­‐but then he'd buy it for Hassan too. Sometimes I wished he
wouldn't do that. Wished he'd let me be the favorite.
The kite-­‐fighting tournament was an old winter tradition in Afghanistan.
It started early in the morning on the day of the contest and didn't end until only
the winning kite flew in the sky-­‐-­‐I remember one year the tournament outlasted
daylight. People gathered on sidewalks and roofs to cheer for their kids. The
streets filled with kite fighters, jerking and tugging on their lines, squinting up to
the sky, trying to gain position to cut the opponent's line. Every kite fighter had
an assistant-­‐-­‐in my case, Hassan-­‐-­‐who held the spool and fed the line.
One time, a bratty Hindi kid whose family had recently moved into the
neighborhood told us that in his hometown, kite fighting had strict rules and
regulations. "You have to play in a boxed area and you have to stand at a right
angle to the wind," he said proudly. "And you can't use aluminum to make your
glass string." Hassan and I looked at each other. Cracked up. The Hindi kid would
soon learn what the British learned earlier in the century, and what the Russians
would eventually learn by the late 1980s: that Afghans are an independent
people. Afghans cherish custom but abhor rules. And so it was with kite fighting.
The rules were simple: No rules. Fly your kite. Cut the opponents. Good luck.
Except that wasn't all. The real fun began when a kite was cut. That was
where the kite runners came in, those kids who chased the windblown kite
drifting through the neighborhoods until it came spiraling down in a field,
dropping in someone's yard, on a tree, or a rooftop. The chase got pretty fierce;
hordes of kite runners swarmed the streets, shoved past each other like those

---

people from Spain I'd read about once, the ones who ran from the bulls. One year
a neighborhood kid climbed a pine tree for a kite. A branch snapped under his
weight and he fell thirty feet. Broke his back and never walked again. But he fell
with the kite still in his hands. And when a kite runner had his hands on a kite, no
one could take it from him. That wasn't a rule. That was custom.
For kite runners, the most coveted prize was the last fallen kite of a
winter tournament. It was a trophy of honor, something to be displayed on a
mantle for guests to admire. When the sky cleared of kites and only the final two
remained, every kite runner readied himself for the chance to land this prize. He
positioned himself at a spot that he thought would give him a head start. Tense
muscles readied themselves to uncoil. Necks craned. Eyes crinkled. Fights broke
out. And when the last kite was cut, all hell broke loose.
Over the years, I had seen a lot of guys run kites. But Hassan was by far
the greatest kite runner I'd ever seen. It was downright eerie the way he always
got to the spot the kite would land before the kite did, as if he had some sort of
inner compass.
I remember one overcast winter day, Hassan and I were running a kite. I
was chasing him through neighborhoods, hopping gutters, weaving through
narrow streets. I was a year older than him, but Hassan ran faster than I did, and
I was falling behind.
"Hassan! Wait!" I yelled, my breathing hot and ragged.
He whirled around, motioned with his hand. "This way!" he called before
dashing around another corner. I looked up, saw that the direction we were
running was opposite to the one the kite was drifting.
"We're losing it! We're going the wrong way!" I cried out.
"Trust me!" I heard him call up ahead. I reached the corner and saw
Hassan bolting along, his head down, not even looking at the sky, sweat soaking
through the back of his shirt. I tripped over a rock and fell-­‐-­‐I wasn't just slower
than Hassan but clumsier too; I'd always envied his natural athieticism. When I
staggered to my feet, I caught a glimpse of Hassan disappearing around another
street corner. I hobbled after him, spikes of pain battering my scraped knees.

---

I saw we had ended up on a rutted dirt road near Isteqial Middle School.
There was a field on one side where lettuce grew in the summer, and a row of
sour cherry trees on the other. I found Hassan sitting cross-­‐legged at the foot of
one of the trees, eating from a fistful of dried mulberries.
"What are we doing here?" I panted, my stomach roiling with nausea.
He smiled. "Sit with me, Amir agha."
I dropped next to him, lay on a thin patch of snow, wheezing. "You're
wasting our time. It was going the other way, didn't you see?"
Hassan popped a mulberry in his mouth. "It's coming," he said. I could
hardly breathe and he didn't even sound tired.
"How do you know?" I said.
"I know."
"How can you know?"
He turned to me. A few sweat beads rolled from his bald scalp. "Would I
ever lie to you, Amir agha?"
Suddenly I decided to toy with him a little. "I don't know. Would you?"
"I'd sooner eat dirt," he said with a look of indignation.
"Really? You'd do that?"

---

He threw me a puzzled look. "Do what?"
"Eat dirt if I told you to," I said. I knew I was being cruel, like when I'd
taunt him if he didn't know some big word. But there was something fascinating-­‐
-­‐albeit in a sick way-­‐-­‐about teasing Hassan. Kind of like when we used to play
insect torture. Except now, he was the ant and I was holding the magnifying
glass.
His eyes searched my face for a long time. We sat there, two boys under a
sour cherry tree, suddenly looking, really looking, at each other. That's when it
happened again: Hassan's face changed. Maybe not _changed_, not really, but
suddenly I had the feeling I was looking at two faces, the one I knew, the one that
was my first memory, and another, a second face, this one lurking just beneath
the surface. I'd seen it happen before-­‐-­‐it always shook me up a little. It just
appeared, this other face, for a fraction of a moment, long enough to leave me
with the unsettling feeling that maybe I'd seen it someplace before. Then Hassan
blinked and it was just him again. Just Hassan.
"If you asked, I would," he finally said, looking right at me. I dropped my
eyes. To this day, I find it hard to gaze directly at people like Hassan, people who
mean every word they say.
"But I wonder," he added. "Would you ever ask me to do such a thing,
Amir agha?" And, just like that, he had thrown at me his own little test. If I was
going to toy with him and challenge his loyalty, then he'd toy with me, test my
integrity.
I wished I hadn't started this conversation. I forced a smile. "Don't be
stupid, Hassan. You know I wouldn't."
Hassan returned the smile. Except his didn't look forced. "I know," he said.
And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think
everyone else does too.
"Here it comes," Hassan said, pointing to the sky. He rose to his feet and
walked a few paces to his left. I looked up, saw the kite plummeting toward us.

---

I heard footfalls, shouts, an approaching melee of kite runners. But they
were wasting their time. Because Hassan stood with his arms wide open, smiling,
waiting for the kite. And may God-­‐-­‐if He exists, that is-­‐-­‐strike me blind if the kite
didn't just drop into his outstretched arms.
IN THE WINTER OF 1975, I saw Hassan run a kite for the last time.
Usually, each neighborhood held its own competition. But that year, the
tournament was going to be held in my neighborhood, Wazir Akbar Khan, and
several other districts-­‐-­‐Karteh-­‐Char, Karteh-­‐Parwan, Mekro-­‐Rayan, and Koteh-­‐
Sangi-­‐-­‐had been invited. You could hardly go anywhere without hearing talk of
the upcoming tournament. Word had it this was going to be the biggest
tournament in twenty-­‐five years.
One night that winter, with the big contest only four days away, Baba and
I sat in his study in overstuffed leather chairs by the glow of the fireplace. We
were sipping tea, talking. Ali had served dinner earlier-­‐-­‐potatoes and curried
cauliflower over rice-­‐-­‐and had retired for the night with Hassan. Baba was
fattening his pipe and I was asking him to tell the story about the winter a pack
of wolves had descended from the mountains in Herat and forced everyone to
stay indoors for a week, when he lit a match and said, casually, "I think maybe
you'll win the tournament this year. What do you think?"
I didn't know what to think. Or what to say. Was that what it would take?
Had he just slipped me a key? I was a good kite fighter. Actually, a very good one.
A few times, I'd even come close to winning the winter tournament-­‐-­‐once, I'd
made it to the final three. But coming close wasn't the same as winning, was it?
Baba hadn't _come close_. He had won because winners won and everyone else
just went home. Baba was used to winning, winning at everything he set his mind
to. Didn't he have a right to expect the same from his son? And just imagine. If I
did win...
Baba smoked his pipe and talked. I pretended to listen. But I couldn't
listen, not really, because Baba's casual little comment had planted a seed in my
head: the resolution that I would win that winter's tournament. I was going to
win. There was no other viable option. I was going to win, and I was going to run
that last kite. Then I'd bring it home and show it to Baba. Show him once and for
all that his son was worthy. Then maybe my life as a ghost in this house would
finally be over. I let myself dream: I imagined conversation and laughter over

