Microsoft Word the kite runner docx

parted in the middle and tied in a ponytail, her nose pierced with a stud shaped
like the sun. She wears bifocals that make her eyes bug out. She wears green too
and her hands are soft. She sees me looking at her and smiles. Says something in
English. Something is jabbing at the side of my chest.
I fade out.

---

A MAN IS STANDING at my bedside. I know him. He is dark and lanky, has a long
beard. He wears a hat-­‐-­‐what are those hats called? Pakols? Wears it tilted to one
side like a famous person whose name escapes me now. I know this man. He
drove me somewhere a few years ago. I know him. There is something wrong
with my mouth. I hear a bubbling sound.
I fade out.
MY RIGHT ARM BURNS. The woman with the bifocals and sun-­‐shaped stud is
hunched over my arm, attaching a clear plastic tubing to it. She says it's "the
Potassium." "It stings like a bee, no?" she says. It does. What's her name?
Something to do with a prophet. I know her too from a few years ago. She used to
wear her hair in a ponytail. Now it's pulled back, tied in a bun. Soraya wore her
hair like that the first time we spoke. When was that? Last week? Aisha! Yes.
There is something wrong with my mouth. And that thing jabbing at my
chest.
I fade out.
WE ARE IN THE SULAIMAN MOUNTAINS of Baluchistan and Baba is wrestling
the black bear. He is the Baba of my childhood, _Toophan agha_, the towering
specimen of Pashtun might, not the withered man under the blankets, the man
with the sunken cheeks and hollow eyes. They roll over a patch of green grass,
man and beast, Baba's curly brown hair flying. The bear roars, or maybe it's
Baba. Spittle and blood fly; claw and hand swipe. They fall to the ground with a
loud thud and Baba is sitting on the bear's chest, his fingers digging in its snout.
He looks up at me and I see. He's me. I am wrestling the bear.

---

I wake up. The lanky dark man is back at my bedside. His name is Farid, I
remember now. And with him is the child from the car. His face reminds me of
the sound of bells. I am thirsty.
I fade out.
I keep fading in and out.
THE NAME OF THE MAN with the Clark Gable mustache turned out to be Dr.
Faruqi. He wasn't a soap opera star at all, but a head-­‐and-­‐neck surgeon, though I
kept thinking of him as some one named Armand in some steamy soap set on a
tropical island.
Where am I? I wanted to ask. But my mouth wouldn't open. I frowned.
Grunted.
Armand smiled; his teeth were blinding white.
"Not yet, Amir," he said, "but soon. When the wires are out." He spoke
English with a thick, rolling Urdu accent.
Wires? Armand crossed his arms; he had hairy forearms and wore a gold
wedding band. "You must be wondering where you are, what happened to you.
That's perfectly normal, the post-­‐surgical state is always disorienting. So I'll tell
you what I know."
I wanted to ask him about the wires. Post-­‐surgical? Where was Aisha? I
wanted her to smile at me, wanted her soft hands in mine.
Armand frowned, cocked one eyebrow in a slightly self-­‐important way.
"You are in a hospital in Peshawar. You've been here two days. You have suffered
some very significant injuries, Amir, I should tell you. I would say you're very
lucky to be alive, my friend." He swayed his index finger back and forth like a

---

pendulum when he said this. "Your spleen had ruptured, probably-­‐-­‐and
fortunately for you-­‐-­‐a delayed rupture, because you had signs of early
hemorrhage into your abdominal cavity. My colleagues from the general surgery
unit had to perform an emergency splenectomy. If it had ruptured earlier, you
would have bled to death." He patted me on the arm, the one with the IV, and
smiled. "You also suffered seven broken ribs. One of them caused a
pneumothorax."
I frowned. Tried to open my mouth. Remembered about the wires.
"That means a punctured lung," Armand explained. He tugged at a clear
plastic tubing on my left side. I felt the jabbing again in my chest. "We sealed the
leak with this chest tube." I followed the tube poking through bandages on my
chest to a container half filled with columns of water. The bubbling sound came
from there.
"You had also suffered various lacerations. That means 'cuts." I wanted to
tell him I knew what the word meant; I was a writer. I went to open my mouth.
Forgot about the wires again.
"The worst laceration was on your upper lip," Armand said. "The impact
had cut your upper lip in two, clean down the middle. But not to worry, the
plastics guys sewed it back together and they think you will have an excellent
result, though there will be a scar. That is unavoidable.
"There was also an orbital fracture on the left side; that's the eye socket
bone, and we had to fix that too. The wires in your jaws will come out in about
six weeks," Armand said. "Until then it's liquids and shakes. You will lose some
weight and you will be talking like Al Pacino from the first Godfather movie for a
little while." He laughed. "But you have a job to do today. Do you know what it
is?"
I shook my head.
"Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you
liquids. No fart, no food." He laughed again.

---

Later, after Aisha changed the IV tubing and raised the head of the bed
like I'd asked, I thought about what had happened to me. Ruptured spleen.
Broken teeth. Punctured lung. Busted eye socket. But as I watched a pigeon peck
at a bread crumb on the windowsill, I kept thinking of something else
Armand/Dr. Faruqi had said: The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had
said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.
FARID AND SOHRAB came to visit the next day. "Do you know who we are today?
Do you remember?" Farid said, only half-­‐jokingly. I nodded.
"Al hamdullellah!" he said, beaming. "No more talking nonsense."
"Thank you, Farid," I said through jaws wired shut. Armand was right-­‐-­‐I
did sound like Al Pacino from The Godfather. And my tongue surprised me every
time it poked in one of the empty spaces left by the teeth I had swallowed. "I
mean, thank you. For everything."
He waved a hand, blushed a little. "Bas, it's not worthy of thanks," he said.
I turned to Sohrab. He was wearing a new outfit, light brown pirhan-­‐tumban that
looked a bit big for him, and a black skullcap. He was looking down at his feet,
toying with the IV line coiled on the bed.
"We were never properly introduced," I said. I offered him my hand. "I am
Amir."
He looked at my hand, then to me. "You are the Amir agha Father told me
about?" he said.
"Yes." I remembered the words from Hassan's letter. I have told much
about you to Farzana jan and Sohrab, about us growing up together and playing
games and running in the streets. They laugh at the stories of all the mischief you
and I used to cause! "I owe you thanks too, Sohrab jan," I said. "You saved my
life."

---

He didn't say anything. I dropped my hand when he didn't take it. "I like
your new clothes," I mumbled.
"They're my son's," Farid said. "He has outgrown them. They fit Sohrab
pretty well, I would say." Sohrab could stay with him, he said, until we found a
place for him. "We don't have a lot of room, but what can I do? I can't leave him
to the streets. Besides, my children have taken a liking to him. Ha, Sohrab?" But
the boy just kept looking down, twirling the line with his finger.
"I've been meaning to ask," Farid said, a little hesitantly. "What happened
in that house? What happened between you and the Talib?"
"Let's just say we both got what we deserved," I said.
Farid nodded, didn't push it. It occurred to me that somewhere between
the time we had left Peshawar for Afghanistan and now, we had become friends.
"I've been meaning to ask something too."
"What?"
I didn't want to ask. I was afraid of the answer. "Rahim Khan," I said.
"He's gone."
My heart skipped. "Is he-­‐-­‐"
"No, just... gone." He handed me a folded piece of paper and a small key.
"The landlord gave me this when I went looking for him. He said Rahim Khan left
the day after we did."
"Where did he go?"

---

Farid shrugged. "The landlord didn't know He said Rahim Khan left the
letter and the key for you and took his leave." He checked his watch. "I'd better
go. Bia, Sohrab."
"Could you leave him here for a while?" I said. "Pick him up later?" I
turned to Sohrab. "Do you want to stay here with me for a little while?"
He shrugged and said nothing.
"Of course," Farid said. "I'll pick him up just before evening _namaz_."
THERE WERE THREE OTHER PATIENTS in my room. Two older men, one with a
cast on his leg, the other wheezing with asthma, and a young man of fifteen or
sixteen who'd had appendix surgery. The old guy in the cast stared at us without
blinking, his eyes switching from me to the Hazara boy sitting on a stool. My
roommates' families-­‐-­‐old women in bright shalwar-­‐kameezes, children, men
wearing skullcaps-­‐-­‐shuffled noisily in and out of the room. They brought with
them pakoras, _naan_, sa,nosas, biryani. Sometimes people just wandered into
the room, like the tall, bearded man who walked in just before Farid and Sohrab
arrived. He wore a brown blanket wrapped around him. Aisha asked him
something in Urdu. He paid her no attention and scanned the room with his eyes.
I thought he looked at me a little longer than necessary. When the nurse spoke to
him again, he just spun around and left.
"How are you?" I asked Sohrab. He shrugged, looked at his hands.
"Are you hungry? That lady there gave me a plate of biryani, but I can't eat
it," I said. I didn't know what else to say to him. "You want it?"
He shook his head.
"Do you want to talk?"

---

He shook his head again.
We sat there like that for a while, silent, me propped up in bed, two
pillows behind my back, Sohrab on the three-­‐legged stool next to the bed. I fell
asleep at some point, and, when I woke up, daylight had dimmed a bit, the
shadows had stretched, and Sohrab was still sitting next to me. He was still
looking down at his hands.
THAT NIGHT, after Farid picked up Sohrab, I unfolded Rahim Khan's letter. I had
delayed reading it as long as possible. It read: Amir jan, _Inshallah_, you have
reached this letter safely. I pray that I have not put you in harm's way and that
Afghanistan has not been too unkind to you. You have been in my prayers since
the day you left. You were right all those years to suspect that I knew. I did know.
Hassan told me shortly after it happened. What you did was wrong, Amir jan, but
do not forget that you were a boy when it happened. A troubled little boy. You
were too hard on yourself then, and you still are-­‐-­‐I saw it in your eyes in
Peshawar. But I hope you will heed this: A man who has no conscience, no
goodness, does not suffer. I hope your suffering comes to an end with this
journey to Afghanistan.
Amir jan, I am ashamed for the lies we told you all those years. You were
right to be angry in Peshawar. You had a right to know. So did Hassan. I know it
doesn't absolve anyone of anything, but the Kabul we lived in in those days was a
strange world, one in which some things mattered more than the truth.
Amir jan, I know how hard your father was on you when you were
growing up. I saw how you suffered and yearned for his affections, and my heart
bled for you. But your father was a man torn between two halves, Amir jan: you
and Hassan. He loved you both, but he could not love Hassan the way he longed
to, openly, and as a father. So he took it out on you instead-­‐-­‐Amir, the socially
legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited and the sin-­‐
with-­‐impunity privileges that came with them. When he saw you, he saw himself.
And his guilt. You are still angry and I realize it is far too early to expect you to
accept this, but maybe someday you will see that when your father was hard on
you, he was also being hard on himself. Your father, like you, was a tortured soul,
Amir jan.
I cannot describe to you the depth and blackness of the sorrow that came
over me when I learned of his passing. I loved him because he was my friend, but

---

also because he was a good man, maybe even a great man. And this is what I
want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's
remorse. Sometimes, I think everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets,
building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of
redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan,
when guilt leads to good.
I know that in the end, God will forgive. He will forgive your father, me,
and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive
me if you wish. But, most important, forgive yourself.
I have left you some money, most of what I have left, in fact. I think you
may have some expenses when you return here, and the money should be
enough to cover them. There is a bank in Peshawar; Farid knows the location.
The money is in a safe-­‐deposit box. I have given you the key.
As for me, it is time to go. I have little time left and I wish to spend it
alone. Please do not look for me. That is my final request of you.
I leave you in the hands of God.
Your friend always,
Rahim
I dragged the hospital gown sleeve across my eyes. I folded the letter and put it
under my mattress.
Amir, the socially legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he
had inherited and the sin-­‐with-­‐impunity privileges that came with them. Maybe
that was why Baba and I had been on such better terms in the U.S., I wondered.
Selling junk for petty cash, our menial jobs, our grimy apartment-­‐-­‐the American
version of a hut; maybe in America, when Baba looked at me, he saw a little bit of
Hassan.

---

Your father, like you, was a tortured soul, Rahim Khan had written. Maybe
so. We had both sinned and betrayed. But Baba had found a way to create good
out of his remorse. What had I done, other than take my guilt out on the very
same people I had betrayed, and then try to forget it all? What had I done, other
than become an insomniac? What had I ever done to right things? When the
nurse-­‐-­‐not Aisha but a red-­‐haired woman whose name escapes me-­‐-­‐walked in
with a syringe in hand and asked me if I needed a morphine injection, I said yes.
THEY REMOVED THE CHEST TUBE early the next morning, and Armand gave the
staff the go-­‐ahead to let me sip apple juice. I asked Aisha for a mirror when she
placed the cup of juice on the dresser next to my bed. She lifted her bifocals to
her forehead as she pulled the curtain open and let the morning sun flood the
room. "Remember, now," she said over her shoulder, "it will look better in a few
days. My son-­‐in-­‐law was in a moped accident last year. His handsome face was
dragged on the asphalt and became purple like an eggplant. Now he is beautiful
again, like a Hollywood movie star."
Despite her reassurances, looking in the mirror and seeing the thing that
insisted it was my face left me a little breathless. It looked like someone had
stuck an air pump nozzle under my skin and had pumped away. My eyes were
puffy and blue. The worst of it was my mouth, a grotesque blob of purple and
red, all bruise and stitches. I tried to smile and a bolt of pain ripped through my
lips. I wouldn't be doing that for a while. There were stitches across my left
cheek, just under the chin, on the forehead just below the hairline.
The old guy with the leg cast said something in Urdu. I gave him a shrug
and shook my head. He pointed to his face, patted it, and grinned a wide,
toothless grin. "Very good," he said in English. "Ins hallah**."
"Thank you," I whispered.
Farid and Sohrab came in just as I put the mirror away. Sohrab took his
seat on the stool, rested his head on the bed's side rail.
"You know, the sooner we get you out of here the better," Farid said.

