The Kite Runner (17 page)

Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people’s
lives. My whole life, I had been “Baba’s son.” Now he was gone. Baba couldn’t show me the way anymore; I’d have to find it
on my own.

The thought of it terrified me.

Earlier, at the gravesite in the small Muslim section of the cemetery, I had watched them lower Baba into the hole. The mullah
and another man got into an argument over which was the correct
ayat
of the Koran to recite at the gravesite. It might have turned ugly had General Taheri not intervened. The mullah chose an
ayat
and recited it, casting the other fellow nasty glances. I watched them toss the first shovelful of dirt into the grave. Then
I left. Walked to the other side of the cemetery. Sat in the shade of a red maple.

Now the last of the mourners had paid their respects and the mosque was empty, save for the mullah unplugging the microphone
and wrapping his Koran in green cloth. The general and I stepped out into a late-afternoon sun. We walked down the steps,
past men smoking in clusters. I heard snippets of their conversations, a soccer game in Union City next weekend, a new Afghan
restaurant in Santa Clara. Life moving on already, leaving Baba behind.

“How are you,
bachem
?” General Taheri said.

I gritted my teeth. Bit back the tears that had threatened all day.

“I’m going to find Soraya,” I said.

“Okay.”

I walked to the women’s side of the mosque. Soraya was standing on the steps with her mother and a couple of ladies I recognized
vaguely from the wedding. I motioned to Soraya. She said something to her mother and came to me.

“Can we walk?” I said.

“Sure.” She took my hand.

We walked in silence down a winding gravel path lined by a row of low hedges. We sat on a bench and watched an elderly couple
kneeling beside a grave a few rows away and placing a bouquet of daisies by the headstone. “Soraya?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to miss him.”

She put her hand on my lap. Baba’s
chila
glinted on her ring finger. Behind her, I could see Baba’s mourners driving away on Mission Boulevard. Soon we’d leave too,
and for the first time ever, Baba would be all alone.

Soraya pulled me to her and the tears finally came.

BECAUSE SORAYA AND I never had an engagement period, much of what I learned about the Taheris I learned after I married into
their family. For example, I learned that, once a month, the general suffered from blinding migraines that lasted almost a
week. When the headaches struck, the general went to his room, undressed, turned off the light, locked the door, and didn’t
come out until the pain subsided. No one was allowed to go in, no one was allowed to knock. Eventually, he would emerge, dressed
in his gray suit once more, smelling of sleep and bedsheets, his eyes puffy and bloodshot. I learned from Soraya that he and
Khanum Taheri had slept in separate rooms for as long as she could remember. I learned that he could be petty, such as when
he’d take a bite of the
qurma
his wife placed before him, sigh, and push it away. “I’ll make you something else,” Khanum Taheri would say, but he’d ignore
her, sulk, and eat bread and onion. This made Soraya angry and her mother cry. Soraya told me he took antidepressants. I learned
that he had kept his family on welfare and had never held a job in the U.S., preferring to cash government-issued checks than
degrading himself with work unsuitable for a man of his stature—he saw the flea market only as a hobby, a way to socialize
with his fellow Afghans. The general believed that, sooner or later, Afghanistan would be freed, the monarchy restored, and
his services would once again be called upon. So every day, he donned his gray suit, wound his pocket watch, and waited.

I learned that Khanum Taheri—whom I called Khala Jamila now—had once been famous in Kabul for her enchanting singing voice.
Though she had never sung professionally, she had had the talent to—I learned she could sing folk songs,
ghazal
s, even raga, which was usually a man’s domain. But as much as the general appreciated listening to music—he owned, in fact,
a considerable collection of classical
ghazal
tapes by Afghan and Hindi singers—he believed the performing of it best left to those with lesser reputations. That she never
sing in public had been one of the general’s conditions when they had married. Soraya told me that her mother had wanted to
sing at our wedding, only one song, but the general gave her one of his looks and the matter was buried. Khala Jamila played
the lotto once a week and watched Johnny Carson every night. She spent her days in the garden, tending to her roses, geraniums,
potato vines, and orchids.