---

dinner instead of silence broken only by the clinking of silverware and the
occasional grunt. I envisioned us taking a Friday drive in Baba's car to Paghman,
stopping on the way at Ghargha Lake for some fried trout and potatoes. We'd go
to the zoo to see Marjan the lion, and maybe Baba wouldn't yawn and steal looks
at his wristwatch all the time. Maybe Baba would even read one of my stories. I'd
write him a hundred if I thought he'd read one. Maybe he'd call me Amir jan like
Rahim Khan did. And maybe, just maybe, I would finally be pardoned for killing
my mother.
Baba was telling me about the time he'd cut fourteen kites on the same
day. I smiled, nodded, laughed at all the right places, but I hardly heard a word he
said. I had a mission now. And I wasn't going to fail Baba. Not this time.
IT SNOWED HEAVILY the night before the tournament. Hassan and I sat under
the kursi and played panjpar as wind-­‐rattled tree branches tapped on the
window. Earlier that day, I'd asked Ali to set up the kursi for us-­‐-­‐which was
basically an electric heater under a low table covered with a thick, quilted
blanket.
Around the table, he arranged mattresses and cushions, so as many as
twenty people could sit and slip their legs under. Hassan and I used to spend
entire snowy days snug under the kursi, playing chess, cards-­‐-­‐mostly panjpar.
I killed Hassan's ten of diamonds, played him two jacks and a six. Next
door, in Baba's study, Baba and Rahim Khan were discussing business with a
couple of other men-­‐one of them I recognized as Assef's father. Through the wall,
I could hear the scratchy sound of Radio Kabul News.
Hassan killed the six and picked up the jacks. On the radio, Daoud Khan
was announcing something about foreign investments.
"He says someday we'll have television in Kabul," I said.
"Who?"

---

"Daoud Khan, you ass, the president."
Hassan giggled. "I heard they already have it in Iran," he said. I sighed.
"Those Iranians..." For a lot of Hazaras, Iran represented a sanctuary of sorts-­‐-­‐I
guess because, like Hazaras, most Iranians were Shi'a Muslims. But I
remembered something my teacher had said that summer about Iranians, that
they were grinning smooth talkers who patted you on the back with one hand
and picked your pocket with the other. I told Baba about that and he said my
teacher was one of those jealous Afghans, jealous because Iran was a rising
power in Asia and most people around the world couldn't even find Afghanistan
on a world map. "It hurts to say that," he said, shrugging. "But better to get hurt
by the truth than comforted with a lie."
"I'll buy you one someday," I said.
Hassan's face brightened. "A television? In truth?"
"Sure. And not the black-­‐and-­‐white kind either. We'll probably be grown-­‐
ups by then, but I'll get us two. One for you and one for me."
"I'll put it on my table, where I keep my drawings," Hassan said.
His saying that made me kind of sad. Sad for who Hassan was, where he
lived. For how he'd accepted the fact that he'd grow old in that mud shack in the
yard, the way his father had. I drew the last card, played him a pair of queens and
a ten.
Hassan picked up the queens. "You know, I think you're going to make
Agha sahib very proud tomorrow."
"You think so?"
"_Inshallah_," he said.

---

"_Inshallah_," I echoed, though the "God willing" qualifier didn't sound as
sincere coming from my lips. That was the thing with Hassan. He was so
goddamn pure, you always felt like a phony around him.
I killed his king and played him my final card, the ace of spades. He had to
pick it up. I'd won, but as I shuffled for a new game, I had the distinct suspicion
that Hassan had let me win.
"Amir agha?"
"What?"
"You know... I _like_ where I live." He was always doing that, reading my
mind.
"It's my home."
"Whatever," I said. "Get ready to lose again."
SEVEN
The next morning, as he brewed black tea for breakfast, Hassan told me he'd had
a dream. "We were at Ghargha Lake, you, me, Father, Agha sahib, Rahim Khan,
and thousands of other people," he said. "It was warm and sunny, and the lake
was clear like a mirror. But no one was swimming because they said a monster
had come to the lake. It was swimming at the bottom, waiting."

---

He poured me a cup and added sugar, blew on it a few times. Put it before
me. "So everyone is scared to get in the water, and suddenly you kick off your
shoes, Amir agha, and take off your shirt. 'There's no monster,' you say. 'I'll show
you all.' And before anyone can stop you, you dive into the water, start
swimming away. I follow you in and we're both swimming."
"But you can't swim."
Hassan laughed. "It's a dream, Amir agha, you can do anything. Anyway,
everyone is screaming, 'Get out! Get out!' but we just swim in the cold water. We
make it way out to the middle of the lake and we stop swimming. We turn
toward the shore and wave to the people. They look small like ants, but we can
hear them clapping. They see now. There is no monster, just water. They change
the name of the lake after that, and call it the 'Lake of Amir and Hassan, Sultans
of Kabul,' and we get to charge people money for swimming in it."
"So what does it mean?" I said.
He coated my _naan_ with marmalade, placed it on a plate. "I don't know. I
was hoping you could tell me."
"Well, it's a dumb dream. Nothing happens in it."
"Father says dreams always mean something."
I sipped some tea. "Why don't you ask him, then? He's so smart," I said,
more curtly than I had intended. I hadn't slept all night. My neck and back were
like coiled springs, and my eyes stung. Still, I had been mean to Hassan. I almost
apologized, then didn't. Hassan understood I was just nervous. Hassan always
understood about me.
Upstairs, I could hear the water running in Baba's bathroom.

---

THE STREETS GLISTENED with fresh snow and the sky was a blameless blue.
Snow blanketed every rooftop and weighed on the branches of the stunted
mulberry trees that lined our street. Overnight, snow had nudged its way into
every crack and gutter. I squinted against the blinding white when Hassan and I
stepped through the wrought-­‐iron gates. Ali shut the gates behind us. I heard
him mutter a prayer under his breath-­‐-­‐he always said a prayer when his son left
the house.
I had never seen so many people on our street. Kids were flinging
snowballs, squabbling, chasing one another, giggling. Kite fighters were huddling
with their spool holders, making last minute preparations. From adjacent streets,
I could hear laughter and chatter. Already, rooftops were jammed with
spectators reclining in lawn chairs, hot tea steaming from thermoses, and the
music of Ahmad Zahir blaring from cassette players. The immensely popular
Ahmad Zahir had revolutionized Afghan music and outraged the purists by
adding electric guitars, drums, and horns to the traditional tabla and
harmonium; on stage or at parties, he shirked the austere and nearly morose
stance of older singers and actually smiled when he sang-­‐-­‐sometimes even at
women. I turned my gaze to our rooftop, found Baba and Rahim Khan sitting on a
bench, both dressed in wool sweaters, sipping tea. Baba waved. I couldn't tell if
he was waving at me or Hassan.
"We should get started," Hassan said. He wore black rubber snow boots
and a bright green chapan over a thick sweater and faded corduroy pants.
Sunlight washed over his face, and, in it, I saw how well the pink scar above his
lip had healed.
Suddenly I wanted to withdraw. Pack it all in, go back home. What was I
thinking? Why was I putting myself through this, when I already knew the
outcome? Baba was on the roof, watching me. I felt his glare on me like the heat
of a blistering sun. This would be failure on a grand scale, even for me.
"I'm not sure I want to fly a kite today," I said.
"It's a beautiful day," Hassan said.
I shifted on my feet. Tried to peel my gaze away from our rooftop. "I don't
know. Maybe we should go home."