---

"Dr. Faruqi says-­‐-­‐"-­‐
"I don't mean the hospital. I mean Peshawar."
"Why?"
"I don't think you'll be safe here for long," Farid said. He lowered his
voice.
"The Taliban have friends here. They will start looking for you."
"I think they already may have," I murmured. I thought suddenly of the
bearded man who'd wandered into the room and just stood there staring at me.
Farid leaned in. "As soon as you can walk, I'll take you to Islamabad. Not
entirely safe there either, no place in Pakistan is, but it's better than here. At least
it will buy you some time."
"Farid jan, this can't be safe for you either. Maybe you shouldn't be seen
with me. You have a family to take care of."
Farid made a waving gesture. "My boys are young, but they are very
shrewd. They know how to take care of their mothers and sisters." He smiled.
"Besides, I didn't say I'd do it for free."
"I wouldn't let you if you offered," I said. I forgot I couldn't smile and tried.
A tiny streak of blood trickled down my chin. "Can I ask you for one more favor?"
"For you a thousand times over," Farid said.
And, just like that, I was crying. I hitched gusts of air, tears gushing down
my cheeks, stinging the raw flesh of my lips.

---

"What's the matter?" Farid said, alarmed.
I buried my face in one hand and held up the other. I knew the whole
room was watching me. After, I felt tired, hollow. "I'm sorry," I said. Sohrab was
looking at me with a frown creasing his brow.
When I could talk again, I told Farid what I needed. "Rahim Khan said they
live here in Peshawar."
"Maybe you should write down their names," Farid said, eyeing me
cautiously, as if wondering what might set me off next. I scribbled their names on
a scrap of paper towel. "John and Betty Caldwell."
Farid pocketed the folded piece of paper. "I will look for them as soon as I
can," he said. He turned to Sohrab. "As for you, I'll pick you up this evening. Don't
tire Amir agha too much."
But Sohrab had wandered to the window, where a half-­‐dozen pigeons
strutted back and forth on the sill, pecking at wood and scraps of old bread.
IN THE MIDDLE DRAWER of the dresser beside my bed, I had found an old
_National Geographic_ magazine, a chewed-­‐up pencil, a comb with missing teeth,
and what I was reaching for now, sweat pouring down my face from the effort: a
deck of cards. I had counted them earlier and, surprisingly, found the deck
complete. I asked Sohrab if he wanted to play. I didn't expect him to answer, let
alone play. He'd been quiet since we had fled Kabul.
But he turned from the window and said, "The only game I know is
panjpar."
"I feel sorry for you already, because I am a grand master at panjpar.
World renowned."

---

He took his seat on the stool next to me. I dealt him his five cards. "When
your father and I were your age, we used to play this game. Especially in the
winter, when it snowed and we couldn't go outside. We used to play until the sun
went down."
He played me a card and picked one up from the pile. I stole looks at him
as he pondered his cards. He was his father in so many ways: the way he fanned
out his cards with both hands, the way he squinted while reading them, the way
he rarely looked a person in the eye.
We played in silence. I won the first game, let him win the next one, and
lost the next five fair and square. "You're as good as your father, maybe even
better," I said, after my last loss. "I used to beat him sometimes, but I think he let
me win." I paused before saying, "Your father and I were nursed by the same
woman."
"I know."
"What... what did he tell you about us?"
"That you were the best friend he ever had," he said.
I twirled the jack of diamonds in my fingers, flipped it back and forth. "I
wasn't such a good friend, I'm afraid," I said. "But I'd like to be your friend. I
think I could be a good friend to you. Would that be all right? Would you like
that?" I put my hand on his arm, gingerly, but he flinched. He dropped his cards
and pushed away on the stool. He walked back to the window. The sky was
awash with streaks of red and purple as the sun set on Peshawar. From the
street below came a succession of honks and the braying of a donkey, the whistle
of a policeman. Sohrab stood in that crimson light, forehead pressed to the glass,
fists buried in his armpits.
AISHA HAD A MALE ASSISTANT help me take my first steps that night. I only
walked around the room once, one hand clutching the wheeled IV stand, the

---

other clasping the assistant's fore arm. It took me ten minutes to make it back to
bed, and, by then, the incision on my stomach throbbed and I'd broken out in a
drenching sweat. I lay in bed, gasping, my heart hammering in my ears, thinking
how much I missed my wife.
Sohrab and I played panjpar most of the next day, again in silence. And
the day after that. We hardly spoke, just played panjpar, me propped in bed, he
on the three-­‐legged stool, our routine broken only by my taking a walk around
the room, or going to the bathroom down the hall. I had a dream later that night.
I dreamed Assef was standing in the doorway of my hospital room, brass ball still
in his eye socket. "We're the same, you and I," he was saying. "You nursed with
him, but you're my twin."
I TOLD ARMAND early that next day that I was leaving.
"It's still early for discharge," Armand protested. He wasn't dressed in
surgical scrubs that day, instead in a button-­‐down navy blue suit and yellow tie.
The gel was back in the hair. "You are still in intravenous antibiotics and-­‐-­‐"
"I have to go," I said. "I appreciate everything you've done for me, all of
you.
Really. But I have to leave."
"Where will you go?" Armand said.
"I'd rather not say."
"You can hardly walk."
"I can walk to the end of the hall and back," I said. "I'll be fine."

---

The plan was this: Leave the hospital. Get the money from the safe-­‐
deposit box and pay my medical bills. Drive to the orphanage and drop Sohrab
off with John and Betty Caldwell. Then get a ride to Islamabad and change travel
plans. Give myself a few more days to get better. Fly home.
That was the plan, anyway. Until Farid and Sohrab arrived that morning.
"Your friends, this John and Betty Caldwell, they aren't in Peshawar," Farid said.
It had taken me ten minutes just to slip into my pirhan tumban. My chest,
where they'd cut me to insert the chest tube hurt when I raised my arm, and my
stomach throbbed every time I leaned over. I was drawing ragged breaths just
from the effort of packing a few of my belongings into a brown paper bag. But I'd
managed to get ready and was sitting on the edge of the bed when Farid came in
with the news. Sohrab sat on the bed next to me.
"Where did they go?" I asked.
Farid shook his head. "You don't understand-­‐-­‐"
"Because Rahim Khan said-­‐-­‐"
"I went to the U.S. consulate," Farid said, picking up my bag. "There never
was a John and Betty Caldwell in Peshawar. According to the people at the
consulate, they never existed. Not here in Peshawar, anyhow."
Next to me, Sohrab was flipping through the pages of the old National
Geographic.
WE GOT THE MONEY from the bank. The manager, a paunchy man with sweat
patches under his arms, kept flashing smiles and telling me that no one in the
bank had touched the money.

---

"Absolutely nobody," he said gravely, swinging his index finger the same
way Armand had.
Driving through Peshawar with so much money in a paper bag was a
slightly frightening experience. Plus, I suspected every bearded man who stared
at me to be a Talib killer, sent by Assef. Two things compounded my fears: There
are a lot of bearded men in Peshawar, and everybody stares.
"What do we do with him?" Farid said, walking me slowly from the
hospital accounting office back to the car. Sohrab was in the backseat of the Land
Cruiser, looking at traffic through the rolled-­‐down window, chin resting on his
palms.
"He can't stay in Peshawar," I said, panting.
"Nay, Amir agha, he can't," Farid said. He'd read the question in my words.
"I'm sorry. I wish I-­‐-­‐"
"That's all right, Farid," I said. I managed a tired smile. "You have mouths
to feed." A dog was standing next to the truck now, propped on its rear legs,
paws on the truck's door, tail wagging. Sohrab was petting the dog. "I guess he
goes to Islamabad for now," I said.
I SLEPT THROUGH almost the entire four-­‐hour ride to Islamabad. I dreamed a
lot, and most of it I only remember as a hodgepodge of images, snippets of visual
memory flashing in my head like cards in a Rolodex: Baba marinating lamb for
my thirteenth birthday party. Soraya and I making love for the first time, the sun
rising in the east, our ears still ringing from the wedding music, her henna-­‐
painted hands laced in mine. The time Baba had taken Hassan and me to a
strawberry field in Jalalabad-­‐-­‐the owner had told us we could eat as much as we
wanted to as long as we bought at least four kilos-­‐-­‐and how we'd both ended up
with bellyaches. How dark, almost black, Hassan's blood had looked on the snow,
dropping from the seat of his pants. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem. Khala
Jamila patting Soraya's knee and saying, God knows best, maybe it wasn't meant
to be. Sleeping on the roof of my father's house. Baba saying that the only sin that
mattered was theft. When you tell a lie, you steal a man's right to the truth.

---

Rahim Khan on the phone, telling me there was a way to be good again. A way to
be good again...
TWENTY-­‐FOUR
If Peshawar was the city that reminded me of what Kabul used to be, then
Islamabad was the city Kabul could have become someday. The streets were
wider than Peshawar's, cleaner, and lined with rows of hibiscus and flame trees.
The bazaars were more organized and not nearly as clogged with rickshaws and
pedestrians. The architecture was more elegant too, more modern, and I saw
parks where roses and jasmine bloomed in the shadows of trees.
Farid found a small hotel on a side street running along the foot of the
Margalla Hills. We passed the famous Shah Faisal Mosque on the way there,
reputedly the biggest mosque in the world, with its giant concrete girders and
soaring minarets. Sohrab perked up at the sight of the mosque, leaned out of the
window and looked at it until Farid turned a corner.
THE HOTEL ROOM was a vast improvement over the one in Kabul where Farid
and I had stayed. The sheets were clean, the carpet vacuumed, and the bathroom
spotless. There was shampoo, soap, razors for shaving, a bathtub, and towels that
smelled like lemon. And no bloodstains on the walls. One other thing: a television
set sat on the dresser across from the two single beds.
"Look!" I said to Sohrab. I turned it on manually-­‐-­‐no remote-­‐-­‐and turned
the dial. I found a children's show with two fluffy sheep puppets singing in Urdu.

---

Sohrab sat on one of the beds and drew his knees to his chest. Images
from the TV reflected in his green eyes as he watched, stone-­‐faced, rocking back
and forth. I remembered the time I'd promised Hassan I'd buy his family a color
TV when we both grew up.
"I'll get going, Amir agha," Farid said.
"Stay the night," I said. "It's a long drive. Leave tomorrow."
"Tashakor," he said. "But I want to get back tonight. I miss my children."
On his way out of the room, he paused in the doorway. "Good-­‐bye, Sohrab jan,"
he said. He waited for a reply, but Sohrab paid him no attention. Just rocked back
and forth, his face lit by the silver glow of the images flickering across the screen.
Outside, I gave him an envelope. When he tore it, his mouth opened.
"I didn't know how to thank you," I said. "You've done so much for me."
"How much is in here?" Farid said, slightly dazed.
"A little over two thousand dollars."
"Two thou-­‐-­‐" he began. His lower lip was quivering a little. Later, when he
pulled away from the curb, he honked twice and waved. I waved back. I never
saw him again.
I returned to the hotel room and found Sohrab lying on the bed, curled up
in a big C. His eyes were closed but I couldn't tell if he was sleeping. He had shut
off the television. I sat on my bed and grimaced with pain, wiped the cool sweat
off my brow. I wondered how much longer it would hurt to get up, sit down, roll
over in bed. I wondered when I'd be able to eat solid food. I wondered what I'd
do with the wounded little boy lying on the bed, though a part of me already
knew.

---

There was a carafe of water on the dresser. I poured a glass and took two
of Armand's pain pills. The water was warm and bitter. I pulled the curtains,
eased myself back on the bed, and lay down. I thought my chest would rip open.
When the pain dropped a notch and I could breathe again, I pulled the blanket to
my chest and waited for Armand's pills to work.
WHEN I WOKE UP, the room was darker. The slice of sky peeking between the
curtains was the purple of twilight turning into night. The sheets were soaked
and my head pounded. I'd been dreaming again, but I couldn't remember what it
had been about.
My heart gave a sick lurch when I looked to Sohrab's bed and found it
empty I called his name. The sound of my voice startled me. It was disorienting,
sitting in a dark hotel room, thousands of miles from home, my body broken,
calling the name of a boy I'd only met a few days ago. I called his name again and
heard nothing. I struggled out of bed, checked the bathroom, looked in the
narrow hallway outside the room. He was gone.
I locked the door and hobbled to the manager's office in the lobby, one
hand clutching the rail along the walkway for support. There was a fake, dusty
palm tree in the corner of the lobby and flying pink flamingos on the wallpaper. I
found the hotel manager reading a newspaper behind the Formica-­‐topped check-­‐
in counter. I described Sohrab to him, asked if he'd seen him. He put down his
paper and took off his reading glasses. He had greasy hair and a square-­‐shaped
little mustache speckled with gray. He smelled vaguely of some tropical fruit I
couldn't quite recognize.
"Boys, they like to run around," he said, sighing. "I have three of them. All
day they are running around, troubling their mother." He fanned his face with
the newspaper, staring at my jaws.
"I don't think he's out running around," I said. "And we're not from here.
I'm afraid he might get lost."
He bobbed his head from side to side. "Then you should have kept an eye
on the boy, mister."

---

"I know," I said. "But I fell asleep and when I woke up, he was gone."
"Boys must be tended to, you know."
"Yes," I said, my pulse quickening. How could he be so oblivious to my
apprehension? He shifted the newspaper to his other hand, resumed the fanning.
"They want bicycles now"
"Who?"
"My boys," he said. "They're saying, 'Daddy, Daddy, please buy us bicycles
and we'll not trouble you. Please, Daddy!" He gave a short laugh through his
nose. "Bicycles. Their mother will kill me, I swear to you."
I imagined Sohrab lying in a ditch. Or in the trunk of some car, bound and
gagged. I didn't want his blood on my hands. Not his too. "Please..." I said. I
squinted. Read his name tag on the lapel of his short-­‐sleeve blue cotton shirt.
"Mr. Fayyaz, have you seen him?"
"The boy?"
I bit down. "Yes, the boy! The boy who came with me. Have you seen him
or not, for God's sake?"
The fanning stopped. His eyes narrowed. "No getting smart with me, my
friend. I am not the one who lost him."
That he had a point did not stop the blood from rushing to my face.
"You're right. I'm wrong. My fault. Now, have you seen him?"

