Page 109 - The Kite Runner

98 Khaled Hosseini

just sat in the dark for a while, knees drawn to my chest, looking
up at the stars, waiting for the night to be over.
“Shouldn’t you be entertaining your guests?” a familiar voice
said. Rahim Khan was walking toward me along the wall.
“They don’t need me for that. Baba’s there, remember?” I said.
The ice in Rahim Khan’s drink clinked when he sat next to me. “I
didn’t know you drank.”
“Turns out I do,” he said. Elbowed me playfully. “But only on
the most important occasions.”
I smiled. “Thanks.”
He tipped his drink to me and took a sip. He lit a cigarette,
one of the unfiltered Pakistani cigarettes he and Baba were always
smoking. “Did I ever tell you I was almost married once?”
“Really?” I said, smiling a little at the notion of Rahim Khan
getting married. I’d always thought of him as Baba’s quiet alter
ego, my writing mentor, my pal, the one who never forgot to bring
me a souvenir, a saughat, when he returned from a trip abroad.
But a husband? A father?
He nodded. “It’s true. I was eighteen. Her name was Homaira.
She was a Hazara, the daughter of our neighbor’s servants. She was
as beautiful as a pari, light brown hair, big hazel eyes ...she had
this laugh . . . I can still hear it sometimes.” He twirled his glass. “We
used to meet secretly in my father’s apple orchards, always after
midnight when everyone had gone to sleep. We’d walk under the
trees and I’d hold her hand . . . Am I embarrassing you, Amir jan?”
“A little,” I said.
“It won’t kill you,” he said, taking another puff. “Anyway, we
had this fantasy. We’d have a great, fancy wedding and invite fam-
ily and friends from Kabul to Kandahar. I would build us a big
house, white with a tiled patio and large windows. We would plant
fruit trees in the garden and grow all sorts of flowers, have a lawn