Page 249 - The Kite Runner

238 Khaled Hosseini

Wahid handed the photo back and rested his thick hand on
my shoulder. “You are an honorable man, Amir agha. A true
Afghan.”
I cringed inside.
“I am proud to have you in our home tonight,” Wahid said. I
thanked him and chanced a glance over to Farid. He was looking
down now, playing with the frayed edges of the straw mat.

A short while later, Maryam and her mother brought
two steaming bowls of vegetable shorwa and two loaves of bread.
“I’m sorry we can’t offer you meat,” Wahid said. “Only the Taliban
can afford meat now.”
“This looks wonderful,” I said. It did too. I offered some to
him, to the kids, but Wahid said the family had eaten before we
arrived. Farid and I rolled up our sleeves, dipped our bread in the
shorwa, and ate with our hands.
As I ate, I noticed Wahid’s boys, all three thin with dirt-
caked faces and short-cropped brown hair under their skullcaps,
stealing furtive glances at my digital wristwatch. The youngest
whispered something in his brother’s ear. The brother nodded,
didn’t take his eyes off my watch. The oldest of the boys—I
guessed his age at about twelve—rocked back and forth, his gaze
glued to my wrist. After dinner, after I’d washed my hands with
the water Maryam poured from a clay pot, I asked for Wahid’s
permission to give his boys a hadia, a gift. He said no, but, when
I insisted, he reluctantly agreed. I unsnapped the wristwatch
and gave it to the youngest of the three boys. He muttered a
sheepish “Tashakor.”
“It tells you the time in any city in the world,” I told him. The
boys nodded politely, passing the watch between them, taking