---

"Sorry," he said curtly. He put his glasses back on. Snapped his newspaper
open.
"I have seen no such boy."
I stood at the counter for a minute, trying not to scream. As I was exiting
the lobby, he said, "Any idea where he might have wandered to?"
"No," I said. I felt tired. Tired and scared.
"Does he have any interests?" he said. I saw he had folded the paper. "My
boys, for example, they will do anything for American action films, especially
with that Arnold ??WThatsanegger-­‐-­‐"
"The mosque!" I said. "The big mosque." I remembered the way the
mosque had jolted Sohrab from his stupor when we'd driven by it, how he'd
leaned out of the window looking at it.
"Shah Faisal?"
"Yes. Can you take me there?"
"Did you know it's the biggest mosque in the world?" he asked.
"No, but-­‐-­‐"
"The courtyard alone can fit forty thousand people."
"Can you take me there?"
"It's only a kilometer from here," he said. But he was already pushing
away from the counter.

---

"I'll pay you for the ride," I said.
He sighed and shook his head. "Wait here." He disappeared into the back
room, returned wearing another pair of eyeglasses, a set of keys in hand, and
with a short, chubby woman in an orange sari trailing him. She took his seat
behind the counter. "I don't take your money," he said, blowing by me. "I will
drive you because I am a father like you."
I THOUGHT WE'D END UP DRIVING around the city until night fell. I saw myself
calling the police, describing Sohrab to them under Fayyaz's reproachful glare. I
heard the officer, his voice tired and uninterested, asking his obligatory
questions. And beneath the official questions, an unofficial one: Who the hell
cared about another dead Afghan kid? But we found him about a hundred yards
from the mosque, sitting in the half-­‐full parking lot, on an island of grass. Fayyaz
pulled up to the island and let me out. "I have to get back," he said.
"That's fine. We'll walk back," I said. "Thank you, Mr. Fayyaz. Really."
He leaned across the front seat when I got out. "Can I say something to
you?"
"Sure."
In the dark of twilight, his face was just a pair of eyeglasses reflecting the
fading light. "The thing about you Afghanis is that... well, you people are a little
reckless."
I was tired and in pain. My jaws throbbed. And those damn wounds on my
chest and stomach felt like barbed wire under my skin. But I started to laugh
anyway.
"What... what did I..." Fayyaz was saying, but I was cackling by then, full-­‐
throated bursts of laughter spilling through my wired mouth.

---

"Crazy people," he said. His tires screeched when he peeled away, his tail-­‐
lights blinking red in the dimming light.
"You GAVE ME A GOOD SCARE," I said. I sat beside him, wincing with pain
as I bent.
He was looking at the mosque. Shah Faisal Mosque was shaped like a
giant tent. Cars came and went; worshipers dressed in white streamed in and
out. We sat in silence, me leaning against the tree, Sohrab next to me, knees to his
chest. We listened to the call to prayer, watched the building's hundreds of lights
come on as daylight faded. The mosque sparkled like a diamond in the dark. It lit
up the sky, Sohrab's face.
"Have you ever been to Mazar-­‐i-­‐Sharif?" Sohrab said, his chin resting on
his kneecaps.
"A long time ago. I don't remember it much."
"Father took me there when I was little. Mother and Sasa came along too.
Father bought me a monkey from the bazaar. Not a real one but the kind you
have to blow up. It was brown and had a bow tie."
"I might have had one of those when I was a kid."
"Father took me to the Blue Mosque," Sohrab said. "I remember there
were so many pigeons outside the masjid, and they weren't afraid of people.
They came right up to us. Sasa gave me little pieces of _naan_ and I fed the birds.
Soon, there were pigeons cooing all around me. That was fun."
"You must miss your parents very much," I said. I wondered if he'd seen
the Taliban drag his parents out into the street. I hoped he hadn't.
"Do you miss your parents?" he asked, resting his cheek on his knees,
looking up at me.

---

"Do I miss my parents? Well, I never met my mother. My father died a few
years ago, and, yes, I do miss him. Sometimes a lot."
"Do you remember what he looked like?"
I thought of Baba's thick neck, his black eyes, his unruly brown hair.
Sitting on his lap had been like sitting on a pair of tree trunks. "I remember what
he looked like," I said. "What he smelled like too."
"I'm starting to forget their faces," Sohrab said. "Is that bad?"
"No," I said. "Time does that." I thought of something. I looked in the front
pocket of my coat. Found the Polaroid snap shot of Hassan and Sohrab. "Here," I
said.
He brought the photo to within an inch of his face, turned it so the light
from the mosque fell on it. He looked at it for a long time. I thought he might cry,
but he didn't. He just held it in both hands, traced his thumb over its surface. I
thought of a line I'd read somewhere, or maybe I'd heard someone say it: There
are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood. He stretched his hand to
give it back to me.
"Keep it," I said. "It's yours."
"Thank you." He looked at the photo again and stowed it in the pocket of
his vest. A horse-­‐drawn cart clip-­‐clopped by in the parking lot. Little bells
dangled from the horse's neck and jingled with each step.
"I've been thinking a lot about mosques lately," Sohrab said.
"You have? What about them?"

---

He shrugged. "Just thinking about them." He lifted his face, looked straight
at me. Now he was crying, softly, silently. "Can I ask you something, Amir agha?"
"Of course."
"Will God..." he began, and choked a little. "Will God put me in hell for
what I did to that man?"
I reached for him and he flinched. I pulled back. "Nay. Of course not," I
said. I wanted to pull him close, hold him, tell him the world had been unkind to
him, not the other way around.
His face twisted and strained to stay composed. "Father used to say it's
wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don't know any better, and because
bad people sometimes become good."
"Not always, Sohrab."
He looked at me questioningly.
"The man who hurt you, I knew him from many years ago," I said. "I guess
you figured that out that from the conversation he and I had. He... he tried to hurt
me once when I was your age, but your father saved me. Your father was very
brave and he was always rescuing me from trouble, standing up for me. So one
day the bad man hurt your father instead. He hurt him in a very bad way, and I... I
couldn't save your father the way he had saved me."
"Why did people want to hurt my father?" Sohrab said in a wheezy little
voice. "He was never mean to anyone."
"You're right. Your father was a good man. But that's what I'm trying to
tell you, Sohrab jan. That there are bad people in this world, and sometimes bad
people stay bad. Sometimes you have to stand up to them. What you did to that
man is what I should have done to him all those years ago. You gave him what he
deserved, and he deserved even more."

---

"Do you think Father is disappointed in me?"
"I know he's not," I said. "You saved my life in Kabul. I know he is very
proud of you for that."
He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. It burst a bubble of spittle
that had formed on his lips. He buried his face in his hands and wept a long time
before he spoke again. "I miss Father, and Mother too," he croaked. "And I miss
Sasa and Rahim Khan sahib. But sometimes I'm glad they're not ... they're not
here anymore."
"Why?" I touched his arm. He drew back.
"Because-­‐-­‐" he said, gasping and hitching between sobs, "because I don't
want them to see me... I'm so dirty." He sucked in his breath and let it out in a
long, wheezy cry. "I'm so dirty and full of sin."
"You're not dirty, Sohrab," I said.
"Those men-­‐-­‐"
"You're not dirty at all."
"-­‐-­‐they did things... the bad man and the other two... they did things... did
things to me."
"You're not dirty, and you're not full of sin." I touched his arm again and
he drew away. I reached again, gently, and pulled him to me. "I won't hurt you," I
whispered. "I promise." He resisted a little. Slackened. He let me draw him to me
and rested his head on my chest. His little body convulsed in my arms with each
sob.
A kinship exists between people who've fed from the same breast. Now,
as the boy's pain soaked through my shirt, I saw that a kinship had taken root

---

between us too. What had happened in that room with Assef had irrevocably
bound us.
I'd been looking for the right time, the right moment, to ask the question
that had been buzzing around in my head and keeping me up at night. I decided
the moment was now, right here, right now, with the bright lights of the house of
God shining on us.
"Would you like to come live in America with me and my wife?"
He didn't answer. He sobbed into my shirt and I let him.
FOR A WEEK, neither one of us mentioned what I had asked him, as if the
question hadn't been posed at all. Then one day, Sohrab and I took a taxicab to
the Daman-­‐e-­‐Koh Viewpoint-­‐-­‐or "the hem of the mountain." Perched midway up
the Margalla Hills, it gives a panoramic view of Islamabad, its rows of clean, tree-­‐
lined avenues and white houses. The driver told us we could see the presidential
palace from up there. "If it has rained and the air is clear, you can even see past
Rawalpindi," he said. I saw his eyes in his rearview mirror, skipping from Sohrab
to me, back and forth, back and forth. I saw my own face too. It wasn't as swollen
as before, but it had taken on a yellow tint from my assortment of fading bruises.
We sat on a bench in one of the picnic areas, in the shade of a gum tree. It
was a warm day, the sun perched high in a topaz blue sky. On benches nearby,
families snacked on samosas and pakoras. Somewhere, a radio played a Hindi
song I thought I remembered from an old movie, maybe Pakeeza. Kids, many of
them Sohrab's age, chased soccer balls, giggling, yelling. I thought about the
orphanage in Karteh-­‐Seh, thought about the rat that had scurried between my
feet in Zaman's office. My chest tightened with a surge of unexpected anger at the
way my countrymen were destroying their own land.
"What?" Sohrab asked. I forced a smile and told him it wasn't important.
We unrolled one of the hotel's bathroom towels on the picnic table and
played panjpar on it. It felt good being there, with my half brother's son, playing

---

cards, the warmth of the sun patting the back of my neck. The song ended and
another one started, one I didn't recognize.
"Look," Sohrab said. He was pointing to the sky with his cards. I looked
up, saw a hawk circling in the broad seamless sky. "Didn't know there were
hawks in Islamabad," I said.
"Me neither," he said, his eyes tracing the bird's circular flight. "Do they
have them where you live?"
"San Francisco? I guess so. I can't say I've seen too many, though."
"Oh," he said. I was hoping he'd ask more, but he dealt another hand and
asked if we could eat. I opened the paper bag and gave him his meatball
sandwich. My lunch consisted of yet another cup of blended bananas and
oranges-­‐-­‐I'd rented Mrs. Fayyaz's blender for the week. I sucked through the
straw and my mouth filled with the sweet, blended fruit. Some of it dripped from
the corner of my lips. Sohrab handed me a napkin and watched me dab at my
lips. I smiled and he smiled back.
"Your father and I were brothers," I said. It just came out. I had wanted to
tell him the night we had sat by the mosque, but I hadn't. But he had a right to
know; I didn't want to hide anything anymore. "Half brothers, really. We had the
same father."
Sohrab stopped chewing. Put the sandwich down. "Father never said he
had a brother."
"That's because he didn't know."
"Why didn't he know?"
"No one told him," I said. "No one told me either. I just found out
recently."

---

Sohrab blinked. Like he was looking at me, really looking at me, for the
very first time. "But why did people hide it from Father and you?"
"You know, I asked myself that same question the other day. And there's
an answer, but not a good one. Let's just say they didn't tell us because your
father and I... we weren't supposed to be brothers."
"Because he was a Hazara?"
I willed my eyes to stay on him. "Yes."
"Did your father," he began, eyeing his food, "did your father love you and
my father equally?"
I thought of a long ago day at Ghargha Lake, when Baba had allowed
himself to pat Hassan on the back when Hassan's stone had out skipped mine. I
pictured Baba in the hospital room, beaming as they removed the bandages from
Hassan's lips. "I think he loved us equally but differently."
"Was he ashamed of my father?"
"No," I said. "I think he was ashamed of himself."
He picked up his sandwich and nibbled at it silently.
WE LEFT LATE THAT AFTERNOON, tired from the heat, but tired in a pleasant
way. All the way back, I felt Sohrab watching me. I had the driver pull over at a
store that sold calling cards. I gave him the money and a tip for running in and
buying me one.

---

That night, we were lying on our beds, watching a talk show on TV. Two
clerics with pepper gray long beards and white turbans were taking calls from
the faithful all over the world. One caller from Finland, a guy named Ayub, asked
if his teenaged son could go to hell for wearing his baggy pants so low the seam
of his underwear showed.
"I saw a picture of San Francisco once," Sohrab said.
"Really?"
"There was a red bridge and a building with a pointy top."
"You should see the streets," I said.
"What about them?" He was looking at me now. On the TV screen, the two
mullahs were consulting each other.
"They're so steep, when you drive up all you see is the hood of your car
and the sky," I said.
"It sounds scary," he said. He rolled to his side, facing me, his back to the
TV.
"It is the first few times," I said. "But you get used to it."
"Does it snow there?"
"No, but we get a lot of fog. You know that red bridge you saw?"
"Yes."

---

"Sometimes the fog is so thick in the morning, all you see is the tip of the
two towers poking through."
There was wonder in his smile. "Oh."
"Sohrab?"
"Yes."
"Have you given any thought to what I asked you before?"
His smiled faded. He rolled to his back. Laced his hands under his head.
The mullahs decided that Ayub's son would go to hell after all for wearing his
pants the way he did. They claimed it was in the Haddith. "I've thought about it,"
Sohrab said.
"And?"
"It scares me."
"I know it's a little scary," I said, grabbing onto that loose thread of hope.
"But you'll learn English so fast and you'll get used to-­‐-­‐"
"That's not what I mean. That scares me too, but...
"But what?"
He rolled toward me again. Drew his knees up. "What if you get tired of
me? What if your wife doesn't like me?"