When I married Soraya, the flowers and Johnny Carson took a backseat. I was the new delight in Khala Jamila’s life. Unlike
the general’s guarded and diplomatic manners—he didn’t correct me when I continued to call him “General Sahib”—Khala Jamila
made no secret of how much she adored me. For one thing, I listened to her impressive list of maladies, something the general
had long turned a deaf ear to. Soraya told me that, ever since her mother’s stroke, every flutter in her chest was a heart
attack, every aching joint the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, and every twitch of the eye another stroke. I remember the first
time Khala Jamila mentioned a lump in her neck to me. “I’ll skip school tomorrow and take you to the doctor,” I said, to which
the general smiled and said, “Then you might as well turn in your books for good,
bachem.
Your khala’s medical charts are like the works of Rumi: They come in volumes.”

But it wasn’t just that she’d found an audience for her monologues of illness. I firmly believed that if I had picked up a
rifle and gone on a murdering rampage, I would have still had the benefit of her unblinking love. Because I had rid her heart
of its gravest malady. I had relieved her of the greatest fear of every Afghan mother: that no honorable
khastegar
would ask for her daughter’s hand. That her daughter would age alone, husbandless, childless. Every woman needed a husband.
Even if he did silence the song in her.

And, from Soraya, I learned the details of what had happened in Virginia.

We were at a wedding. Soraya’s uncle, Sharif, the one who worked for the INS, was marrying his son to an Afghan girl from
Newark. The wedding was at the same hall where, six months prior, Soraya and I had had our
awroussi.
We were standing in a crowd of guests, watching the bride accept rings from the groom’s family, when we overheard two middle-aged
women talking, their backs to us.

“What a lovely bride,” one of them said, “Just look at her. So
maghbool,
like the moon.”

“Yes,” the other said. “And pure too. Virtuous. No boyfriends.”

“I know. I tell you that boy did well not to marry his cousin.”

Soraya broke down on the way home. I pulled the Ford off to the curb, parked under a streetlight on Fremont Boulevard.

“It’s all right,” I said, pushing back her hair. “Who cares?”

“It’s so fucking unfair,” she barked.

“Just forget it.”

“Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no
one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they’re just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking
nang
and
namoos,
and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.”

I wiped a tear from her jawline, just above her birthmark, with the pad of my thumb.

“I didn’t tell you,” Soraya said, dabbing at her eyes, “but my father showed up with a gun that night. He told . . . him .
. . that he had two bullets in the chamber, one for him and one for himself if I didn’t come home. I was screaming, calling
my father all kinds of names, saying he couldn’t keep me locked up forever, that I wished he were dead.” Fresh tears squeezed
out between her lids. “I actually said that to him, that I wished he were dead.

“When he brought me home, my mother threw her arms around me and she was crying too. She was saying things but I couldn’t
understand any of it because she was slurring her words so badly. So my father took me up to my bedroom and sat me in front
of the dresser mirror. He handed me a pair of scissors and calmly told me to cut off all my hair. He watched while I did it.

“I didn’t step out of the house for weeks. And when I did, I heard whispers or imagined them everywhere I went. That was four
years ago and three thousand miles away and I’m still hearing them.”

“Fuck ’em,” I said.

She made a sound that was half sob, half laugh. “When I told you about this on the phone the night of
khastegari,
I was sure you’d change your mind.”

“No chance of that, Soraya.”

She smiled and took my hand. “I’m so lucky to have found you. You’re so different from every Afghan guy I’ve met.”

“Let’s never talk about this again, okay?”

“Okay.”

I kissed her cheek and pulled away from the curb. As I drove, I wondered why I was different. Maybe it was because I had been
raised by men; I hadn’t grown up around women and had never been exposed firsthand to the double standard with which Afghan
society sometimes treated them. Maybe it was because Baba had been such an unusual Afghan father, a liberal who had lived
by his own rules, a maverick who had disregarded or embraced societal customs as he had seen fit.

But I think a big part of the reason I didn’t care about Soraya’s past was that I had one of my own. I knew all about regret.

