Page 195 - The Kite Runner

184 Khaled Hosseini

should have been a time of glory for Afghans. Instead, the war
raged on, this time between Afghans, the Mujahedin, against the
Soviet puppet government of Najibullah, and Afghan refugees
kept flocking to Pakistan. That was the year that the cold war
ended, the year the Berlin Wall came down. It was the year of
Tiananmen Square. In the midst of it all, Afghanistan was forgot-
ten. And General Taheri, whose hopes had stirred awake after the
Soviets pulled out, went back to winding his pocket watch.
That was also the year that Soraya and I began trying to have
a child.

The idea of fatherhood unleashed a swirl of emotions in
me. I found it frightening, invigorating, daunting, and exhilarating
all at the same time. What sort of father would I make, I wondered.
I wanted to be just like Baba and I wanted to be nothing like him.
But a year passed and nothing happened. With each cycle of
blood, Soraya grew more frustrated, more impatient, more irrita-
ble. By then, Khala Jamila’s initially subtle hints had become
overt, as in “Kho dega!” So! “When am I going to sing alahoo for
my little nawasa?” The general, ever the Pashtun, never made any
queries—doing so meant alluding to a sexual act between his
daughter and a man, even if the man in question had been mar-
ried to her for over four years. But his eyes perked up when Khala
Jamila teased us about a baby.
“Sometimes, it takes a while,” I told Soraya one night.
“A year isn’t a while, Amir!” she said, in a terse voice so unlike
her. “Something’s wrong, I know it.”
“Then let’s see a doctor.”

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