---

I struggled out of bed and crossed the space between us. I sat beside him.
"I won't ever get tired of you, Sohrab," I said. "Not ever. That's a promise. You're
my nephew, remember? And Soraya jan, she's a very kind woman. Trust me,
she's going to love you. I promise that too." I chanced something. Reached down
and took his hand. He tightened up a little but let me hold it.
"I don't want to go to another orphanage," he said.
"I won't ever let that happen. I promise you that." I cupped his hand in
both of mine. "Come home with me."
His tears were soaking the pillow. He didn't say anything for a long time.
Then his hand squeezed mine back. And he nodded. He nodded.
THE CONNECTION WENT THROUGH on the fourth try. The phone rang three
times before she picked it up. "Hello?" It was 7:30 in the evening in Islamabad,
roughly about the same time in the morning in California. That meant Soraya had
been up for an hour, getting ready for school.
"It's me," I said. I was sitting on my bed, watching Sohrab sleep.
"Amir!" she almost screamed. "Are you okay? Where are you?"
"I'm in Pakistan."
"Why didn't you call earlier? I've been sick with tashweesh! My mother's
praying and doing nazr every day."
"I'm sorry I didn't call. I'm fine now." I had told her I'd be away a week,
two at the most. I'd been gone for nearly a month. I smiled. "And tell Khala Jamila
to stop killing sheep."

---

"What do you mean 'fine now'? And what's wrong with your voice?"
"Don't worry about that for now. I'm fine. Really. Soraya, I have a story to
tell you, a story I should have told you a long time ago, but first I need to tell you
one thing."
"What is it?" she said, her voice lower now, more cautious.
"I'm not coming home alone. I'm bringing a little boy with me." I paused.
"I want us to adopt him."
"What?"
I checked my watch. "I have fifty-­‐seven minutes left on this stupid calling
card and I have so much to tell you. Sit some where." I heard the legs of a chair
dragged hurriedly across the wooden floor.
"Go ahead," she said.
Then I did what I hadn't done in fifteen years of marriage: I told my wife
everything. Everything. I had pictured this moment so many times, dreaded it,
but, as I spoke, I felt something lifting off my chest. I imagined Soraya had
experienced something very similar the night of our khastegari, when she'd told
me about her past.
By the time I was done with my story, she was weeping.
"What do you think?" I said.
"I don't know what to think, Amir. You've told me so much all at once."
"I realize that."

---

I heard her blowing her nose. "But I know this much: You have to bring
him home.
I want you to."
"Are you sure?" I said, closing my eyes and smiling.
"Am I sure?" she said. "Amir, he's your qaom, your family, so he's my
qaom too. Of course I'm sure. You can't leave him to the streets." There was a
short pause. "What's he like?"
I looked over at Sohrab sleeping on the bed. "He's sweet, in a solemn kind
of way."
"Who can blame him?" she said. "I want to see him, Amir. I really do."
"Soraya?"
"Yeah."
"Dostet darum." I love you.
"I love you back," she said. I could hear the smile in her words. "And be
careful."
"I will. And one more thing. Don't tell your parents who he is. If they need
to know, it should come from me."
"Okay."
We hung up.

---

THE LAWN OUTSIDE the American embassy in Islamabad was neatly mowed,
dotted with circular clusters of flowers, bordered by razor-­‐straight hedges. The
building itself was like a lot of buildings in Islamabad: flat and white. We passed
through several road blocks to get there and three different security officials
conducted a body search on me after the wires in my jaws set off the metal
detectors. When we finally stepped in from the heat, the air-­‐conditioning hit my
face like a splash of ice water. The secretary in the lobby, a fifty-­‐something, lean-­‐
faced blond woman, smiled when I gave her my name. She wore a beige blouse
and black slacks-­‐-­‐the first woman I'd seen in weeks dressed in something other
than a burqa or a shalwar-­‐kameez. She looked me up on the appointment list,
tapping the eraser end of her pencil on the desk. She found my name and asked
me to take a seat.
"Would you like some lemonade?" she asked.
"None for me, thanks," I said.
"How about your son?"
"Excuse me?"
"The handsome young gentleman," she said, smiling at Sohrab.
"Oh. That'd be nice, thank you."
Sohrab and I sat on the black leather sofa across the reception desk, next
to a tall American flag. Sohrab picked up a magazine from the glass-­‐top coffee
table. He flipped the pages, not really looking at the pictures.
"What?" Sohrab said.

---

"Sorry?"
"You're smiling."
"I was thinking about you," I said.
He gave a nervous smile. Picked up another magazine and flipped through
it in under thirty seconds.
"Don't be afraid," I said, touching his arm. "These people are friendly.
Relax." I could have used my own advice. I kept shifting in my seat, untying and
retying my shoelaces. The secretary placed a tall glass of lemonade with ice on
the coffee table. "There you go."
Sohrab smiled shyly. "Thank you very much," he said in English. It came
out as "Tank you wery match." It was the only English he knew, he'd told me, that
and "Have a nice day."
She laughed. "You're most welcome." She walked back to her desk, high
heels clicking on the floor.
"Have a nice day," Sohrab said.
RAYMOND ANDREWS was a short fellow with small hands, nails perfectly
trimmed, wedding band on the ring finger. He gave me a curt little shake; it felt
like squeezing a sparrow. Those are the hands that hold our fates, I thought as
Sohrab and I seated our selves across from his desk. A _Les Miserables_ poster
was nailed to the wall behind Andrews next to a topographical map of the U.S. A
pot of tomato plants basked in the sun on the windowsill.
"Smoke?" he asked, his voice a deep baritone that was at odds with his
slight stature.

---

"No thanks," I said, not caring at all for the way Andrews's eyes barely
gave Sohrab a glance, or the way he didn't look at me when he spoke. He pulled
open a desk drawer and lit a cigarette from a half-­‐empty pack. He also produced
a bottle of lotion from the same drawer. He looked at his tomato plants as he
rubbed lotion into his hands, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
Then he closed the drawer, put his elbows on the desktop, and exhaled. "So," he
said, crinkling his gray eyes against the smoke, "tell me your story."
I felt like Jean Valjean sitting across from Javert. I reminded myself that I
was on American soil now, that this guy was on my side, that he got paid for
helping people like me. "I want to adopt this boy, take him back to the States with
me," I said.
"Tell me your story," he repeated, crushing a flake of ash on the neatly
arranged desk with his index finger, flicking it into the trash can.
I gave him the version I had worked out in my head since I'd hung up with
Soraya. I had gone into Afghanistan to bring back my half brother's son. I had
found the boy in squalid conditions, wasting away in an orphanage. I had paid
the orphanage director a sum of money and withdrawn the boy. Then I had
brought him to Pakistan.
"You are the boy's half uncle?"
"Yes."
He checked his watch. Leaned and turned the tomato plants on the sill.
"Know anyone who can attest to that?"
"Yes, but I don't know where he is now."
He turned to me and nodded. I tried to read his face and couldn't. I
wondered if he'd ever tried those little hands of his at poker.

---

"I assume getting your jaws wired isn't the latest fashion statement," he
said. We were in trouble, Sohrab and I, and I knew it then. I told him I'd gotten
mugged in Peshawar.
"Of course," he said. Cleared his throat. "Are you Muslim?"
"Yes."
"Practicing?"
"Yes." In truth, I didn't remember the last time I had laid my forehead to
the ground in prayer. Then I did remember: the day Dr. Amani gave Baba his
prognosis. I had kneeled on the prayer rug, remembering only fragments of
verses I had learned in school.
"Helps your case some, but not much," he said, scratching a spot on the
flawless part in his sandy hair.
"What do you mean?" I asked. I reached for Sohrab's hand, intertwined
my fingers with his. Sohrab looked uncertainly from me to Andrews.
"There's a long answer and I'm sure I'll end up giving it to you. You want
the short one first?"
"I guess," I said.
Andrews crushed his cigarette, his lips pursed. "Give it up."
"I'm sorry?"
"Your petition to adopt this young fellow. Give it up. That's my advice to
you."

---

"Duly noted," I said. "Now, perhaps you'll tell me why."
"That means you want the long answer," he said, his voice impassive, not
reacting at all to my curt tone. He pressed his hands palm to palm, as if he were
kneeling before the Virgin Mary. "Let's assume the story you gave me is true,
though I'd bet my pension a good deal of it is either fabricated or omitted. Not
that I care, mind you. You're here, he's here, that's all that matters. Even so, your
petition faces significant obstacles, not the least of which is that this child is not
an orphan."
"Of course he is."
"Not legally he isn't."
"His parents were executed in the street. The neighbors saw it," I said,
glad we were speaking in English.
"You have death certificates?"
"Death certificates? This is Afghanistan we're talking about. Most people
there don't have birth certificates."
His glassy eyes didn't so much as blink. "I don't make the laws, sir. Your
outrage notwithstanding, you still need to prove the parents are deceased. The
boy has to be declared a legal orphan."
"But-­‐-­‐"
"You wanted the long answer and I'm giving it to you. Your next problem
is that you need the cooperation of the child's country of origin. Now, that's
difficult under the best of circumstances, and, to quote you, this is Afghanistan
we're talking about. We don't have an American embassy in Kabul. That makes
things extremely complicated. Just about impossible."
"What are you saying, that I should throw him back on the streets?" I said.

---

"I didn't say that."
"He was sexually abused," I said, thinking of the bells around Sohrab's
ankles, the mascara on his eyes.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Andrews's mouth said. The way he was looking at
me, though, we might as well have been talking about the weather. "But that is
not going to make the INS issue this young fellow a visa."
"What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that if you want to help, send money to a reputable relief
organization. Volunteer at a refugee camp. But at this point in time, we strongly
discourage U.S. citizens from attempting to adopt Afghan children."
I got up. "Come on, Sohrab," I said in Farsi. Sohrab slid next to me, rested
his head on my hip. I remembered the Polaroid of him and Hassan standing that
same way. "Can I ask you something, Mr. Andrews?"
"Yes."
"Do you have children?"
For the first time, he blinked.
"Well, do you? It's a simple question."
He was silent.
"I thought so," I said, taking Sohrab's hand. "They ought to put someone in
your chair who knows what it's like to want a child." I turned to go, Sohrab
trailing me.

---

"Can I ask you a question?" Andrews called.
"Go ahead."
"Have you promised this child you'll take him with you?"
"What if I have?"
He shook his head. "It's a dangerous business, making promises to kids."
He sighed and opened his desk drawer again. "You mean to pursue this?" he said,
rummaging through papers.
"I mean to pursue this."
He produced a business card. "Then I advise you to get a good
immigration lawyer. Omar Faisal works here in Islamabad. You can tell him I
sent you."
I took the card from him. "Thanks," I muttered.
"Good luck," he said. As we exited the room, I glanced over my shoulder.
Andrews was standing in a rectangle of sunlight, absently staring out the
window, his hands turning the potted tomato plants toward the sun, petting
them lovingly.
"TAKE CARE," the secretary said as we passed her desk.
"Your boss could use some manners," I said. I expected her to roll her
eyes, maybe nod in that "I know, everybody says that," kind of way. Instead, she
lowered her voice. "Poor Ray. He hasn't been the same since his daughter died."
I raised an eyebrow.

---

"Suicide," she whispered.
"I know it sounds crazy, but I find myself wondering what his favorite _qurma_
will be, or his favorite subject in school. I picture myself helping him with
homework..." She laughed. In the bathroom, the water had stopped running. I
could hear Sohrab in there, shifting in the tub, spilling water over the sides.
"You're going to be great," I said.
"Oh, I almost forgot! I called Kaka Sharif."
I remembered him reciting a poem at our nika from a scrap of hotel
stationery paper. His son had held the Koran over our heads as Soraya and I had
walked toward the stage, smiling at the flashing cameras. "What did he say?"
"Well, he's going to stir the pot for us. He'll call some of his INS buddies,"
she said.
"That's really great news," I said. "I can't wait for you to see Sohrab."
"I can't wait to see you," she said.
I hung up smiling.
ON THE TAXI RIDE back to the hotel, Sohrab rested his head on the window, kept
staring at the passing buildings, the rows of gum trees. His breath fogged the
glass, cleared, fogged it again. I waited for him to ask me about the meeting but
he didn't.

---

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the closed bathroom door the water was running. Since
the day we'd checked into the hotel, Sohrab took a long bath every night before
bed. In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity. Now
Sohrab spent almost an hour a night in the bath, soaking in the soapy water,
scrubbing. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I called Soraya. I glanced at the thin line
of light under the bathroom door. Do you feel clean yet, Sohrab? I passed on to
Soraya what Raymond Andrews had told me. "So what do you think?" I said.
"We have to think he's wrong." She told me she had called a few adoption
agencies that arranged international adoptions. She hadn't yet found one that
would consider doing an Afghan adoption, but she was still looking.
"How are your parents taking the news?"
"Madar is happy for us. You know how she feels about you, Amir, you can
do no wrong in her eyes. Padar... well, as always, he's a little harder to read. He's
not saying much."
"And you? Are you happy?"
I heard her shifting the receiver to her other hand. "I think we'll be good
for your nephew, but maybe that little boy will be good for us too."
"I was thinking the same thing."
Sohrab emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later. He had barely
said a dozen words since the meeting with Raymond Andrews and my attempts
at conversation had only met with a nod or a monosyllabic reply. He climbed into
bed, pulled the blanket to his chin. Within minutes, he was snoring.
I wiped a circle on the fogged-­‐up mirror and shaved with one of the
hotel's old-­‐fashioned razors, the type that opened and you slid the blade in. Then

---

I took my own bath, lay there until the steaming hot water turned cold and my
skin shriveled up. I lay there drifting, wondering, imagining...
OMAR FAISAL WAS CHUBBY, dark, had dimpled cheeks, black button eyes, and
an affable, gap-­‐toothed smile. His thinning gray hair was tied back in a ponytail.
He wore a brown corduroy suit with leather elbow patches and carried a worn,
overstuffed briefcase. The handle was missing, so he clutched the briefcase to his
chest. He was the sort of fellow who started a lot of sentences with a laugh and
an unnecessary apology, like I'm sorry, I'll be there at five. Laugh. When I had
called him, he had insisted on coming out to meet us. "I'm sorry, the cabbies in
this town are sharks," he said in perfect English, without a trace of an accent.
"They smell a foreigner, they triple their fares."
He pushed through the door, all smiles and apologies, wheezing a little
and sweating. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and opened his briefcase,
rummaged in it for a notepad and apologized for the sheets of paper that spilled
on the bed. Sitting cross-­‐legged on his bed, Sohrab kept one eye on the muted
television, the other on the harried lawyer. I had told him in the morning that
Faisal would be coming and he had nodded, almost asked something, and had
just gone on watching a show with talking animals.
"Here we are," Faisal said, flipping open a yellow legal notepad. "I hope
my children take after their mother when it comes to organization. I'm sorry,
probably not the sort of thing you want to hear from your prospective lawyer,
heh?" He laughed.
"Well, Raymond Andrews thinks highly of you."
"He did?"
"Oh yes.... So you're familiar with my situation?"
Faisal dabbed at the sweat beads above his lips. "I'm familiar with the
version of the situation you gave Mr. Andrews," he said. His cheeks dimpled with
a coy smile. He turned to Sohrab. "This must be the young man who's causing all
the trouble," he said in Farsi.