---

Then he stepped toward me and, in a low voice, said something that
scared me a little. "Remember, Amir agha. There's no monster, just a beautiful
day." How could I be such an open book to him when, half the time, I had no idea
what was milling around in his head? I was the one who went to school, the one
who could read, write. I was the smart one. Hassan couldn't read a first grade
textbook but he'd read me plenty. That was a little unsettling, but also sort of
comfortable to have someone who always knew what you needed.
"No monster," I said, feeling a little better, to my own surprise.
He smiled. "No monster."
"Are you sure?"
He closed his eyes. Nodded.
I looked to the kids scampering down the street, flinging snowballs. "It is
a beautiful day, isn't it?"
"Let's fly," he said.
It occurred to me then that maybe Hassan had made up his dream. Was
that possible? I decided it wasn't. Hassan wasn't that smart. I wasn't that smart.
But made up or not, the silly dream had lifted some of my anxiety. Maybe I
should take off my shirt, take a swim in the lake. Why not? "Let's do it," I said.
Hassan's face brightened. "Good," he said. He lifted our kite, red with
yellow borders, and, just beneath where the central and cross spars met, marked
with Saifo's unmistakable signature. He licked his finger and held it up, tested the
wind, then ran in its direction-­‐-­‐on those rare occasions we flew kites in the
summer, he'd kick up dust to see which way the wind blew it. The spool rolled in
my hands until Hassan stopped, about fifty feet away. He held the kite high over
his head, like an Olympic athlete showing his gold medal. I jerked the string
twice, our usual signal, and Hassan tossed the kite.

---

Caught between Baba and the mullahs at school, I still hadn't made up my
mind about God. But when a Koran ayat I had learned in my diniyat class rose to
my lips, I muttered it. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and pulled on the string.
Within a minute, my kite was rocketing to the sky. It made a sound like a paper
bird flapping its wings. Hassan clapped his hands, whistled, and ran back to me. I
handed him the spool, holding on to the string, and he spun it quickly to roll the
loose string back on.
At least two dozen kites already hung in the sky, like paper sharks
roaming for prey. Within an hour, the number doubled, and red, blue, and yellow
kites glided and spun in the sky. A cold breeze wafted through my hair. The wind
was perfect for kite flying, blowing just hard enough to give some lift, make the
sweeps easier. Next to me, Hassan held the spool, his hands already bloodied by
the string.
Soon, the cutting started and the first of the defeated kites whirled out of
control. They fell from the sky like shooting stars with brilliant, rippling tails,
showering the neighborhoods below with prizes for the kite runners. I could
hear the runners now, hollering as they ran the streets. Someone shouted
reports of a fight breaking out two streets down.
I kept stealing glances at Baba sitting with Rahim Khan on the roof,
wondered what he was thinking. Was he cheering for me? Or did a part of him
enjoy watching me fail? That was the thing about kite flying: Your mind drifted
with the kite.
They were coming down all over the place now, the kites, and I was still
flying. I was still flying. My eyes kept wandering over to Baba, bundled up in his
wool sweater. Was he surprised I had lasted as long as I had? You don't keep
your eyes to the sky, you won't last much longer. I snapped my gaze back to the
sky. A red kite was closing in on me-­‐-­‐I'd caught it just in time. I tangled a bit with
it, ended up besting him when he became impatient and tried to cut me from
below.
Up and down the streets, kite runners were returning triumphantly, their
captured kites held high. They showed them off to their parents, their friends.
But they all knew the best was yet to come. The biggest prize of all was still
flying. I sliced a bright yellow kite with a coiled white tail. It cost me another gash
on the' index finger and blood trickled down into my palm. I had Hassan hold the
string and sucked the blood dry, blotted my finger against my jeans.

---

Within another hour, the number of surviving kites dwindled from maybe
fifty to a dozen. I was one of them. I'd made it to the last dozen. I knew this part
of the tournament would take a while, because the guys who had lasted this long
were good-­‐-­‐they wouldn't easily fall into simple traps like the old lift-­‐and-­‐dive,
Hassan's favorite trick.
By three o'clock that afternoon, tufts of clouds had drifted in and the sun
had slipped behind them. Shadows started to lengthen. The spectators on the
roofs bundled up in scarves and thick coats. We were down to a half dozen and I
was still flying. My legs ached and my neck was stiff. But with each defeated kite,'
hope grew in my heart, like snow collecting on a wall, one flake at a time.
My eyes kept returning to a blue kite that had been wreaking havoc for
the last hour.
"How many has he cut?" I asked.
"I counted eleven," Hassan said.
"Do you know whose it might be?"
Hassan clucked his tongue and tipped his chin. That was a trademark
Hassan gesture, meant he had no idea. The blue kite sliced a big purple one and
swept twice in big loops. Ten minutes later, he'd cut another two, sending hordes
of kite runners racing after them.
After another thirty minutes, only four kites remained. And I was still
flying. It seemed I could hardly make a wrong move, as if every gust of wind blew
in my favor. I'd never felt so in command, so lucky It felt intoxicating. I didn't
dare look up to the roof. Didn't dare take my eyes off the sky. I had to
concentrate, play it smart. Another fifteen minutes and what had seemed like a
laughable dream that morning had suddenly become reality: It was just me and
the other guy. The blue kite.
The tension in the air was as taut as the glass string I was tugging with my
bloody hands. People were stomping their feet, clapping, whistling, chanting,
"Boboresh! Boboresh!" Cut him! Cut him! I wondered if Baba's voice was one of

---

them. Music blasted. The smell of steamed mantu and fried pakora drifted from
rooftops and open doors.
But all I heard-­‐-­‐all I willed myself to hear-­‐-­‐was the thudding of blood in
my head. All I saw was the blue kite. All I smelled was victory. Salvation.
Redemption. If Baba was wrong and there was a God like they said in school,
then He'd let me win. I didn't know what the other guy was playing for, maybe
just bragging rights. But this was my one chance to become someone who was
looked at, not seen, listened to, not heard. If there was a God, He'd guide the
winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I'd cut loose my pain,
my longing. I'd endured too much, come too far. And suddenly, just like that,
hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.
It turned out to be sooner than later. A gust of wind lifted my kite and I
took advantage. Fed the string, pulled up. Looped my kite on top of the blue one.
I held position. The blue kite knew it was in trouble. It was trying desperately to
maneuver out of the jam, but I didn't let go. I held position. The crowd sensed the
end was at hand. The chorus of "Cut him! Cut him!" grew louder, like Romans
chanting for the gladiators to kill, kill!
"You're almost there, Amir agha! Almost there!" Hassan was panting.
Then the moment came. I closed my eyes and loosened my grip on the
string. It sliced my fingers again as the wind dragged it. And then... I didn't need
to hear the crowd's roar to know I didn't need to see either. Hassan was
screaming and his arm was wrapped around my neck.
"Bravo! Bravo, Amir agha!"
I opened my eyes, saw the blue kite spinning wildly like a tire come loose
from a speeding car. I blinked, tried to say something. Nothing came out.
Suddenly I was hovering, looking down on myself from above. Black leather coat,
red scarf, faded jeans. A thin boy, a little sallow, and a tad short for his twelve
years. He had narrow shoulders and a hint of dark circles around his pale hazel
eyes. The breeze rustled his light brown hair. He looked up to me and we smiled
at each other.
Then I was screaming, and everything was color and sound, everything
was alive and good. I was throwing my free arm around Hassan and we were

---

hopping up and down, both of us laughing, both of us weeping. "You won, Amir
agha! You won!"
"We won! We won!" was all I could say. This wasn't happening. In a
moment, I'd blink and rouse from this beautiful dream, get out of bed, march
down to the kitchen to eat breakfast with no one to talk to but Hassan. Get
dressed. Wait for Baba. Give up. Back to my old life. Then I saw Baba on our roof.
He was standing on the edge, pumping both of his fists. Hollering and clapping.
And that right there was the single greatest moment of my twelve years of life,
seeing Baba on that roof, proud of me at last.
But he was doing something now, motioning with his hands in an urgent
way. Then I understood. "Hassan, we-­‐-­‐"
"I know," he said, breaking our embrace. "_Inshallah_, we'll celebrate later.
Right now, I'm going to run that blue kite for you," he said. He dropped the spool
and took off running, the hem of his green chapan dragging in the snow behind
him.
"Hassan!" I called. "Come back with it!"
He was already turning the street corner, his rubber boots kicking up
snow. He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. "For you a
thousand times over!" he said. Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared
around the corner. The next time I saw him smile unabashedly like that was
twenty-­‐six years later, in a faded Polaroid photograph.
I began to pull my kite back as people rushed to congratulate me. I shook
hands with them, said my thanks. The younger kids looked at me with an
awestruck twinkle in their eyes; I was a hero. Hands patted my back and tousled
my hair. I pulled on the string and returned every smile, but my mind was on the
blue kite.
Finally, I had my kite in hand. I wrapped the loose string that had
collected at my feet around the spool, shook a few more hands, and trotted home.
When I reached the wrought-­‐iron gates, Ali was waiting on the other side. He
stuck his hand through the bars. "Congratulations," he said.

