Page 208 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 197

lone suitcase, and walked up to the intricately carved door. The
building had wooden balconies with open shutters—from many of
them, laundry was hanging to dry in the sun. I walked up the
creaky stairs to the second floor, down a dim hallway to the last
door on the right. Checked the address on the piece of stationery
paper in my palm. Knocked.
Then, a thing made of skin and bones pretending to be Rahim
Khan opened the door.

A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to
say about clichés: “Avoid them like the plague.” Then he’d laugh
at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always
thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on.
But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the
nature of the saying as a cliché. For example, the “elephant in the
room” saying. Nothing could more correctly describe the initial
moments of my reunion with Rahim Khan.
We sat on a wispy mattress set along the wall, across the win-
dow overlooking the noisy street below. Sunlight slanted in and
cast a triangular wedge of light onto the Afghan rug on the floor.
Two folding chairs rested against one wall and a small copper
samovar sat in the opposite corner. I poured us tea from it.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“It’s not difficult to find people in America. I bought a map of the
U.S., and called up information for cities in Northern California,”
he said. “It’s wonderfully strange to see you as a grown man.”
I smiled and dropped three sugar cubes in my tea. He liked his
black and bitter, I remembered. “Baba didn’t get the chance to tell
you but I got married fifteen years ago.” The truth was, by then,
the cancer in Baba’s brain had made him forgetful, negligent.