---

"This is Sohrab," I said. "Sohrab, this is Mr. Faisal, the lawyer I told you
about."
Sohrab slid down the side of his bed and shook hands with Omar Faisal.
"Salaam alaykum," he said in a low voice.
"Alaykum salaam, Sohrab," Faisal said. "Did you know you are named
after a great warrior?"
Sohrab nodded. Climbed back onto his bed and lay on his side to watch
TV.
"I didn't know you spoke Farsi so well," I said in English. "Did you grow
up in Kabul?"
"No, I was born in Karachi. But I did live in Kabul for a number of years.
Shar-­‐e-­‐Nau, near the Haji Yaghoub Mosque," Faisal said. "I grew up in Berkeley,
actually. My father opened a music store there in the late sixties. Free love,
headbands, tie-­‐dyed shirts, you name it." He leaned forward. "I was at
Woodstock."
"Groovy," I said, and Faisal laughed so hard he started sweating all over
again. "Anyway," I continued, "what I told Mr. Andrews was pretty much it, save
for a thing or two. Or maybe three. I'll give you the uncensored version."
He licked a finger and flipped to a blank page, uncapped his pen. "I'd
appreciate that, Amir. And why don't we just keep it in English from here on
out?"
"Fine."
I told him everything that had happened. Told him about my meeting with
Rahim Khan, the trek to Kabul, the orphanage, the stoning at Ghazi Stadium.

---

"God," he whispered. "I'm sorry, I have such fond memories of Kabul.
Hard to believe it's the same place you're telling me about."
"Have you been there lately?"
"God no."
"It's not Berkeley, I'll tell you that," I said.
"Go on."
I told him the rest, the meeting with Assef, the fight, Sohrab and his
slingshot, our escape back to Pakistan. When I was done, he scribbled a few
notes, breathed in deeply, and gave me a sober look. "Well, Amir, you've got a
tough battle ahead of you."
"One I can win?"
He capped his pen. "At the risk of sounding like Raymond Andrews, it's
not likely. Not impossible, but hardly likely." Gone was the affable smile, the
playful look in his eyes.
"But it's kids like Sohrab who need a home the most," I said. "These rules
and regulations don't make any sense to me."
"You're preaching to the choir, Amir," he said. "But the fact is, take current
immigration laws, adoption agency policies, and the political situation in
Afghanistan, and the deck is stacked against you."
"I don't get it," I said. I wanted to hit something. "I mean, I get it but I don't
get it."

---

Omar nodded, his brow furrowed. "Well, it's like this. In the aftermath of a
disaster, whether it be natural or man-­‐made-­‐-­‐and the Taliban are a disaster,
Amir, believe me-­‐-­‐it's always difficult to ascertain that a child is an orphan. Kids
get displaced in refugee camps, or parents just abandon them because they can't
take care of them. Happens all the time. So the INS won't grant a visa unless it's
clear the child meets the definition of an eligible orphan. I'm sorry, I know it
sounds ridiculous, but you need death certificates."
"You've been to Afghanistan," I said. "You know how improbable that is."
"I know," he said. "But let's suppose it's clear that the child has no
surviving parent. Even then, the INS thinks it's good adoption practice to place
the child with someone in his own country so his heritage can be preserved."
"What heritage?" I said. "The Taliban have destroyed what heritage
Afghans had.
You saw what they did to the giant Buddhas in Bamiyan."
"I'm sorry, I'm telling you how the INS works, Amir," Omar said, touching
my arm. He glanced at Sohrab and smiled. Turned back to me. "Now, a child has
to be legally adopted according to the laws and regulations of his own country.
But when you have a country in turmoil, say a country like Afghanistan,
government offices are busy with emergencies, and processing adoptions won't
be a top priority."
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. A pounding headache was settling in just
behind them.
"But let's suppose that somehow Afghanistan gets its act together," Omar
said, crossing his arms on his protruding belly. "It still may not permit this
adoption. In fact, even the more moderate Muslim nations are hesitant with
adoptions because in many of those countries, Islamic law, Shari'a, doesn't
recognize adoption."
"You're telling me to give it up?" I asked, pressing my palm to my
forehead.

---

"I grew up in the U.S., Amir. If America taught me anything, it's that
quitting is right up there with pissing in the Girl Scouts' lemonade jar. But, as
your lawyer, I have to give you the facts," he said. "Finally, adoption agencies
routinely send staff members to evaluate the child's milieu, and no reasonable
agency is going to send an agent to Afghanistan."
I looked at Sohrab sitting on the bed, watching TV, watching us. He was
sitting the way his father used to, chin resting on one knee.
"I'm his half uncle, does that count for anything?"
"It does if you can prove it. I'm sorry, do you have any papers or anyone
who can support you?"
"No papers," I said, in a tired voice. "No one knew about it. Sohrab didn't
know until I told him, and I myself didn't find out until recently. The only other
person who knows is gone, maybe dead."
"What are my options, Omar?"
"I'll be frank. You don't have a lot of them."
"Well, Jesus, what can I do?"
Omar breathed in, tapped his chin with the pen, let his breath out. "You
could still file an orphan petition, hope for the best. You could do an independent
adoption. That means you'd have to live with Sohrab here in Pakistan, day in and
day out, for the next two years. You could seek asylum on his behalf. That's a
lengthy process and you'd have to prove political persecution. You could request
a humanitarian visa. That's at the discretion of the attorney general and it's not
easily given." He paused. "There is another option, probably your best shot."
"What?" I said, leaning forward.

---

"You could relinquish him to an orphanage here, then file an orphan
petition.
Start your I-­‐600 form and your home study while he's in a safe place."
"What are those?"
"I'm sorry, the I-­‐600 is an INS formality. The home study is done by the
adoption agency you choose," Omar said. "It's, you know, to make sure you and
your wife aren't raving lunatics."
"I don't want to do that," I said, looking again at Sohrab. "I promised him I
wouldn't send him back to an orphanage."
"Like I said, it may be your best shot."
We talked a while longer. Then I walked him out to his car, an old VW Bug.
The sun was setting on Islamabad by then, a flaming red nimbus in the west. I
watched the car tilt under Omar's weight as he somehow managed to slide in
behind the wheel. He rolled down the window. "Amir?"
"Yes."
"I meant to tell you in there, about what you're trying to do? I think it's
pretty great."
He waved as he pulled away. Standing outside the hotel room and waving
back, I wished Soraya could be there with me.

---

SOHRAB HAD TURNED OFF THE TV when l went back into the room. I sat on the
edge of my bed, asked him to sit next to me. "Mr. Faisal thinks there is a way I can
take you to America with me," I said.
"He does?" Sohrab said, smiling faintly for the first time in days. "When
can we go?"
"Well, that's the thing. It might take a little while. But he said it can be
done and he's going to help us." I put my hand on the back of his neck. From
outside, the call to prayer blared through the streets.
"How long?" Sohrab asked.
"I don't know. A while."
Sohrab shrugged and smiled, wider this time. "I don't mind. I can wait. It's
like the sour apples."
"Sour apples?"
"One time, when I was really little, I climbed a tree and ate these green,
sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot.
Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become
sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said
about the apples."
"Sour apples," I said. "_Mashallah_, you're just about the smartest little
guy I've ever met, Sohrab jan." His ears reddened with a blush.
"Will you take me to that red bridge? The one with the fog?" he said.
"Absolutely," I said. "Absolutely."

---

"And we'll drive up those streets, the ones where all you see is the hood of
the car and the sky?"
"Every single one of them," I said. My eyes stung with tears and I blinked
them away.
"Is English hard to learn?"
"I say, within a year, you'll speak it as well as Farsi."
"Really?"
"Yes." I placed a finger under his chin, turned his face up to mine. "There
is one other thing, Sohrab."
"What?"
"Well, Mr. Faisal thinks that it would really help if we could... if we could
ask you to stay in a home for kids for a while."
"Home for kids?" he said, his smile fading. "You mean an orphanage?"
"It would only be for a little while."
"No," he said. "No, please."
"Sohrab, it would be for just a little while. I promise."
"You promised you'd never put me in one of those places, Amir agha," he
said.

---

His voice was breaking, tears pooling in his eyes. I felt like a prick.
"This is different. It would be here, in Islamabad, not in Kabul. And I'd
visit you all the time until we can get you out and take you to America."
"Please! Please, no!" he croaked. "I'm scared of that place. They'll hurt me!
I don't want to go."
"No one is going to hurt you. Not ever again."
"Yes they will! They always say they won't but they lie. They lie! Please,
God!"
I wiped the tear streaking down his cheek with my thumb. "Sour apples,
remember? It's just like the sour apples," I said softly.
"No it's not. Not that place. God, oh God. Please, no!" He was trembling,
snot and tears mixing on his face.
"Shhh." I pulled him close, wrapped my arms around his shaking little
body. "Shhh. It'll be all right. We'll go home together. You'll see, it'll be all right."
His voice was muffled against my chest, but I heard the panic in it. "Please
promise you won't! Oh God, Amir agha! Please promise you won't!"
How could I promise? I held him against me, held him tightly, and rocked
back and forth. He wept into my shirt until his tears dried, until his shaking
stopped and his frantic pleas dwindled to indecipherable mumbles. I waited,
rocked him until his breathing slowed and his body slackened. I remembered
something I had read somewhere a long time ago: That's how children deal with
terror. They fall asleep.
I carried him to his bed, set him down. Then I lay in my own bed, looking
out the window at the purple sky over Islamabad.

---

THE SKY WAS A DEEP BLACK when the phone jolted me from sleep. I rubbed my
eyes and turned on the bedside lamp. It was a little past 10:30 P.M.; I'd been
sleeping for almost three hours. I picked up the phone. "Hello?"
"Call from America." Mr. Fayyaz's bored voice.
"Thank you," I said. The bathroom light was on; Sohrab was taking his
nightly bath. A couple of clicks and then Soraya: "Salaam!" She sounded excited.
"How did the meeting go with the lawyer?"
I told her what Omar Faisal had suggested. "Well, you can forget about it,"
she said. "We won't have to do that."
I sat up. "Rawsti? Why, what's up?"
"I heard back from Kaka Sharif. He said the key was getting Sohrab into
the country. Once he's in, there are ways of keeping him here. So he made a few
calls to his INS friends. He called me back tonight and said he was almost certain
he could get Sohrab a humanitarian visa."
"No kidding?" I said. "Oh thank God! Good ol' Sharif jan!"
"I know. Anyway, we'll serve as the sponsors. It should all happen pretty
quickly. He said the visa would be good for a year, plenty of time to apply for an
adoption petition."
"It's really going to happen, Soraya, huh?"

---

"It looks like it," she said. She sounded happy. I told her I loved her and
she said she loved me back. I hung up.
"Sohrab!" I called, rising from my bed. "I have great news." I knocked on
the bathroom door. "Sohrab! Soraya jan just called from California. We won't
have to put you in the orphanage, Sohrab. We're going to America, you and I. Did
you hear me? We're going to America!"
I pushed the door open. Stepped into the bathroom.
Suddenly I was on my knees, screaming. Screaming through my clenched
teeth.
Screaming until I thought my throat would rip and my chest explode.
Later, they said I was still screaming when the ambulance arrived.
TWENTY-­‐FIVE
They won't let me in.
I see them wheel him through a set of double doors and I follow. I burst
through the doors, the smell of iodine and peroxide hits me, but all I have time to
see is two men wearing surgical caps and a woman in green huddling over a
gurney. A white sheet spills over the side of the gurney and brushes against
grimy checkered tiles. A pair of small, bloody feet poke out from under the sheet
and I see that the big toenail on the left foot is chipped. Then a tall, thickset man