---

I gave him my kite and spool, shook his hand. "Tashakor, Ali jan."
"I was praying for you the whole time."
"Then keep praying. We're not done yet."
I hurried back to the street. I didn't ask Ali about Baba. I didn't want to see
him yet. In my head, I had it all planned: I'd make a grand entrance, a hero,
prized trophy in my bloodied hands. Heads would turn and eyes would lock.
Rostam and Sohrab sizing each other up. A dramatic moment of silence. Then the
old warrior would walk to the young one, embrace him, acknowledge his
worthiness. Vindication. Salvation. Redemption. And then? Well... happily ever
after, of course. What else? The streets of Wazir Akbar Khan were numbered and
set at right angles to each other like a grid. It was a new neighborhood then, still
developing, with empty lots of land and half-­‐constructed homes on every street
between compounds surrounded by eight-­‐foot walls. I ran up and down every
street, looking for Hassan. Everywhere, people were busy folding chairs, packing
food and utensils after a long day of partying. Some, still sitting on their rooftops,
shouted their congratulations to me.
Four streets south of ours, I saw Omar, the son of an engineer who was a
friend of Baba's. He was dribbling a soccer ball with his brother on the front lawn
of their house. Omar was a pretty good guy. We'd been classmates in fourth
grade, and one time he'd given me a fountain pen, the kind you had to load with a
cartridge.
"I heard you won, Amir," he said. "Congratulations."
"Thanks. Have you seen Hassan?"
"Your Hazara?"
I nodded.
Omar headed the ball to his brother. "I hear he's a great kite runner." His
brother headed the ball back to him. Omar caught it, tossed it up and down.

---

"Although I've always wondered how he manages. I mean, with those tight little
eyes, how does he see anything?"
His brother laughed, a short burst, and asked for the ball. Omar ignored
him.
"Have you seen him?"
Omar flicked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing southwest. "I saw him
running toward the bazaar awhile ago."
"Thanks." I scuttled away.
By the time I reached the marketplace, the sun had almost sunk behind
the hills and dusk had painted the sky pink and purple. A few blocks away, from
the Haji Yaghoub Mosque, the mullah bellowed azan, calling for the faithful to
unroll their rugs and bow their heads west in prayer. Hassan never missed any of
the five daily prayers. Even when we were out playing, he'd excuse himself, draw
water from the well in the yard, wash up, and disappear into the hut. He'd come
out a few minutes later, smiling, find me sitting against the wall or perched on a
tree. He was going to miss prayer tonight, though, because of me.
The bazaar was emptying quickly, the merchants finishing up their
haggling for the day. I trotted in the mud between rows of closely packed
cubicles where you could buy a freshly slaughtered pheasant in one stand and a
calculator from the adjacent one. I picked my way through the dwindling crowd,
the lame beggars dressed in layers of tattered rags, the vendors with rugs on
their shoulders, the cloth merchants and butchers closing shop for the day. I
found no sign of Hassan.
I stopped by a dried fruit stand, described Hassan to an old merchant
loading his mule with crates of pine seeds and raisins. He wore a powder blue
turban.
He paused to look at me for a long time before answering. "I might have
seen him."

---

"Which way did he go?"
He eyed me up and down. "What is a boy like you doing here at this time
of the day looking for a Hazara?" His glance lingered admiringly on my leather
coat and my jeans-­‐-­‐cowboy pants, we used to call them. In Afghanistan, owning
anything American, especially if it wasn't secondhand, was a sign of wealth.
"I need to find him, Agha."
"What is he to you?" he said. I didn't see the point of his question, but I
reminded myself that impatience wasn't going to make him tell me any faster.
"He's our servant's son," I said.
The old man raised a pepper gray eyebrow. "He is? Lucky Hazara, having
such a concerned master. His father should get on his knees, sweep the dust at
your feet with his eyelashes."
"Are you going to tell me or not?"
He rested an arm on the mule's back, pointed south. "I think I saw the boy
you described running that way. He had a kite in his hand. A blue one."
"He did?" I said. For you a thousand times over, he'd promised. Good old
Hassan.
Good old reliable Hassan. He'd kept his promise and run the last kite for
me.
"Of course, they've probably caught him by now," the old merchant said,
grunting and loading another box on the mule's back.
"Who?"

---

"The other boys," he said. "The ones chasing him. They were dressed like
you." He glanced to the sky and sighed. "Now, run along, you're making me late
for nainaz."
But I was already scrambling down the lane.
For the next few minutes, I scoured the bazaar in vain. Maybe the old
merchant's eyes had betrayed him. Except he'd seen the blue kite. The thought of
getting my hands on that kite... I poked my head behind every lane, every shop.
No sign of Hassan.
I had begun to worry that darkness would fall before I found Hassan
when I heard voices from up ahead. I'd reached a secluded, muddy road. It ran
perpendicular to the end of the main thoroughfare bisecting the bazaar. I turned
onto the rutted track and followed the voices. My boot squished in mud with
every step and my breath puffed out in white clouds before me. The narrow path
ran parallel on one side to a snow-­‐filled ravine through which a stream may have
tumbled in the spring. To my other side stood rows of snow-­‐burdened cypress
trees peppered among flat-­‐topped clay houses-­‐-­‐no more than mud shacks in
most cases-­‐-­‐separated by narrow alleys.
I heard the voices again, louder this time, coming from one of the alleys. I
crept close to the mouth of the alley. Held my breath. Peeked around the corner.
Hassan was standing at the blind end of the alley in a defiant stance: fists
curled, legs slightly apart. Behind him, sitting on piles of scrap and rubble, was
the blue kite. My key to Baba's heart.
Blocking Hassan's way out of the alley were three boys, the same three
from that day on the hill, the day after Daoud Khan's coup, when Hassan had
saved us with his slingshot. Wali was standing on one side, Kamal on the other,
and in the middle, Assef. I felt my body clench up, and something cold rippled up
my spine. Assef seemed relaxed, confident. He was twirling his brass knuckles.
The other two guys shifted nervously on their feet, looking from Assef to Hassan,
like they'd cornered some kind of wild animal that only Assef could tame.

---

"Where is your slingshot, Hazara?" Assef said, turning the brass knuckles
in his hand. "What was it you said? 'They'll have to call you One-­‐Eyed Assef.'
That's right. One-­‐Eyed Assef. That was clever. Really clever. Then again, it's easy
to be clever when you're holding a loaded weapon."
I realized I still hadn't breathed out. I exhaled, slowly, quietly. I felt
paralyzed. I watched them close in on the boy I'd grown up with, the boy whose
harelipped face had been my first memory.
"But today is your lucky day, Hazara," Assef said. He had his back to me,
but I would have bet he was grinning. "I'm in a mood to forgive. What do you say
to that, boys?"
"That's generous," Kamal blurted, "Especially after the rude manners he
showed us last time." He was trying to sound like Assef, except there was a
tremor in his voice. Then I understood: He wasn't afraid of Hassan, not really. He
was afraid because he had no idea what Assef had in mind.
Assef waved a dismissive hand. "Bakhshida. Forgiven. It's done." His voice
dropped a little. "Of course, nothing is free in this world, and my pardon comes
with a small price."
"That's fair," Kamal said.
"Nothing is free," Wali added.
"You're a lucky Hazara," Assef said, taking a step toward Hassan. "Because
today, it's only going to cost you that blue kite. A fair deal, boys, isn't it?"
"More than fair," Kamal said.
Even from where I was standing, I could see the fear creeping into
Hassan's eyes, but he shook his head. "Amir agha won the tournament and I ran
this kite for him. I ran it fairly. This is his kite."

