Page 226 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 215

sip. He then fished an envelope from the breast pocket of his vest
and handed it to me. “For you.”
I tore the sealed envelope. Inside, I found a Polaroid photo-
graph and a folded letter. I stared at the photograph for a full
minute.
A tall man dressed in a white turban and a green-striped cha-
pan stood with a little boy in front of a set of wrought-iron gates.
Sunlight slanted in from the left, casting a shadow on half of his
rotund face. He was squinting and smiling at the camera, showing
a pair of missing front teeth. Even in this blurry Polaroid, the man
in the chapan exuded a sense of self-assuredness, of ease. It was
in the way he stood, his feet slightly apart, his arms comfortably
crossed on his chest, his head titled a little toward the sun. Mostly,
it was in the way he smiled. Looking at the photo, one might have
concluded that this was a man who thought the world had been
good to him. Rahim Khan was right: I would have recognized him
if I had bumped into him on the street. The little boy stood bare-
foot, one arm wrapped around the man’s thigh, his shaved head
resting against his father’s hip. He too was grinning and squinting.
I unfolded the letter. It was written in Farsi. No dots were
omitted, no crosses forgotten, no words blurred together—the
handwriting was almost childlike in its neatness. I began to read:

In the name of Allah the most beneficent,
the most merciful,
Amir agha, with my deepest respects,
Farzana jan, Sohrab, and I pray that this latest letter
finds you in good health and in the light of Allah’s good
graces. Please offer my warmest thanks to Rahim Khan
sahib for carrying it to you. I am hopeful that one day I will