---

in blue presses his palm against my chest and he's pushing me back out through
the doors, his wedding band cold on my skin. I shove forward and I curse him,
but he says you cannot be here, he says it in English, his voice polite but firm.
"You must wait," he says, leading me back to the waiting area, and now the
double doors swing shut behind him with a sigh and all I see is the top of the
men's surgical caps through the doors' narrow rectangular windows.
He leaves me in a wide, windowless corridor crammed with people sitting
on metallic folding chairs set along the walls, others on the thin frayed carpet. I
want to scream again, and I remember the last time I felt this way, riding with
Baba in the tank of the fuel truck, buried in the dark with the other refugees. I
want to tear myself from this place, from this reality rise up like a cloud and float
away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the
hills. But I am here, my legs blocks of concrete, my lungs empty of air, my throat
burning. There will be no floating away. There will be no other reality tonight. I
close my eyes and my nostrils fill with the smells of the corridor, sweat and
ammonia, rubbing alcohol and curry. On the ceiling, moths fling themselves at
the dull gray light tubes running the length of the corridor and I hear the papery
flapping of their wings. I hear chatter, muted sobbing, sniffling, someone
moaning, someone else sighing, elevator doors opening with a bing, the operator
paging someone in Urdu.
I open my eyes again and I know what I have to do. I look around, my
heart a jackhammer in my chest, blood thudding in my ears. There is a dark little
supply room to my left. In it, I find what I need. It will do. I grab a white bed sheet
from the pile of folded linens and carry it back to the corridor. I see a nurse
talking to a policeman near the restroom. I take the nurse's elbow and pull, I
want to know which way is west. She doesn't understand and the lines on her
face deepen when she frowns. My throat aches and my eyes sting with sweat,
each breath is like inhaling fire, and I think I am weeping. I ask again. I beg. The
policeman is the one who points.
I throw my makeshift _jai-­‐namaz_, my prayer rug, on the floor and I get on
my knees, lower my forehead to the ground, my tears soaking through the sheet.
I bow to the west. Then I remember I haven't prayed for over fifteen years. I have
long forgotten the words. But it doesn't matter, I will utter those few words I still
remember: ??La iflaha ii** Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah. There is no God but
Allah and Muhammad is His messenger. I see now that Baba was wrong, there is
a God, there always had been. I see Him here, in the eyes of the people in this
corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who
have lost God will find Him, not the white masjid with its bright diamond lights
and towering minarets. There is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will
pray that He forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I
have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my
hour of need, I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book

---

says He is. I bow to the west and kiss the ground and promise that I will do
_zakat_, I will do _namaz_, I will fast during Ramadan and when Ramadan has
passed I will go on fasting, I will commit to memory every last word of His holy
book, and I will set on a pilgrimage to that sweltering city in the desert and bow
before the Ka'bah too. I will do all of this and I will think of Him every day from
this day on if He only grants me this one wish: My hands are stained with
Hassan's blood; I pray God doesn't let them get stained with the blood of his boy
too.
I hear a whimpering and realize it is mine, my lips are salty with the tears
trickling down my face. I feel the eyes of everyone in this corridor on me and still
I bow to the west. I pray. I pray that my sins have not caught up with me the way
I'd always feared they would.
A STARLESS, BLACK NIGHT falls over Islamabad. It's a few hours later and I am
sitting now on the floor of a tiny lounge off the corridor that leads to the
emergency ward. Before me is a dull brown coffee table cluttered with
newspapers and dog-­‐eared magazines-­‐-­‐an April 1996 issue of Time; a Pakistani
newspaper showing the face of a young boy who was hit and killed by a train the
week before; an entertainment magazine with smiling Hollywood actors on its
glossy cover. There is an old woman wearing a jade green shalwar-­‐kameez and a
crocheted shawl nodding off in a wheelchair across from me. Every once in a
while, she stirs awake and mutters a prayer in Arabic. I wonder tiredly whose
prayers will be heard tonight, hers or mine. I picture Sohrab's face, the pointed
meaty chin, his small seashell ears, his slanting bamboo-­‐leaf eyes so much like
his father's. A sorrow as black as the night outside invades me, and I feel my
throat clamping.
I need air.
I get up and open the windows. The air coming through the screen is
musty and hot-­‐-­‐it smells of overripe dates and dung. I force it into my lungs in
big heaps, but it doesn't clear the clamping feeling in my chest. I drop back on the
floor. I pick up the Time magazine and flip through the pages. But I can't read,
can't focus on anything. So I toss it on the table and go back to staring at the
zigzagging pattern of the cracks on the cement floor, at the cobwebs on the
ceiling where the walls meet, at the dead flies littering the windowsill. Mostly, I
stare at the clock on the wall. It's just past 4 A.M. and I have been shut out of the
room with the swinging double doors for over five hours now. I still haven't
heard any news.

---

The floor beneath me begins to feel like part of my body, and my
breathing is growing heavier, slower. I want to sleep, shut my eyes and lie my
head down on this cold, dusty floor. Drift off. When I wake up, maybe I will
discover that everything I saw in the hotel bathroom was part of a dream: the
water drops dripping from the faucet and landing with a plink into the bloody
bath water; the left arm dangling over the side of the tub, the blood-­‐soaked razor
sitting on the toilet tank-­‐-­‐the same razor I had shaved with the day before-­‐-­‐and
his eyes, still half open but light less. That more than anything. I want to forget
the eyes.
Soon, sleep comes and I let it take me. I dream of things I can't remember
later.
SOMEONE IS TAPPING ME on the shoulder. I open my eyes. There is a man
kneeling beside me. He is wearing a cap like the men behind the swinging double
doors and a paper surgical mask over his mouth-­‐-­‐my heart sinks when I see a
drop of blood on the mask. He has taped a picture of a doe-­‐eyed little girl to his
beeper. He unsnaps his mask and I'm glad I don't have to look at Sohrab's blood
anymore. His skin is dark like the imported Swiss chocolate Hassan and I used to
buy from the bazaar in Shar-­‐e-­‐Nau; he has thinning hair and hazel eyes topped
with curved eyelashes. In a British accent, he tells me his name is Dr. Nawaz, and
suddenly I want to be away from this man, because I don't think I can bear to
hear what he has come to tell me. He says the boy had cut himself deeply and had
lost a great deal of blood and my mouth begins to mutter that prayer again: La
illaha il Allah, Muhammad u rasul ullah.
They had to transfuse several units of red cells-­‐-­‐How will I tell Soraya?
Twice, they had to revive him-­‐-­‐I will do _namaz_, I will do _zakat_.
They would have lost him if his heart hadn't been young and strong-­‐-­‐I will
fast.
He is alive.

---

Dr. Nawaz smiles. It takes me a moment to register what he has just said.
Then he says more but I don't hear him. Because I have taken his hands and I
have brought them up to my face. I weep my relief into this stranger's small,
meaty hands and he says nothing now. He waits.
THE INTENSIVE CARE UNIT is L-­‐shaped and dim, a jumble of bleeping monitors
and whirring machines. Dr. Nawaz leads me between two rows of beds separated
by white plastic curtains. Sohrab's bed is the last one around the corner, the one
nearest the nurses' station where two nurses in green surgical scrubs are jotting
notes on clipboards, chatting in low voices. On the silent ride up the elevator
with Dr. Nawaz, I had thought I'd weep again when I saw Sohrab. But when I sit
on the chair at the foot of his bed, looking at his white face through the tangle of
gleaming plastic tubes and IV lines, I am dry-­‐eyed. Watching his chest rise and
fall to the rhythm of the hissing ventilator, a curious numbness washes over me,
the same numbness a man might feel seconds after he has swerved his car and
barely avoided a head-­‐on collision.
I doze off, and, when I wake up, I see the sun rising in a buttermilk sky
through the window next to the nurses' station. The light slants into the room,
aims my shadow toward Sohrab. He hasn't moved.
"You'd do well to get some sleep," a nurse says to me. I don't recognize
her-­‐-­‐there must have been a shift change while I'd napped. She takes me to
another lounge, this one just outside the ICU. It's empty. She hands me a pillow
and a hospital-­‐issue blanket. I thank her and lie on the vinyl sofa in the corner of
the lounge. I fall asleep almost immediately.
I dream I am back in the lounge downstairs. Dr. Nawaz walks in and I rise
to meet him. He takes off his paper mask, his hands suddenly whiter than I
remembered, his nails manicured, he has neatly parted hair, and I see he is not
Dr. Nawaz at all but Raymond Andrews, the little embassy man with the potted
tomatoes. Andrews cocks his head. Narrows his eyes.
IN THE DAYTIME, the hospital was a maze of teeming, angled hallways, a blur of
blazing-­‐white overhead fluorescence. I came to know its layout, came to know

---

that the fourth-­‐floor button in the east wing elevator didn't light up, that the
door to the men's room on that same floor was jammed and you had to ram your
shoulder into it to open it. I came to know that hospital life has a rhythm, the
flurry of activity just before the morning shift change, the midday hustle, the
stillness and quiet of the late-­‐night hours interrupted occasionally by a blur of
doctors and nurses rushing to revive someone. I kept vigil at Sohrab's bedside in
the daytime and wandered through the hospital's serpentine corridors at night,
listening to my shoe heels clicking on the tiles, thinking of what I would say to
Sohrab when he woke up. I'd end up back in the ICU, by the whooshing ventilator
beside his bed, and I'd be no closer to knowing.
After three days in the ICU, they withdrew the breathing tube and
transferred him to a ground-­‐level bed. I wasn't there when they moved him. I
had gone back to the hotel that night to get some sleep and ended up tossing
around in bed all night. In the morning, I tried to not look at the bathtub. It was
clean now, someone had wiped off the blood, spread new floor mats on the floor,
and scrubbed the walls. But I couldn't stop myself from sitting on its cool,
porcelain edge. I pictured Sohrab filling it with warm water. Saw him undressing.
Saw him twisting the razor handle and opening the twin safety latches on the
head, sliding the blade out, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. I
pictured him lowering himself into the water, lying there for a while, his eyes
closed. I wondered what his last thought had been as he had raised the blade and
brought it down.
I was exiting the lobby when the hotel manager, Mr. Fayyaz, caught up
with me. "I am very sorry for you," he said, "but I am asking for you to leave my
hotel, please. This is bad for my business, very bad."
I told him I understood and I checked out. He didn't charge me for the
three days I'd spent at the hospital. Waiting for a cab outside the hotel lobby, I
thought about what Mr. Fayyaz had said to me that night we'd gone looking for
Sohrab: The thing about you Afghanis is that... well, you people are a little
reckless. I had laughed at him, but now I wondered. Had I actually gone to sleep
after I had given Sohrab the news he feared most? When I got in the cab, I asked
the driver if he knew any Persian bookstores. He said there was one a couple of
kilometers south. We stopped there on the way to the hospital.
SOHRAB'S NEW ROOM had cream-­‐colored walls, chipped, dark gray moldings,
and glazed tiles that might have once been white. He shared the room with a
teenaged Punjabi boy who, I later learned from one of the nurses, had broken his

---

leg when he had slipped off the roof of a moving bus. His leg was in a cast, raised
and held by tongs strapped to several weights.
Sohrab's bed was next to the window, the lower half lit by the late-­‐
morning sunlight streaming through the rectangular panes. A uniformed security
guard was standing at the window, munching on cooked watermelon seeds-­‐-­‐
Sohrab was under twenty-­‐four hours-­‐a-­‐day suicide watch. Hospital protocol, Dr.
Nawaz had informed me. The guard tipped his hat when he saw me and left the
room.
Sohrab was wearing short-­‐sleeved hospital pajamas and lying on his back,
blanket pulled to his chest, face turned to the window. I thought he was sleeping,
but when I scooted a chair up to his bed his eyelids fluttered and opened. He
looked at me, then looked away. He was so pale, even with all the blood they had
given him, and there was a large purple bruise in the crease of his right arm.
"How are you?" I said.
He didn't answer. He was looking through the window at a fenced-­‐in
sandbox and swing set in the hospital garden. There was an arch-­‐shaped trellis
near the playground, in the shadow of a row of hibiscus trees, a few green vines
climbing up the timber lattice. A handful of kids were playing with buckets and
pails in the sand box. The sky was a cloudless blue that day, and I saw a tiny jet
leaving behind twin white trails. I turned back to Sohrab. "I spoke to Dr. Nawaz a
few minutes ago and he thinks you'll be discharged in a couple of days. That's
good news, nay?"
Again I was met by silence. The Punjabi boy at the other end of the room
stirred in his sleep and moaned something. "I like your room," I said, trying not
to look at Sohrab's bandaged wrists. "It's bright, and you have a view." Silence. A
few more awkward minutes passed, and a light sweat formed on my brow, my
upper lip. I pointed to the untouched bowl of green pea aush on his nightstand,
the unused plastic spoon. "You should try to eat something. Gain your quwat
back, your strength. Do you want me to help you?"
He held my glance, then looked away, his face set like stone. His eyes were
still lightless, I saw, vacant, the way I had found them when I had pulled him out
of the bathtub. I reached into the paper bag between my feet and took out the
used copy of the Shah Namah I had bought at the Persian bookstore. I turned the
cover so it faced Sohrab. "I used to read this to your father when we were
children. We'd go up the hill by our house and sit beneath the pomegranate..." I

---

trailed off. Sohrab was looking through the window again. I forced a smile. "Your
father's favorite was the story of Rostam and Sohrab and that's how you got your
name, I know you know that." I paused, feeling a bit like an idiot. "Any way, he
said in his letter that it was your favorite too, so I thought I'd read you some of it.
Would you like that?"
Sohrab closed his eyes. Covered them with his arm, the one with the
bruise.
I flipped to the page I had bent in the taxicab. "Here we go," I said,
wondering for the first time what thoughts had passed through Hassan's head
when he had finally read the _Shahnamah_ for himself and discovered that I had
deceived him all those times. I cleared my throat and read. "Give ear unto the
combat of Sohrab against Rostam, though it be a tale replete with tears," I began.
"It came about that on a certain day Rostam rose from his couch and his mind
was filled with forebodings. He bethought him..." I read him most of chapter 1, up
to the part where the young warrior Sohrab comes to his mother, Tahmineh, the
princess of Samengan, and demands to know the identity of his father. I closed
the book. "Do you want me to go on? There are battles coming up, remember?
Sohrab leading his army to the White Castle in Iran? Should I read on?"
He shook his head slowly. I dropped the book back in the paper bag.
"That's fine," I said, encouraged that he had responded at all. "Maybe we can
continue tomorrow. How do you feel?"
Sohrab's mouth opened and a hoarse sound came out. Dr. Nawaz had told
me that would happen, on account of the breathing tube they had slid through
his vocal cords. He licked his lips and tried again. "Tired."
"I know. Dr. Nawaz said that was to be expected-­‐-­‐" He was shaking his
head.
"What, Sohrab?"
He winced when he spoke again in that husky voice, barely above a
whisper.
"Tired of everything."