---

"A loyal Hazara. Loyal as a dog," Assef said. Kamal's laugh was a shrill,
nervous sound.
"But before you sacrifice yourself for him, think about this: Would he do
the same for you? Have you ever wondered why he never includes you in games
when he has guests? Why he only plays with you when no one else is around? I'll
tell you why, Hazara. Because to him, you're nothing but an ugly pet. Something
he can play with when he's bored, something he can kick when he's angry. Don't
ever fool yourself and think you're something more."
"Amir agha and I are friends," Hassan said. He looked flushed.
"Friends?" Assef said, laughing. "You pathetic fool! Someday you'll wake
up from your little fantasy and learn just how good of a friend he is. Now, bas!
Enough of this. Give us that kite."
Hassan stooped and picked up a rock.
Assef flinched. He began to take a step back, stopped. "Last chance,
Hazara."
Hassan's answer was to cock the arm that held the rock.
"Whatever you wish." Assef unbuttoned his winter coat, took it off, folded
it slowly and deliberately. He placed it against the wall.
I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life
might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn't. I just watched. Paralyzed.
Assef motioned with his hand, and the other two boys separated, forming
a half circle, trapping Hassan in the alley.
"I've changed my mind," Assef said. "I'm letting you keep the kite, Hazara.
I'll let you keep it so it will always remind you of what I'm about to do."

---

Then he charged. Hassan hurled the rock. It struck Assef in the forehead.
Assef yelped as he flung himself at Hassan, knocking him to the ground. Wali and
Kamal followed.
I bit on my fist. Shut my eyes.
A MEMORY: Did you know Hassan and you fed from the same breast? Did you
know that, Amir agha? Sakina, her name was. She was a fair, blue-­‐eyed Hazara
woman from Bamiyan and she sang you old wedding songs. They say there is a
brotherhood between people who've fed from the same breast. Did you know
that? A memory: "A rupia each, children. Just one rupia each and I will part the
curtain of truth." The old man sits against a mud wall. His sightless eyes are like
molten silver embedded in deep, twin craters.
Hunched over his cane, the fortune-­‐teller runs a gnarled hand across the
surface of his deflated cheeks. Cups it before us. "Not much to ask for the truth, is
it, a rupia each?" Hassan drops a coin in the leathery palm. I drop mine too. "In
the name of Allah most beneficent, most merciful," the old fortune-­‐teller
whispers. He takes Hassan's hand first, strokes the palm with one horn-­‐like
fingernail, round and round, round and round. The finger then floats to Hassan's
face and makes a dry, scratchy sound as it slowly traces the curve of his cheeks,
the outline of his ears. The calloused pads of his fingers brush against Hassan's
eyes. The hand stops there. Lingers. A shadow passes across the old man's face.
Hassan and I exchange a glance. The old man takes Hassan's hand and puts the
rupia back in Hassan's palm. He turns to me. "How about you, young friend?" he
says. On the other side of the wall, a rooster crows. The old man reaches for my
hand and I withdraw it.
A dream: I am lost in a snowstorm. The wind shrieks, blows stinging
sheets of snow into my eyes. I stagger through layers of shifting white. I call for
help but the wind drowns my cries. I fall and lie panting on the snow, lost in the
white, the wind wailing in my ears. I watch the snow erase my fresh footprints.
I'm a ghost now, I think, a ghost with no footprints. I cry out again, hope fading
like my footprints. But this time, a muffled reply. I shield my eyes and manage to
sit up. Out of the swaying curtains of snow, I catch a glimpse of movement, a
flurry of color. A familiar shape materializes. A hand reaches out for me. I see
deep, parallel gashes across the palm, blood dripping, staining the snow. I take
the hand and suddenly the snow is gone. We're standing in a field of apple green

---

grass with soft wisps of clouds drifting above. I look up and see the clear sky is
filled with kites, green, yellow, red, orange. They shimmer in the afternoon light.
A HAVOC OF SCRAP AND RUBBLE littered the alley. Worn bicycle tires, bottles
with peeled labels, ripped up magazines, yellowed newspapers, all scattered
amid a pile of bricks and slabs of cement. A rusted cast-­‐iron stove with a gaping
hole on its side tilted against a wall. But there were two things amid the garbage
that I couldn't stop looking at: One was the blue kite resting against the wall,
close to the cast-­‐iron stove; the other was Hassan's brown corduroy pants
thrown on a heap of eroded bricks.
"I don't know," Wali was saying. "My father says it's sinful." He sounded
unsure, excited, scared, all at the same time. Hassan lay with his chest pinned to
the ground. Kamal and Wali each gripped an arm, twisted and bent at the elbow
so that Hassan's hands were pressed to his back. Assef was standing over them,
the heel of his snow boots crushing the back of Hassan's neck.
"Your father won't find out," Assef said. "And there's nothing sinful about
teaching a lesson to a disrespectful donkey."
"I don't know," Wali muttered.
"Suit yourself," Assef said. He turned to Kamal. "What about you?"
"I... well..."
"It's just a Hazara," Assef said. But Kamal kept looking away.
"Fine," Assef snapped. "All I want you weaklings to do is hold him down.
Can you manage that?"
Wali and Kamal nodded. They looked relieved.

---

Assef knelt behind Hassan, put his hands on Hassan's hips and lifted his
bare buttocks. He kept one hand on Hassan's back and undid his own belt buckle
with his free hand. He unzipped his jeans. Dropped his underwear. He positioned
himself behind Hassan. Hassan didn't struggle. Didn't even whimper. He moved
his head slightly and I caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the resignation in it. It
was a look I had seen before. It was the look of the lamb.
TOMORROW IS THE TENTH DAY of Dhul-­‐Hijjah, the last month of the Muslim
calendar, and the first of three days of Eid Al-­‐Adha, or Eid-­‐e-­‐Qorban, as Afghans
call it-­‐-­‐a day to celebrate how the prophet Ibrahim almost sacrificed his own son
for God. Baba has handpicked the sheep again this year, a powder white one with
crooked black ears.
We all stand in the backyard, Hassan, Ali, Baba, and I. The mullah recites
the prayer, rubs his beard. Baba mutters, Get on with it, under his breath. He
sounds annoyed with the endless praying, the ritual of making the meat halal.
Baba mocks the story behind this Eid, like he mocks everything religious. But he
respects the tradition of Eid-­‐e-­‐Qorban. The custom is to divide the meat in thirds,
one for the family, one for friends, and one for the poor. Every year, Baba gives it
all to the poor. The rich are fat enough already, he says.
The mullah finishes the prayer. Ameen. He picks up the kitchen knife with
the long blade. The custom is to not let the sheep see the knife. Ali feeds the
animal a cube of sugar-­‐-­‐another custom, to make death sweeter. The sheep kicks,
but not much. The mullah grabs it under its jaw and places the blade on its neck.
Just a second before he slices the throat in one expert motion, I see the sheep's
eyes. It is a look that will haunt my dreams for weeks. I don't know why I watch
this yearly ritual in our backyard; my nightmares persist long after the
bloodstains on the grass have faded. But I always watch. I watch because of that
look of acceptance in the animal's eyes. Absurdly, I imagine the animal
understands. I imagine the animal sees that its imminent demise is for a higher
purpose. This is the look...
I STOPPED WATCHING, turned away from the alley. Something warm was
running down my wrist. I blinked, saw I was still biting down on my fist, hard

---

enough to draw blood from the knuckles. I realized something else. I was
weeping. From just around the corner, I could hear Assef's quick, rhythmic
grunts.
I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide
who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan-­‐-­‐the way
he'd stood up for me all those times in the past-­‐-­‐and accept whatever would
happen to me. Or I could run.
In the end, I ran.
I ran because I was a coward. I was afraid of Assef and what he would do
to me.
I was afraid of getting hurt. That's what I told myself as I turned my back
to the alley, to Hassan. That's what I made myself believe. I actually aspired to
cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef
was right: Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to
pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba. Was it a fair price? The answer floated to
my conscious mind before I could thwart it: He was just a Hazara, wasn't he? I
ran back the way I'd come. Ran back to the all but deserted bazaar. I lurched to a
cubicle and leaned against the padlocked swinging doors. I stood there panting,
sweating, wishing things had turned out some other way.
About fifteen minutes later, I heard voices and running footfalls. I
crouched behind the cubicle and watched Assef and the other two sprinting by,
laughing as they hurried down the deserted lane. I forced myself to wait ten
more minutes. Then I walked back to the rutted track that ran along the snow-­‐
filled ravine. I squinted in the dimming light and spotted Hassan walking slowly
toward me. I met him by a leafless birch tree on the edge of the ravine.
He had the blue kite in his hands; that was the first thing I saw. And I can't
lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips. His chapan had mud smudges
down the front and his shirt was ripped just below the collar. He stopped.
Swayed on his feet like he was going to collapse. Then he steadied himself.
Handed me the kite.

