The Kite Runner: Chapters 13–19

As words from the Koran reverberated through the room, I thought of the old story of Baba wrestling a black bear in Baluchistan.

For one thing, I listened to her impressive list of maladies, something the general had long turned a deaf ear to. Soraya told me that, ever since her mother’s stroke, every flutter in her chest was a heart attack, every aching joint the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, and every twitch of the eye another stroke.

By then, Khala Jamila’s initially subtle hints had become overt, as in "Kho dega!” So! “When am I going to sing alahoo for my little nawasa?”

We’d talked at home about adoption. Soraya was ambivalent at best.

The general’s frailty—and time—had softened things between him and Soraya too.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: “Avoid them like the plague.” Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on.

But I am not surrendering to fate here, I am being pragmatic. I have seen several good doctors here and they have given the same answer. I trust them and believe them.

Other than that, he had those same narrow green eyes, that scar on his upper lip, that round face, that affable smile.

You have a zendagi, a life here. It was presumptuous of me to just show up and ask you to drop everything.

The pretext was that they had evicted a trespasser. Hassan’s and Farzana’s murders were dismissed as a case of self-defense.

But in its stead, I felt like a man who awakens in his own house and finds all the furniture rearranged, so that every familiar nook and cranny looks foreign now. Disoriented, he has to reevaluate his surroundings, reorient himself.

Two Pakistani militia approached our dilapidated Land Cruiser, took a cursory glance inside, and waved us on.

I was afraid I’d deliberate, ruminate, agonize, rationalize, and talk myself into not going.

Pine trees flanked the road, fewer than I remembered and many of them bare, but it was good to see trees again after the arduous drive through the Khyber Pass.

“What brings them all back to Afghanistan, dear brother?” Farid said, speaking to Wahid but fixing me with a contemptuous gaze.