---

I sighed and slumped in my chair. There was a band of sunlight on the bed
between us, and, for just a moment, the ashen gray face looking at me from the
other side of it was a dead ringer for Hassan's, not the Hassan I played marbles
with until the mullah belted out the evening azan and Ali called us home, not the
Hassan I chased down our hill as the sun dipped behind clay rooftops in the west,
but the Hassan I saw alive for the last time, dragging his belongings behind Ali in
a warm summer downpour, stuffing them in the trunk of Baba's car while I
watched through the rain-­‐soaked window of my room.
He gave a slow shake of his head. "Tired of everything," he repeated.
"What can I do, Sohrab? Please tell me."
"I want-­‐-­‐" he began. He winced again and brought his hand to his throat as
if to clear whatever was blocking his voice. My eyes were drawn again to his
wrist wrapped tightly with white gauze bandages. "I want my old life back," he
breathed.
"Oh, Sohrab."
"I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim
Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house again." He dragged his
forearm across his eyes. "I want my old life back."
I didn't know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands.
Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard, Sohrab. I lived
in the same house. But the grass is dead and a stranger's jeep is parked in the
driveway of our house, pissing oil all over the asphalt. Our old life is gone,
Sohrab, and everyone in it is either dead or dying. It's just you and me now. Just
you and me.
"I can't give you that," I said.
"I wish you hadn't-­‐-­‐"

---

"Please don't say that."
"-­‐-­‐wish you hadn't... I wish you had left me in the water."
"Don't ever say that, Sohrab," I said, leaning forward. "I can't bear to hear
you talk like that." I touched his shoulder and he flinched. Drew away. I dropped
my hand, remembering ruefully how in the last days before I'd broken my
promise to him he had finally become at ease with my touch. "Sohrab, I can't give
you your old life back, I wish to God I could. But I can take you with me. That was
what I was coming in the bathroom to tell you. You have a visa to go to America,
to live with me and my wife. It's true. I promise."
He sighed through his nose and closed his eyes. I wished I hadn't said
those last two words. "You know, I've done a lot of things I regret in my life," I
said, "and maybe none more than going back on the promise I made you. But that
will never happen again, and I am so very profoundly sorry. I ask for your
bakhshesh, your forgiveness. Can you do that? Can you forgive me? Can you
believe me?" I dropped my voice. "Will you come with me?"
As I waited for his reply, my mind flashed back to a winter day from long
ago, Hassan and I sitting on the snow beneath a leafless sour cherry tree. I had
played a cruel game with Hassan that day, toyed with him, asked him if he would
chew dirt to prove his loyalty to me. Now I was the one under the microscope,
the one who had to prove my worthiness. I deserved this.
Sohrab rolled to his side, his back to me. He didn't say anything for a long
time. And then, just as I thought he might have drifted to sleep, he said with a
croak, "I am so khasta." So very tired. I sat by his bed until he fell asleep.
Something was lost between Sohrab and me. Until my meeting with the lawyer,
Omar Faisal, a light of hope had begun to enter Sohrab's eyes like a timid guest.
Now the light was gone, the guest had fled, and I wondered when it would dare
return. I wondered how long before Sohrab smiled again. How long before he
trusted me. If ever.
So I left the room and went looking for another hotel, unaware that
almost a year would pass before I would hear Sohrab speak another word.

---

IN THE END, Sohrab never accepted my offer. Nor did he decline it. But he knew
that when the bandages were removed and the hospital garments returned, he
was just another homeless Hazara orphan. What choice did he have? Where
could he go? So what I took as a yes from him was in actuality more of a quiet
surrender, not so much an acceptance as an act of relinquishment by one too
weary to decide, and far too tired to believe. What he yearned for was his old life.
What he got was me and America. Not that it was such a bad fate, everything
considered, but I couldn't tell him that. Perspective was a luxury when your head
was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.
And so it was that, about a week later, we crossed a strip of warm, black
tarmac and I brought Hassan's son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from
the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty.
ONE DAY, maybe around 1983 or 1984, I was at a video store in Fremont. I was
standing in the Westerns section when a guy next to me, sipping Coke from a 7-­‐
Eleven cup, pointed to _The Magnificent Seven_ and asked me if I had seen it.
"Yes, thirteen times," I said. "Charles Bronson dies in it, so do James Coburn and
Robert Vaughn." He gave me a pinch-­‐faced look, as if I had just spat in his soda.
"Thanks a lot, man," he said, shaking his head and muttering something as he
walked away. That was when I learned that, in America, you don't reveal the
ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be scorned and made to apologize
profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.
In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan and I came
home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba,
or the myriad of Baba's friends-­‐-­‐second and third cousins milling in and out of
the house-­‐-­‐wanted to know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did
the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become katnyab and fulfill his dreams, or
was he nah-­‐kam, doomed to wallow in failure? Was there happiness at the end,
they wanted to know.
If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab,
and me ends with happiness, I wouldn't know what to say.

---

Does anybody's? After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara,
Afghans like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab, nah-­‐kam,
crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis.
I wouldn't know how to answer that question. Despite the matter of last
Sunday's tiny miracle.
WE ARRIVED HOME about seven months ago, on a warm day in August 2001.
Soraya picked us up at the airport. I had never been away from Soraya for so
long, and when she locked her arms around my neck, when I smelled apples in
her hair, I realized how much I had missed her. "You're still the morning sun to
my yelda," I whispered.
"What?"
"Never mind." I kissed her ear.
After, she knelt to eye level with Sohrab. She took his hand and smiled at
him.
"Salaam, Sohrab jan, I'm your Khala Soraya. We've all been waiting for
you."
Looking at her smiling at Sohrab, her eyes tearing over a little, I had a
glimpse of the mother she might have been, had her own womb not betrayed her.
Sohrab shifted on his feet and looked away.

---

SORAYA HAD TURNED THE STUDY upstairs into a bedroom for Sohrab. She led
him in and he sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets showed brightly colored
kites flying in indigo blue skies. She had made inscriptions on the wall by the
closet, feet and inches to measure a child's growing height. At the foot of the bed,
I saw a wicker basket stuffed with books, a locomotive, a water color set.
Sohrab was wearing the plain white T-­‐shirt and new denims I had bought
him in Islamabad just before we'd left-­‐-­‐the shirt hung loosely over his bony,
slumping shoulders. The color still hadn't seeped back into his face, save for the
halo of dark circles around his eyes. He was looking at us now in the impassive
way he looked at the plates of boiled rice the hospital orderly placed before him.
Soraya asked if he liked his room and I noticed that she was trying to
avoid looking at his wrists and that her eyes kept swaying back to those jagged
pink lines. Sohrab lowered his head. Hid his hands under his thighs and said
nothing.
Then he simply lay his head on the pillow. Less than five minutes later,
Soraya and I watching from the doorway, he was snoring.
We went to bed, and Soraya fell asleep with her head on my chest. In the
darkness of our room, I lay awake, an insomniac once more. Awake. And alone
with demons of my own. Sometime in the middle of the night, I slid out of bed
and went to Sohrab's room. I stood over him, looking down, and saw something
protruding from under his pillow. I picked it up. Saw it was Rahim Khan's
Polaroid, the one I had given to Sohrab the night we had sat by the Shah Faisal
Mosque. The one of Hassan and Sohrab standing side by side, squinting in the
light of the sun, and smiling like the world was a good and just place. I wondered
how long Sohrab had lain in bed staring at the photo, turning it in his hands.
I looked at the photo. Your father was a man torn between two halves,
Rahim Khan had said in his letter. I had been the entitled half, the society-­‐
approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment of Baba's guilt. I looked at
Hassan, showing those two missing front teeth, sunlight slanting on his face.
Baba's other half. The unentitled, unprivileged half. The half who had inherited
what had been pure and noble in Baba. The half that, maybe, in the most secret
recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son.
I slipped the picture back where I had found it. Then I realized something:
That last thought had brought no sting with it. Closing Sohrab's door, I wondered
if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with

---

pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the
middle of the night.
THE GENERAL AND KHALA JAMILA came over for dinner the following night.
Khala Jamila, her hair cut short and a darker shade of red than usual, handed
Soraya the plate of almond-­‐topped maghout she had brought for dessert. She
saw Sohrab and beamed. "_Mashallah_!" Soraya jan told us how khoshteep you
were, but you are even more handsome in person, Sohrab jan." She handed him a
blue turtleneck sweater. "I knitted this for you," she said. "For next winter.
_Inshallah_, it will fit you."
Sohrab took the sweater from her.
"Hello, young man," was all the general said, leaning with both hands on
his cane, looking at Sohrab the way one might study a bizarre decorative item at
someone's house.
I answered, and answered again, Khala Jamila's questions about my
injuries-­‐-­‐I'd asked Soraya to tell them I had been mugged-­‐-­‐reassuring her that I
had no permanent damage, that the wires would come out in a few weeks so I'd
be able to eat her cooking again, that, yes, I would try rubbing rhubarb juice and
sugar on my scars to make them fade faster.
The general and I sat in the living room and sipped wine while Soraya and
her mother set the table. I told him about Kabul and the Taliban. He listened and
nodded, his cane on his lap, and tsk'ed when I told him of the man I had spotted
selling his artificial leg. I made no mention of the executions at Ghazi Stadium
and Assef. He asked about Rahim Khan, whom he said he had met in Kabul a few
times, and shook his head solemnly when I told him of Rahim Khan's illness. But
as we spoke, I caught his eyes drifting again and again to Sohrab sleeping on the
couch. As if we were skirting around the edge of what he really wanted to know.
The skirting finally came to an end over dinner when the general put
down his fork and said, "So, Amir jan, you're going to tell us why you have
brought back this boy with you?"

---

"Iqbal jan! What sort of question is that?" Khala Jamila said.
"While you're busy knitting sweaters, my dear, I have to deal with the
community's perception of our family. People will ask. They will want to know
why there is a Hazara boy living with our daughter. What do I tell them?"
Soraya dropped her spoon. Turned on her father. "You can tell them-­‐-­‐"
"It's okay, Soraya," I said, taking her hand. "It's okay. General Sahib is
quite right. People will ask."
"Amir-­‐-­‐" she began.
"It's all right." I turned to the general. "You see, General Sahib, my father
slept with his servant's wife. She bore him a son named Hassan. Hassan is dead
now. That boy sleeping on the couch is Hassan's son. He's my nephew. That's
what you tell people when they ask."
They were all staring at me.
"And one more thing, General Sahib," I said. "You will never again refer to
him as 'Hazara boy' in my presence. He has a name and it's Sohrab."
No one said anything for the remainder of the meal.
IT WOULD BE ERRONEOUS to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquillity.
Quiet is turning down the VOLUME knob on life.
Silence is pushing the OFF button. Shutting it down. All of it.

---

Sohrab's silence wasn't the self-­‐imposed silence of those with convictions,
of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the
silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and
tucked them under.
He didn't so much live with us as occupy space. And precious little of it.
Sometimes, at the market, or in the park, I'd notice how other people hardly
seemed to even see him, like he wasn't there at all. I'd look up from a book and
realize Sohrab had entered the room, had sat across from me, and I hadn't
noticed. He walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints. He moved as if
not to stir the air around him. Mostly, he slept.
Sohrab's silence was hard on Soraya too. Over that long-­‐distance line to
Pakistan, Soraya had told me about the things she was planning for Sohrab.
Swimming classes. Soccer. Bowling league. Now she'd walk past Sohrab's room
and catch a glimpse of books sitting unopened in the wicker basket, the growth
chart unmarked, the jigsaw puzzle unassembled, each item a reminder of a life
that could have been. A reminder of a dream that was wilting even as it was
budding. But she hadn't been alone. I'd had my own dreams for Sohrab.
While Sohrab was silent, the world was not. One Tuesday morning last
September, the Twin Towers came crumbling down and, overnight, the world
changed. The American flag suddenly appeared everywhere, on the antennae of
yellow cabs weaving around traffic, on the lapels of pedestrians walking the
sidewalks in a steady stream, even on the grimy caps of San Francisco's pan
handlers sitting beneath the awnings of small art galleries and open-­‐fronted
shops. One day I passed Edith, the homeless woman who plays the accordion
every day on the corner of Sutter and Stockton, and spotted an American flag
sticker on the accordion case at her feet.
Soon after the attacks, America bombed Afghanistan, the Northern
Alliance moved in, and the Taliban scurried like rats into the caves. Suddenly,
people were standing in grocery store lines and talking about the cities of my
childhood, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-­‐i-­‐Sharif. When I was very little, Baba took
Hassan and me to Kunduz. I don't remember much about the trip, except sitting
in the shade of an acacia tree with Baba and Hassan, taking turns sipping fresh
watermelon juice from a clay pot and seeing who could spit the seeds farther.
Now Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and people sipping lattes at Starbucks were
talking about the battle for Kunduz, the Taliban's last stronghold in the north.
That December, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras gathered in Bonn and,
under the watchful eye of the UN, began the process that might someday end

---

over twenty years of unhappiness in their watan. Hamid Karzai's caracul hat and
green chapan became famous.
Sohrab sleepwalked through it all.
Soraya and I became involved in Afghan projects, as much out of a sense
of civil duty as the need for something-­‐-­‐anything-­‐-­‐to fill the silence upstairs, the
silence that sucked everything in like a black hole. I had never been the active
type before, but when a man named Kabir, a former Afghan ambassador to Sofia,
called and asked if I wanted to help him with a hospital project, I said yes. The
small hospital had stood near the Afghan-­‐Pakistani border and had a small
surgical unit that treated Afghan refugees with land mine injuries. But it had
closed down due to a lack of funds. I became the project manager, Soraya my co-­‐
manager. I spent most of my days in the study, e-­‐mailing people around the
world, applying for grants, organizing fund-­‐raising events. And telling myself
that bringing Sohrab here had been the right thing to do.
The year ended with Soraya and me on the couch, blanket spread over our
legs, watching Dick Clark on TV. People cheered and kissed when the silver ball
dropped, and confetti whitened the screen. In our house, the new year began
much the same way the last one had ended. In silence.
THEN, FOUR DAYS AGO, on a cool rainy day in March 2002, a small, wondrous
thing happened.
I took Soraya, Khala Jamila, and Sohrab to a gathering of Afghans at Lake
Elizabeth Park in Fremont. The general had finally been summoned to
Afghanistan the month before for a ministry position, and had flown there two
weeks earlier-­‐-­‐he had left behind his gray suit and pocket watch. The plan was
for Khala Jamila to join him in a few months once he had settled. She missed him
terribly-­‐-­‐and worried about his health there-­‐-­‐and we had insisted she stay with
us for a while.
The previous Thursday, the first day of spring, had been the Afghan New
Year's Day-­‐-­‐the Sawl-­‐e-­‐Nau-­‐-­‐and Afghans in the Bay Area had planned
celebrations throughout the East Bay and the peninsula. Kabir, Soraya, and I had
an additional reason to rejoice: Our little hospital in Rawalpindi had opened the

