Page 30 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Abdullah had never been to Kabul. What he knew about Kabul came
from stories Uncle Nabi had told him. He had visited a few smaller towns on
jobs with Father, but never a real city, and certainly nothing Uncle Nabi had said
could have prepared him for the hustle and bustle of the biggest and busiest city
of them all. Everywhere, he saw traffic lights, and teahouses, and restaurants,
and glass-fronted shops with bright multicolored signs. Cars rattling noisily
down the crowded streets, hooting, darting narrowly among buses, pedestrians,
and bicycles. Horse-drawn garis jingled up and down boulevards, their iron-
rimmed wheels bouncing on the road. The sidewalks he walked with Pari and
Father were crowded with cigarette and chewing-gum sellers, magazine stands,
blacksmiths pounding horseshoes. At intersections, traffic policemen in ill-fitting

uniforms blew their whistles and made authoritative gestures that no one seemed
to heed.
Pari on his lap, Abdullah sat on a sidewalk bench near a butcher’s shop,
sharing a tin plate of baked beans and cilantro chutney that Father had bought
them from a street stall.
“Look, Abollah,” Pari said, pointing to a shop across the street. In its window
stood a young woman dressed in a beautifully embroidered green dress with
small mirrors and beads. She wore a long matching scarf, with silver jewelry and
deep red trousers. She stood perfectly still, gazing indifferently at passersby
without once blinking. She didn’t move so much as a finger as Abdullah and
Pari finished their beans, and remained motionless after that too. Up the block,

Abdullah saw a huge poster hanging from the façade of a tall building. It showed
a young, pretty Indian woman in a tulip field, standing in a downpour of rain,
ducking playfully behind some kind of bungalow. She was grinning shyly, a wet
sari hugging her curves. Abdullah wondered if this was what Uncle Nabi had
called a cinema, where people went to watch films, and hoped that in the coming
month Uncle Nabi would take him and Pari to see a film. He grinned at the
thought.
It was just after the call to prayer blared from a blue-tiled mosque up the
street that Abdullah saw Uncle Nabi pull up to the curb. Uncle Nabi swung out
of the driver’s side, dressed in his olive suit, his door narrowly missing a young

bicycle rider in a chapan, who swerved just in time.
Uncle Nabi hurried around the front of the car and embraced Father. When he
saw Abdullah and Pari, his face erupted in a big grin. He stooped to be on the
same level as them.
“How do you like Kabul, kids?”