Page 142 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 131

and nobody’s ever done this,” she said. And that was how Baba
ended those humiliating food stamp moments at the cash register
and alleviated one of his greatest fears: that an Afghan would see
him buying food with charity money. Baba walked out of the wel-
fare office like a man cured of a tumor.

That summer of 1983, I graduated from high school at the
age of twenty, by far the oldest senior tossing his mortarboard on
the football field that day. I remember losing Baba in the swarm of
families, flashing cameras, and blue gowns. I found him near the
twenty-yard line, hands shoved in his pockets, camera dangling on
his chest. He disappeared and reappeared behind the people mov-
ing between us: squealing blue-clad girls hugging, crying, boys
high-fiving their fathers, each other. Baba’s beard was graying, his
hair thinning at the temples, and hadn’t he been taller in Kabul?
He was wearing his brown suit—his only suit, the same one he
wore to Afghan weddings and funerals—and the red tie I had
bought for his fiftieth birthday that year. Then he saw me and
waved. Smiled. He motioned for me to wear my mortarboard, and
took a picture of me with the school’s clock tower in the back-
ground. I smiled for him—in a way, this was his day more than
mine. He walked to me, curled his arm around my neck, and gave
my brow a single kiss. “I am moftakhir, Amir,” he said. Proud. His
eyes gleamed when he said that and I liked being on the receiving
end of that look.
He took me to an Afghan kabob house in Hayward that night
and ordered far too much food. He told the owner that his son
was going to college in the fall. I had debated him briefly about
that just before graduation, and told him I wanted to get a job.
Help out, save some money, maybe go to college the following