Page 101 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

It was Timur’s father, Idris’s uncle, who had sent them to Kabul. The
Bashiri family home had changed hands a number of times over the last two
decades of war. Reestablishing ownership would take time and money.
Thousands of cases of property disputes already clogged the country’s courts.
Timur’s father had told them that they would have to “maneuver” through the
infamously sluggish, ponderous Afghan bureaucracy—a euphemism for “find
the right palms to grease.”
“That would be my department,” Timur had said as if it needed saying.

Idris’s own father had died nine years before after a long bout with cancer. He
had died at his home, with his wife, two daughters, and Idris at his bedside. The
day he died, a mob descended on the house—uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and
acquaintances—sitting on the couches, the dining chairs, and, when those were
taken, on the floor, the stairs. Women gathered in the dining room and kitchen.
They brewed thermos after thermos of tea. Idris, as the only son, had to sign all
the papers—papers for the medical examiner, who arrived to pronounce his
father dead; papers for the polite young men from the funeral home, who came
with a stretcher to take his father’s body.
Timur never left his side. He helped Idris answer phone calls. He greeted the
waves of people who came to pay respects. He ordered rice and lamb from

Abe’s Kabob House, a local Afghan restaurant run by Timur’s friend Abdullah,
whom Timur teasingly called Uncle Abe. Timur parked cars for elderly guests
when it started to rain. He called a buddy of his at one of the local Afghan TV
stations. Unlike Idris, Timur was well connected in the Afghan community; he
once told Idris that he had over three hundred contact names and numbers on his
cell phone. He made arrangements for an announcement to run on Afghan TV
that same night.
Early that afternoon, Timur drove Idris to the funeral home in Hayward. It
was pouring by then, and traffic was slow on the northbound lanes of the 680.

“Your dad, he was all class, bro. He was old-school,” Timur croaked as he
took the Mission off-ramp. He kept wiping tears with the palm of his free hand.
Idris nodded somberly. His whole life he’d not been able to cry in the
presence of other people, at events where it was called for such as funerals. He
saw this as a minor handicap, like color blindness. Still, he felt vaguely—and, he
knew, irrationally—resentful toward Timur for upstaging him back at the house
with all the running around and dramatic sobbing. As if it was his father who had
died.