---

week before, not the surgical unit, just the pediatric clinic. But it was a good start,
we all agreed.
It had been sunny for days, but Sunday morning, as I swung my legs out of
bed, I heard raindrops pelting the window. Afghan luck, I thought. Snickered. I
prayed morning _namaz_ while Soraya slept-­‐-­‐I didn't have to consult the prayer
pamphlet I had obtained from the mosque anymore; the verses came naturally
now, effortlessly.
We arrived around noon and found a handful of people taking cover
under a large rectangular plastic sheet mounted on six poles spiked to the
ground. Someone was already frying bolani; steam rose from teacups and a pot
of cauliflower aush. A scratchy old Ahmad Zahir song was blaring from a cassette
player. I smiled a little as the four of us rushed across the soggy grass field,
Soraya and I in the lead, Khala Jamila in the middle, Sohrab behind us, the hood
of his yellow raincoat bouncing on his back.
"What's so funny?" Soraya said, holding a folded newspaper over her
head.
"You can take Afghans out of Paghman, but you can't take Paghman out of
Afghans," I said.
We stooped under the makeshift tent. Soraya and Khala Jamila drifted
toward an overweight woman frying spinach bolani. Sohrab stayed under the
canopy for a moment, then stepped back out into the rain, hands stuffed in the
pockets of his raincoat, his hair-­‐-­‐now brown and straight like Hassan's-­‐-­‐
plastered against his scalp. He stopped near a coffee-­‐colored puddle and stared
at it. No one seemed to notice. No one called him back in. With time, the queries
about our adopted-­‐-­‐and decidedly eccentric-­‐-­‐little boy had mercifully ceased,
and, considering how tactless Afghan queries can be sometimes, that was a
considerable relief. People stopped asking why he never spoke. Why he didn't
play with the other kids. And best of all, they stopped suffocating us with their
exaggerated empathy, their slow head shaking, their tsk tsks, their "Oh gung
bichara." Oh, poor little mute one. The novelty had worn off. Like dull wallpaper,
Sohrab had blended into the background.
I shook hands with Kabir, a small, silver-­‐haired man. He introduced me to
a dozen men, one of them a retired teacher, another an engineer, a former
architect, a surgeon who was now running a hot dog stand in Hayward. They all
said they'd known Baba in Kabul, and they spoke about him respectfully. In one

---

way or another, he had touched all their lives. The men said I was lucky to have
had such a great man for a father.
We chatted about the difficult and maybe thankless job Karzai had in
front of him, about the upcoming Loya jirga, and the king's imminent return to
his homeland after twenty-­‐eight years of exile. I remembered the night in 1973,
the night Zahir Shah's cousin overthrew him; I remembered gunfire and the sky
lighting up silver-­‐-­‐Ali had taken me and Hassan in his arms, told us not to be
afraid, that they were just shooting ducks.
Then someone told a Mullah Nasruddin joke and we were all laughing.
"You know, your father was a funny man too," Kabir said.
"He was, wasn't he?" I said, smiling, remembering how, soon after we
arrived in the U.S., Baba started grumbling about American flies. He'd sit at the
kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies darting from wall to wall,
buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed. "In this country, even flies are
pressed for time," he'd groan. How I had laughed. I smiled at the memory now.
By three o'clock, the rain had stopped and the sky was a curdled gray
burdened with lumps of clouds. A cool breeze blew through the park. More
families turned up. Afghans greeted each other, hugged, kissed, exchanged food.
Someone lighted coal in a barbecue and soon the smell of garlic and morgh
kabob flooded my senses. There was music, some new singer I didn't know, and
the giggling of children. I saw Sohrab, still in his yellow raincoat, leaning against
a garbage pail, staring across the park at the empty batting cage.
A little while later, as I was chatting with the former surgeon, who told me
he and Baba had been classmates in eighth grade, Soraya pulled on my sleeve.
"Amir, look!"
She was pointing to the sky. A half-­‐dozen kites were flying high, speckles
of bright yellow, red, and green against the gray sky.
"Check it out," Soraya said, and this time she was pointing to a guy selling
kites from a stand nearby.

---

"Hold this," I said. I gave my cup of tea to Soraya. I excused myself and
walked over to the kite stand, my shoes squishing on the wet grass. I pointed to a
yellow seh-­‐parcha. "Sawl-­‐e-­‐Nau mubabrak," the kite seller said, taking the
twenty and handing me the kite and a wooden spool of glass tar. I thanked him
and wished him a Happy New Year too. I tested the string the way Hassan and I
used to, by holding it between my thumb and forefinger and pulling it. It
reddened with blood and the kite seller smiled. I smiled back.
I took the kite to where Sohrab was standing, still leaning against the
garbage pail, arms crossed on his chest. He was looking up at the sky.
"Do you like the seh-­‐parcha?" I said, holding up the kite by the ends of the
cross bars. His eyes shifted from the sky to me, to the kite, then back. A few
rivulets of rain trickled from his hair, down his face.
"I read once that, in Malaysia, they use kites to catch fish," I said. "I'll bet
you didn't know that. They tie a fishing line to it and fly it beyond the shallow
waters, so it doesn't cast a shadow and scare the fish. And in ancient China,
generals used to fly kites over battlefields to send messages to their men. It's
true. I'm not slipping you a trick." I showed him my bloody thumb. "Nothing
wrong with the tar either."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Soraya watching us from the tent.
Hands tensely dug in her armpits. Unlike me, she'd gradually abandoned her
attempts at engaging him. The unanswered questions, the blank stares, the
silence, it was all too painful. She had shifted to "Holding Pattern," waiting for a
green light from Sohrab. Waiting.
I wet my index finger and held it up. "I remember the way your father
checked the wind was to kick up dust with his sandal, see which way the wind
blew it. He knew a lot of little tricks like that," I said. Lowered my finger. "West, I
think."
Sohrab wiped a raindrop from his earlobe and shifted on his feet. Said
nothing. I thought of Soraya asking me a few months ago what his voice sounded
like. I'd told her I didn't remember anymore.

---

"Did I ever tell you your father was the best kite runner in Wazir Akbar
Khan? Maybe all of Kabul?" I said, knotting the loose end of the spool tar to the
string loop tied to the center spar. "How jealous he made the neighborhood kids.
He'd run kites and never look up at the sky, and people used to say he was
chasing the kite's shadow. But they didn't know him like I did. Your father wasn't
chasing any shadows. He just... knew" Another half-­‐dozen kites had taken flight.
People had started to gather in clumps, teacups in hand, eyes glued to the sky.
"Do you want to help me fly this?" I said.
Sohrab's gaze bounced from the kite to me. Back to the sky.
"Okay." I shrugged. "Looks like I'll have to fly it tanhaii." Solo.
I balanced the spool in my left hand and fed about three feet of tar. The
yellow kite dangled at the end of it, just above the wet grass. "Last chance," I said.
But Sohrab was looking at a pair of kites tangling high above the trees.
"All right. Here I go." I took off running, my sneakers splashing rainwater
from puddles, the hand clutching the kite end of the string held high above my
head. It had been so long, so many years since I'd done this, and I wondered if I'd
make a spectacle of myself. I let the spool roll in my left hand as I ran, felt the
string cut my right hand again as it fed through. The kite was lifting behind my
shoulder now, lifting, wheeling, and I ran harder. The spool spun faster and the
glass string tore another gash in my right palm. I stopped and turned. Looked up.
Smiled. High above, my kite was tilting side to side like a pendulum, making that
old paper-­‐bird-­‐flapping-­‐its-­‐wings sound I always associated with winter
mornings in Kabul. I hadn't flown a kite in a quarter of a century, but suddenly I
was twelve again and all the old instincts came rushing back.
I felt a presence next to me and looked down. It was Sohrab. Hands dug
deep in the pockets of his raincoat. He had followed me.
"Do you want to try?" I asked. He said nothing. But when I held the string
out for him, his hand lifted from his pocket. Hesitated. Took the string. My heart
quickened as I spun the spool to gather the loose string. We stood quietly side by
side. Necks bent up.

---

Around us, kids chased each other, slid on the grass. Someone was playing
an old Hindi movie soundtrack now. A line of elderly men were praying
afternoon _namaz_ on a plastic sheet spread on the ground. The air smelled of
wet grass, smoke, and grilled meat. I wished time would stand still.
Then I saw we had company. A green kite was closing in. I traced the
string to a kid standing about thirty yards from us. He had a crew cut and a T-­‐
shirt that read THE ROCK RULES in bold block letters. He saw me looking at him
and smiled. Waved. I waved back.
Sohrab was handing the string back to me.
"Are you sure?" I said, taking it.
He took the spool from me.
"Okay," I said. "Let's give him a sabagh, teach him a lesson, nay?" I glanced
over at him. The glassy, vacant look in his eyes was gone. His gaze flitted
between our kite and the green one. His face was a little flushed, his eyes
suddenly alert. Awake. Alive. I wondered when I had forgotten that, despite
everything, he was still just a child.
The green kite was making its move. "Let's wait," I said. "We'll let him get
a little closer." It dipped twice and crept toward us. "Come on. Come to me," I
said.
The green kite drew closer yet, now rising a little above us, unaware of
the trap I'd set for it. "Watch, Sohrab. I'm going to show you one of your father's
favorite tricks, the old lift-­‐and-­‐dive."
Next to me, Sohrab was breathing rapidly through his nose. The spool
rolled in his palms, the tendons in his scarred wrists like rubab strings. Then I
blinked and, for just a moment, the hands holding the spool were the chipped-­‐
nailed, calloused hands of a harelipped boy. I heard a crow cawing somewhere
and I looked up. The park shimmered with snow so fresh, so dazzling white, it
burned my eyes. It sprinkled soundlessly from the branches of white-­‐clad trees. I

---

smelled turnip qurina now. Dried mulberries. Sour oranges. Sawdust and
walnuts. The muffled quiet, snow-­‐quiet, was deafening. Then far away, across the
stillness, a voice calling us home, the voice of a man who dragged his right leg.
The green kite hovered directly above us now. "He's going for it. Anytime
now," I said, my eyes flicking from Sohrab to our kite.
The green kite hesitated. Held position. Then shot down. "Here he comes!"
I said.
I did it perfectly. After all these years. The old lift-­‐and-­‐dive trap. I
loosened my grip and tugged on the string, dipping and dodging the green kite. A
series of quick sidearm jerks and our kite shot up counterclockwise, in a half
circle. Suddenly I was on top. The green kite was scrambling now, panic-­‐stricken.
But it was too late. I'd already slipped him Hassan's trick. I pulled hard and our
kite plummeted. I could almost feel our string sawing his. Almost heard the snap.
Then, just like that, the green kite was spinning and wheeling out of
control.
Behind us, people cheered. Whistles and applause broke out. I was
panting. The last time I had felt a rush like this was that day in the winter of
1975, just after I had cut the last kite, when I spotted Baba on our rooftop,
clapping, beaming.
I looked down at Sohrab. One corner of his mouth had curled up just so.
A smile.
Lopsided.
Hardly there.
But there.

---

Behind us, kids were scampering, and a melee of screaming kite runners
was chasing the loose kite drifting high above the trees. I blinked and the smile
was gone. But it had been there. I had seen it.
"Do you want me to run that kite for you?"
His Adam's apple rose and fell as he swallowed. The wind lifted his hair. I
thought I saw him nod.
"For you, a thousand times over," I heard myself say.
Then I turned and ran.
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It
didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods,
shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight.
But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the
snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.
I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But I
didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the
Valley of Panjsher on my lips.
I ran.
The End

---

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
I am indebted to the following colleagues for their advice, assistance, or support:
Dr. Alfred Lerner, Don Vakis, Robin Heck, Dr. Todd Dray, Dr. Robert Tull, and Dr.
Sandy Chun. Thanks also to Lynette Parker of East San Jose Community Law
Center for her advice about adoption procedures, and to Mr. Daoud Wahab for
sharing his experiences in Afghanistan with me. I am grateful to my dear friend
Tamim Ansary for his guidance and support and to the gang at the San Francisco
Writers Workshop for their feed back and encouragement. I want to thank my
father, my oldest friend and the inspiration for all that is noble in Baba; my
mother who prayed for me and did nazr at every stage of this book's writing; my
aunt for buying me books when I was young. Thanks go out to Ali, Sandy, Daoud,
Walid, Raya, Shalla, Zahra, Rob, and Kader for reading my stories. I want to thank
Dr. and Mrs. Kayoumy-­‐-­‐my other parents-­‐-­‐for their warmth and unwavering
support.
I must thank my agent and friend, Elaine Koster, for her wisdom, patience,
and gracious ways, as well as Cindy Spiegel, my keen-­‐eyed and judicious editor
who helped me unlock so many doors in this tale. And I would like to thank
Susan Petersen Kennedy for taking a chance on this book and the hardworking
staff at Riverhead for laboring over it.
Last, I don't know how to thank my lovely wife, Roya-­‐-­‐to whose opinion I
am addicted-­‐-­‐for her kindness and grace, and for reading, re-­‐reading, and
helping me edit every single draft of this novel. For your patience and
understanding, I will always love you, Roya jan.
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