SHORTLY AFTER BABA’S DEATH, Soraya and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Fremont, just a few blocks away from the general
and Khala Jamila’s house. Soraya’s parents bought us a brown leather couch and a set of Mikasa dishes as housewarming presents.
The general gave me an additional present, a brand-new IBM typewriter. In the box, he had slipped a note written in Farsi:

Amir jan, I hope you discover many tales on these keys.

General Iqbal Taheri

I sold Baba’s VW bus and, to this day, I have not gone back to the flea market. I would drive to his gravesite every Friday,
and, sometimes, I’d find a fresh bouquet of freesias by the headstone and know Soraya had been there too.

Soraya and I settled into the routines—and minor wonders—of married life. We shared toothbrushes and socks, passed each other
the morning paper. She slept on the right side of the bed, I preferred the left. She liked fluffy pillows, I liked the hard
ones. She ate her cereal dry, like a snack, and chased it with milk.

I got my acceptance at San Jose State that summer and declared an English major. I took on a security job, swing shift at
a furniture warehouse in Sunnyvale. The job was dreadfully boring, but its saving grace was a considerable one: When everyone
left at 6 P.M. and shadows began to crawl between aisles of plastic-covered sofas piled to the ceiling, I took out my books
and studied. It was in the Pine-Sol-scented office of that furniture warehouse that I began my first novel.

Soraya joined me at San Jose State the following year and enrolled, to her father’s chagrin, in the teaching track.

“I don’t know why you’re wasting your talents like this,” the general said one night over dinner. “Did you know, Amir jan,
that she earned nothing but A’s in high school?” He turned to her. “An intelligent girl like you could become a lawyer, a
political scientist. And,
Inshallah,
when Afghanistan is free, you could help write the new constitution. There would be a need for young talented Afghans like
you. They might even offer you a ministry position, given your family name.”

I could see Soraya holding back, her face tightening. “I’m not a girl, Padar. I’m a married woman. Besides, they’d need teachers
too.”

“Anyone can teach.”

“Is there any more rice,
Madar
?” Soraya said.

After the general excused himself to meet some friends in Hayward, Khala Jamila tried to console Soraya. “He means well,”
she said. “He just wants you to be successful.”

“So he can boast about his attorney daughter to his friends. Another medal for the general,” Soraya said.

“Such nonsense you speak!”

“Successful,” Soraya hissed. “At least I’m not like him, sitting around while other people fight the
Shorawi,
waiting for when the dust settles so he can move in and reclaim his posh little government position. Teaching may not pay
much, but it’s what I want to do! It’s what I love, and it’s a whole lot better than collecting welfare, by the way.”

Khala Jamila bit her tongue. “If he ever hears you saying that, he will never speak to you again.”

“Don’t worry,” Soraya snapped, tossing her napkin on the plate. “I won’t bruise his precious ego.”

IN THE SUMMER of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son
story set in Kabul, written mostly with the typewriter the general had given me. I sent query letters to a dozen agencies
and was stunned one August day when I opened our mailbox and found a request from a New York agency for the completed manuscript.
I mailed it the next day. Soraya kissed the carefully wrapped manuscript and Khala Jamila insisted we pass it under the Koran.
She told me that she was going to do
nazr
for me, a vow to have a sheep slaughtered and the meat given to the poor if my book was accepted.

“Please, no
nazr,
Khala jan,” I said, kissing her face. “Just do
zakat,
give the money to someone in need, okay? No sheep killing.”

Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt called from New York and offered to represent me. I only told Soraya about it.
“But just because I have an agent doesn’t mean I’ll get published. If Martin sells the novel, then we’ll celebrate.”

A month later, Martin called and informed me I was going to be a published novelist. When I told Soraya, she screamed.

We had a celebration dinner with Soraya’s parents that night. Khala Jamila made
kofta
—meatballs and white rice—and white
ferni.
The general, a sheen of moisture in his eyes, said that he was proud of me. After General Taheri and his wife left, Soraya
and I celebrated with an expensive bottle of Merlot I had bought on the way home—the general did not approve of women drinking
alcohol, and Soraya didn’t drink in his presence.