---

"Where were you? I looked for you," I said. Speaking those words was like
chewing on a rock.
Hassan dragged a sleeve across his face, wiped snot and tears. I waited for
him to say something, but we just stood there in silence, in the fading light. I was
grateful for the early-­‐evening shadows that fell on Hassan's face and concealed
mine. I was glad I didn't have to return his gaze. Did he know I knew? And if he
knew, then what would I see if I did look in his eyes? Blame? Indignation? Or,
God forbid, what I feared most: guileless devotion? That, most of all, I couldn't
bear to see.
He began to say something and his voice cracked. He closed his mouth,
opened it, and closed it again. Took a step back. Wiped his face. And that was as
close as Hassan and I ever came to discussing what had happened in the alley. I
thought he might burst into tears, but, to my relief, he didn't, and I pretended I
hadn't heard the crack in his voice. Just like I pretended I hadn't seen the dark
stain in the seat of his pants. Or those tiny drops that fell from between his legs
and stained the snow black.
"Agha sahib will worry," was all he said. He turned from me and limped
away.
IT HAPPENED JUST THE WAY I'd imagined. I opened the door to the smoky
study and stepped in. Baba and Rahim Khan were drinking tea and listening to
the news crackling on the radio. Their heads turned. Then a smile played on my
father's lips. He opened his arms. I put the kite down and walked into his thick
hairy arms. I buried my face in the warmth of his chest and wept. Baba held me
close to him, rocking me back and forth. In his arms, I forgot what I'd done. And
that was good.
EIGHT

---

For a week, I barely saw Hassan. I woke up to find toasted bread, brewed tea, and
a boiled egg already on the kitchen table. My clothes for the day were ironed and
folded, left on the cane-­‐seat chair in the foyer where Hassan usually did his
ironing. He used to wait for me to sit at the breakfast table before he started
ironing-­‐-­‐that way, we could talk. Used to sing too, over the hissing of the iron,
sang old Hazara songs about tulip fields. Now only the folded clothes greeted me.
That, and a breakfast I hardly finished anymore.
One overcast morning, as I was pushing the boiled egg around on my
plate, Ali walked in cradling a pile of chopped wood. I asked him where Hassan
was.
"He went back to sleep," Ali said, kneeling before the stove. He pulled the
little square door open.
Would Hassan be able to play today? Ali paused with a log in his hand. A
worried look crossed his face. "Lately, it seems all he wants to do is sleep. He
does his chores-­‐-­‐I see to that-­‐-­‐but then he just wants to crawl under his blanket.
Can I ask you something?"
"If you have to."
"After that kite tournament, he came home a little bloodied and his shirt
was torn. I asked him what had happened and he said it was nothing, that he'd
gotten into a little scuffle with some kids over the kite."
I didn't say anything. Just kept pushing the egg around on my plate.
"Did something happen to him, Amir agha? Something he's not telling
me?"
I shrugged. "How should I know?"

---

"You would tell me, nay? _Inshallah_, you would tell me if something had
happened?"
"Like I said, how should I know what's wrong with him?" I snapped.
"Maybe he's sick. People get sick all the time, Ali. Now, am I going to freeze to
death or are you planning on lighting the stove today?"
THAT NIGHT I asked Baba if we could go to Jalalabad on Friday. He was rocking
on the leather swivel chair behind his desk, reading a newspaper. He put it down,
took off the reading glasses I disliked so much-­‐-­‐Baba wasn't old, not at all, and he
had lots of years left to live, so why did he have to wear those stupid glasses?
"Why not!" he said. Lately, Baba agreed to everything I asked. Not only that, just
two nights before, he'd asked me if I wanted to see _El Cid_ with Charlton Heston
at Cinema Aryana. "Do you want to ask Hassan to come along to Jalalabad?"
Why did Baba have to spoil it like that? "He's mazreez," I said. Not feeling
well.
"Really?" Baba stopped rocking in his chair. "What's wrong with him?"
I gave a shrug and sank in the sofa by the fireplace. "He's got a cold or
something. Ali says he's sleeping it off."
"I haven't seen much of Hassan the last few days," Baba said. "That's all it
is, then, a cold?" I couldn't help hating the way his brow furrowed with worry.
"Just a cold. So are we going Friday, Baba?"
"Yes, yes," Baba said, pushing away from the desk. "Too bad about Hassan.
I thought you might have had more fun if he came."

---

"Well, the two of us can have fun together," I said. Baba smiled. Winked.
"Dress warm," he said.
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN just the two of us-­‐-­‐that was the way, I wanted it-­‐-­‐but by
Wednesday night, Baba had managed to invite another two dozen people. He
called his cousin Homayoun-­‐-­‐he was actually Baba's second cousin-­‐-­‐and
mentioned he was going to Jalalabad on Friday, and Homayoun, who had studied
engineering in France and had a house in Jalalabad, said he'd love to have
everyone over, he'd bring the kids, his two wives, and, while he was at it, cousin
Shafiqa and her family were visiting from Herat, maybe she'd like to tag along,
and since she was staying with cousin Nader in Kabul, his family would have to
be invited as well even though Homayoun and Nader had a bit of a feud going,
and if Nader was invited, surely his brother Faruq had to be asked too or his
feelings would be hurt and he might not invite them to his daughter's wedding
next month and...
We filled three vans. I rode with Baba, Rahim Khan, Kaka Homayoun-­‐-­‐
Baba had taught me at a young age to call any older male Kaka, or Uncle, and any
older female, Khala, or Aunt. Kaka Homayoun's two wives rode with us too-­‐-­‐the
pinch-­‐faced older one with the warts on her hands and the younger one who
always smelled of perfume and danced with her eyes closed-­‐-­‐as did Kaka
Homayoun's twin girls. I sat in the back row, carsick and dizzy, sandwiched
between the seven-­‐year-­‐old twins who kept reaching over my lap to slap at each
other. The road to Jalalabad is a two-­‐hour trek through mountain roads winding
along a steep drop, and my stomach lurched with each hairpin turn. Everyone in
the van was talking, talking loudly and at the same time, nearly shrieking, which
is how Afghans talk. I asked one of the twins-­‐-­‐Fazila or Karima, I could never tell
which was which-­‐-­‐if she'd trade her window seat with me so I could get fresh air
on account of my car sickness. She stuck her tongue out and said no. I told her
that was fine, but I couldn't be held accountable for vomiting on her new dress. A
minute later, I was leaning out the window. I watched the cratered road rise and
fall, whirl its tail around the mountainside, counted the multicolored trucks
packed with squatting men lumbering past. I tried closing my eyes, letting the
wind slap at my cheeks, opened my mouth to swallow the clean air. I still didn't
feel better. A finger poked me in the side. It was Fazila/Karima.
"What?" I said.

