Page 199 - The Kite Runner

188 Khaled Hosseini

father wouldn’t have agreed to ask for your hand if he didn’t know
whose descendant you were. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem,
and when you adopt, you don’t know whose blood you’re bringing
into your house.
“Now, if you were American, it wouldn’t matter. People here
marry for love, family name and ancestry never even come into the
equation. They adopt that way too, as long as the baby is healthy,
everyone is happy. But we are Afghans, bachem.”
“Is the fish almost ready?” Soraya said. General Taheri’s eyes
lingered on her. He patted her knee. “Just be happy you have your
health and a good husband.”
“What do you think, Amir jan?” Khala Jamila said.
I put my glass on the ledge, where a row of her potted gerani-
ums were dripping water. “I think I agree with General Sahib.”
Reassured, the general nodded and went back to the grill.
We all had our reasons for not adopting. Soraya had hers, the
general his, and I had this: that perhaps something, someone,
somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I
had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so.
It wasn’t meant to be, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was
meant not to be.

A few months later, we used the advance for my second
novel and placed a down payment on a pretty, two-bedroom Victo-
rian house in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights. It had a peaked
roof, hardwood floors, and a tiny backyard which ended in a sun
deck and a fire pit. The general helped me refinish the deck and
paint the walls. Khala Jamila bemoaned us moving almost an hour
away, especially since she thought Soraya needed all the love and
support she could get—oblivious to the fact that her well-