---

"I was just telling everyone about the tournament," Baba said from behind
the wheel. Kaka Homayoun and his wives were smiling at me from the middle
row of seats.
"There must have been a hundred kites in the sky that day?" Baba said. "Is
that about right, Amir?"
"I guess so," I mumbled.
"A hundred kites, Homayoun jan. No _laaf_. And the only one still flying at
the end of the day was Amir's. He has the last kite at home, a beautiful blue kite.
Hassan and Amir ran it together."
"Congratulations," Kaka Homayoun said. His first wife, the one with the
warts, clapped her hands. "Wah wah, Amir jan, we're all so proud of you!" she
said. The younger wife joined in. Then they were all clapping, yelping their
praises, telling me how proud I'd made them all. Only Rahim Khan, sitting in the
passenger seat next to Baba, was silent. He was looking at me in an odd way.
"Please pull over, Baba," I said.
"What?"
"Getting sick," I muttered, leaning across the seat, pressing against Kaka
Homayoun's daughters.
Fazila/Karima's face twisted. "Pull over, Kaka! His face is yellow! I don't
want him throwing up on my new dress!" she squealed.
Baba began to pull over, but I didn't make it. A few minutes later, I was
sitting on a rock on the side of the road as they aired out the van. Baba was
smoking with Kaka Homayoun who was telling Fazila/Karima to stop crying;
he'd buy her another dress in Jalalabad. I closed my eyes, turned my face to the
sun. Little shapes formed behind my eyelids, like hands playing shadows on the
wall. They twisted, merged, formed a single image: Hassan's brown corduroy
pants discarded on a pile of old bricks in the alley.

---

KAKA HOMAYOUN'S WHITE, two-­‐story house in Jalalabad had a balcony
overlooking a large, walled garden with apple and persimmon trees. There were
hedges that, in the summer, the gardener shaped like animals, and a swimming
pool with emerald colored tiles. I sat on the edge of the pool, empty save for a
layer of slushy snow at the bottom, feet dangling in. Kaka Homayoun's kids were
playing hide-­‐and-­‐seek at the other end of the yard. The women were cooking and
I could smell onions frying already, could hear the phht-­‐phht of a pressure
cooker, music, laughter. Baba, Rahim Khan, Kaka Homayoun, and Kaka Nader
were sitting on the balcony, smoking. Kaka Homayoun was telling them he'd
brought the projector along to show his slides of France. Ten years since he'd
returned from Paris and he was still showing those stupid slides.
It shouldn't have felt this way. Baba and I were finally friends. We'd gone
to the zoo a few days before, seen Marjan the lion, and I had hurled a pebble at
the bear when no one was watching. We'd gone to Dadkhoda's Kabob House
afterward, across from Cinema Park, had lamb kabob with freshly baked _naan_
from the tandoor. Baba told me stories of his travels to India and Russia, the
people he had met, like the armless, legless couple in Bombay who'd been
married forty-­‐seven years and raised eleven children. That should have been fun,
spending a day like that with Baba, hearing his stories. I finally had what I'd
wanted all those years. Except now that I had it, I felt as empty as this unkempt
pool I was dangling my legs into.
The wives and daughters served dinner-­‐-­‐rice, kofta, and chicken _qurma_-­‐
-­‐at sundown. We dined the traditional way, sitting on cushions around the room,
tablecloth spread on the floor, eating with our hands in groups of four or five
from common platters. I wasn't hungry but sat down to eat anyway with Baba,
Kaka Faruq, and Kaka Homayoun's two boys. Baba, who'd had a few scotches
before dinner, was still ranting about the kite tournament, how I'd outlasted
them all, how I'd come home with the last kite. His booming voice dominated the
room. People raised their heads from their platters, called out their
congratulations. Kaka Faruq patted my back with his clean hand. I felt like
sticking a knife in my eye.
Later, well past midnight, after a few hours of poker between Baba and
his cousins, the men lay down to sleep on parallel mattresses in the same room
where we'd dined. The women went upstairs. An hour later, I still couldn't sleep.
I kept tossing and turning as my relatives grunted, sighed, and snored in their
sleep. I sat up. A wedge of moonlight streamed in through the window.

---

"I watched Hassan get raped," I said to no one. Baba stirred in his sleep.
Kaka Homayoun grunted. A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and
hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in
the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going
to get away with it.
I thought about Hassan's dream, the one about us swimming in the lake.
There is no monster, he'd said, just water. Except he'd been wrong about that.
There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged
him to the murky bottom. I was that monster.
That was the night I became an insomniac.
I DIDN'T SPEAK TO HASSAN until the middle of the next week. I had just half-­‐
eaten my lunch and Hassan was doing the dishes. I was walking upstairs, going to
my room, when Hassan asked if I wanted to hike up the hill. I said I was tired.
Hassan looked tired too-­‐-­‐he'd lost weight and gray circles had formed under his
puffed-­‐up eyes. But when he asked again, I reluctantly agreed.
We trekked up the hill, our boots squishing in the muddy snow. Neither
one of us said anything. We sat under our pomegranate tree and I knew I'd made
a mistake. I shouldn't have come up the hill. The words I'd carved on the tree
trunk with Ali's kitchen knife, Amir and Hassan: The Sultans of Kabul... I couldn't
stand looking at them now.
He asked me to read to him from the _Shahnamah_ and I told him I'd
changed my mind. Told him I just wanted to go back to my room. He looked away
and shrugged. We walked back down the way we'd gone up in silence. And for
the first time in my life, I couldn't wait for spring.
MY MEMORY OF THE REST of that winter of 1975 is pretty hazy. I remember I
was fairly happy when Baba was home. We'd eat together, go to see a film, visit

---

Kaka Homayoun or Kaka Faruq. Sometimes Rahim Khan came over and Baba let
me sit in his study and sip tea with them. He'd even have me read him some of
my stories. It was good and I even believed it would last. And Baba believed it
too, I think. We both should have known better. For at least a few months after
the kite tournament, Baba and I immersed ourselves in a sweet illusion, saw each
other in a way that we never had before. We'd actually deceived ourselves into
thinking that a toy made of tissue paper, glue, and bamboo could somehow close
the chasm between us.
But when Baba was out-­‐-­‐and he was out a lot-­‐-­‐I closed myself in my room.
I read a book every couple of days, wrote stories, learned to draw horses. I'd hear
Hassan shuffling around the kitchen in the morning, hear the clinking of
silverware, the whistle of the teapot. I'd wait to hear the door shut and only then
I would walk down to eat. On my calendar, I circled the date of the first day of
school and began a countdown.
To my dismay, Hassan kept trying to rekindle things between us. I
remember the last time. I was in my room, reading an abbreviated Farsi
translation of Ivanhoe, when he knocked on my door.
"What is it?"
"I'm going to the baker to buy _naan_," he said from the other side. "I was
wondering if you... if you wanted to come along."
"I think I'm just going to read," I said, rubbing my temples. Lately, every
time Hassan was around, I was getting a headache.
"It's a sunny day," he said.
"I can see that."
"Might be fun to go for a walk."
"You go."

---

"I wish you'd come along," he said. Paused. Something thumped against
the door, maybe his forehead. "I don't know what I've done, Amir agha. I wish
you'd tell me. I don't know why we don't play anymore."
"You haven't done anything, Hassan. Just go."
"You can tell me, I'll stop doing it."
I buried my head in my lap, squeezed my temples with my knees, like a
vice.
"I'll tell you what I want you to stop doing," I said, eyes pressed shut.
"Anything."
"I want you to stop harassing me. I want you to go away," I snapped. I
wished he would give it right back to me, break the door open and tell me off-­‐-­‐it
would have made things easier, better. But he didn't do anything like that, and
when I opened the door minutes later, he wasn't there. I fell on my bed, buried
my head under the pillow, and cried.
HASSAN MILLED ABOUT the periphery of my life after that. I made sure our
paths crossed as little as possible, planned my day that way. Because when he
was around, the oxygen seeped out of the room. My chest tightened and I
couldn't draw enough air; I'd stand there, gasping in my own little airless bubble
of atmosphere. But even when he wasn't around, he was. He was there in the
hand-­‐washed and ironed clothes on the cane-­‐seat chair, in the warm slippers left
outside my door, in the wood already burning in the stove when I came down for
breakfast. Everywhere I turned, I saw signs of his loyalty, his goddamn
unwavering loyalty.
Early that spring, a few days before the new school year started, Baba and
I were planting tulips in the garden. Most of the snow had melted and the hills in
the north were already dotted with patches of green grass. It was a cool, gray

---

morning, and Baba was squatting next to me, digging the soil and planting the
bulbs I handed to him. He was telling me how most people thought it was better
to plant tulips in the fall and how that wasn't true, when I came right out and
said it. "Baba, have you ever thought about getting new servants?"
He dropped the tulip bulb and buried the trowel in the dirt. Took off his
gardening gloves. I'd startled him. "Chi? What did you say?"
"I was just wondering, that's all."
"Why would I ever want to do that?" Baba said curtly.
"You wouldn't, I guess. It was just a question," I said, my voice fading to a
murmur. I was already sorry I'd said it.
"Is this about you and Hassan? I know there's something going on
between you two, but whatever it is, you have to deal with it, not me. I'm staying
out of it."
"I'm sorry, Baba."
He put on his gloves again. "I grew up with Ali," he said through clenched
teeth. "My father took him in, he loved Ali like his own son. Forty years Ali's been
with my family. Forty goddamn years. And you think I'm just going to throw him
out?" He turned to me now, his face as red as a tulip. "I've never laid a hand on
you, Amir, but you ever say that again..." He looked away, shaking his head. "You
bring me shame. And Hassan... Hassan's not going anywhere, do you
understand?"
I looked down and picked up a fistful of cool soil. Let it pour between my
fingers.
"I said, Do you understand?" Baba roared.
I flinched. "Yes, Baba."

---

"Hassan's not going anywhere," Baba snapped. He dug a new hole with
the trowel, striking the dirt harder than he had to. "He's staying right here with
us, where he belongs. This is his home and we're his family. Don't you ever ask
me that question again!"
"I won't, Baba. I'm sorry."
We planted the rest of the tulips in silence.
I was relieved when school started that next week. Students with new
notebooks and sharpened pencils in hand ambled about the courtyard, kicking
up dust, chatting in groups, waiting for the class captains' whistles. Baba drove
down the dirt lane that led to the entrance. The school was an old two-­‐story
building with broken windows and dim, cobblestone hallways, patches of its
original dull yellow paint still showing between sloughing chunks of plaster.
Most of the boys walked to school, and Baba's black Mustang drew more than
one envious look. I should have been beaming with pride when he dropped me
off-­‐-­‐the old me would have-­‐-­‐but all I could muster was a mild form of
embarrassment. That and emptiness. Baba drove away without saying good-­‐bye.
I bypassed the customary comparing of kite-­‐fighting scars and stood in
line. The bell rang and we marched to our assigned class, filed in in pairs. I sat in
the back row. As the Farsi teacher handed out our textbooks, I prayed for a heavy
load of homework.
School gave me an excuse to stay in my room for long hours. And, for a
while, it took my mind off what had happened that winter, what I had let happen.
For a few weeks, I preoccupied myself with gravity and momentum, atoms and
cells, the Anglo-­‐Afghan wars, instead of thinking about Hassan and what had
happened to him. But, always, my mind returned to the alley. To Hassan's brown
corduroy pants lying on the bricks. To the droplets of blood staining the snow
dark red, almost black.
One sluggish, hazy afternoon early that summer, I asked Hassan to go up
the hill with me. Told him I wanted to read him a new story I'd written. He was
hanging clothes to dry in the yard and I saw his eagerness in the harried way he
finished the job.

---

We climbed the hill, making small talk. He asked about school, what I was
learning, and I talked about my teachers, especially the mean math teacher who
punished talkative students by sticking a metal rod between their fingers and
then squeezing them together. Hassan winced at that, said he hoped I'd never
have to experience it. I said I'd been lucky so far, knowing that luck had nothing
to do with it. I had done my share of talking in class too. But my father was rich
and everyone knew him, so I was spared the metal rod treatment.
We sat against the low cemetery wall under the shade thrown by the
pomegranate tree. In another month or two, crops of scorched yellow weeds
would blanket the hillside, but that year the spring showers had lasted longer
than usual, nudging their way into early summer, and the grass was still green,
peppered with tangles of wildflowers. Below us, Wazir Akbar Khan's white
walled, flat-­‐topped houses gleamed in the sunshine, the laundry hanging on
clotheslines in their yards stirred by the breeze to dance like butterflies.
We had picked a dozen pomegranates from the tree. I unfolded the story
I'd brought along, turned to the first page, then put it down. I stood up and
picked up an overripe pomegranate that had fallen to the ground.
"What would you do if I hit you with this?" I said, tossing the fruit up and
down.
Hassan's smile wilted. He looked older than I'd remembered. No, not
older, old. Was that possible? Lines had etched into his tanned face and creases
framed his eyes, his mouth. I might as well have taken a knife and carved those
lines myself.
"What would you do?" I repeated.
The color fell from his face. Next to him, the stapled pages of the story I'd
promised to read him fluttered in the breeze. I hurled the pomegranate at him. It
struck him in the chest, exploded in a spray of red pulp. Hassan's cry was
pregnant with surprise and pain.
"Hit me back!" I snapped. Hassan looked from the stain on his chest to me.

---

"Get up! Hit me!" I said. Hassan did get up, but he just stood there, looking
dazed like a man dragged into the ocean by a riptide when, just a moment ago, he
was enjoying a nice stroll on the beach.
I hit him with another pomegranate, in the shoulder this time. The juice
splattered his face. "Hit me back!" I spat. "Hit me back, goddamn you!" I wished
he would. I wished he'd give me the punishment I craved, so maybe I'd finally
sleep at night. Maybe then things could return to how they used to be between
us. But Hassan did nothing as I pelted him again and again. "You're a coward!" I
said. "Nothing but a goddamn coward!"
I don't know how many times I hit him. All I know is that, when I finally
stopped, exhausted and panting, Hassan was smeared in red like he'd been shot
by a firing squad. I fell to my knees, tired, spent, frustrated.
Then Hassan did pick up a pomegranate. He walked toward me. He
opened it and crushed it against his own forehead. "There," he croaked, red
dripping down his face like blood. "Are you satisfied? Do you feel better?" He
turned around and started down the hill.
I let the tears break free, rocked back and forth on my knees.
"What am I going to do with you, Hassan? What am I going to do with
you?" But by the time the tears dried up and I trudged down the hill, I knew the
answer to that question.
I TURNED THIRTEEN that summer of 1976, Afghanistan's next to last summer of
peace and anonymity. Things between Baba and me were already cooling off
again. I think what started it was the stupid comment I'd made the day we were
planting tulips, about getting new servants. I regretted saying it-­‐-­‐I really did-­‐-­‐but
I think even if I hadn't, our happy little interlude would have come to an end.
Maybe not quite so soon, but it would have. By the end of the summer, the
scraping of spoon and fork against the plate had replaced dinner table chatter
and Baba had resumed retreating to his study after supper. And closing the door.
I'd gone back to thumbing through Hafez and Khayyam, gnawing my nails down
to the cuticles, writing stories. I kept the stories in a stack under my bed, keeping

---

them just in case, though I doubted Baba would ever again ask me to read them
to him.
Baba's motto about throwing parties was this: Invite the whole world or
it's not a party. I remember scanning over the invitation list a week before my
birthday party and not recognizing at least three-­‐quarters of the four hundred-­‐-­‐
plus Kakas and Khalas who were going to bring me gifts and congratulate me for
having lived to thirteen. Then I realized they weren't really coming for me. It was
my birthday, but I knew who the real star of the show was.
For days, the house was teeming with Baba's hired help. There was
Salahuddin the butcher, who showed up with a calf and two sheep in tow,
refusing payment for any of the three. He slaughtered the animals himself in the
yard by a poplar tree. "Blood is good for the tree," I remember him saying as the
grass around the poplar soaked red. Men I didn't know climbed the oak trees
with coils of small electric bulbs and meters of extension cords. Others set up
dozens of tables in the yard, spread a tablecloth on each. The night before the big