Page 255 - The Kite Runner

244 Khaled Hosseini

chattier since our overnight stay at Wahid’s house. He had me sit
in the passenger seat and looked at me when he spoke. He even
smiled once or twice. Maneuvering the steering wheel with his
mangled hand, he pointed to mud-hut villages along the way
where he’d known people years before. Most of those people, he
said, were either dead or in refugee camps in Pakistan. “And
sometimes the dead are luckier,” he said.
He pointed to the crumbled, charred remains of a tiny village.
It was just a tuft of blackened, roofless walls now. I saw a dog
sleeping along one of the walls. “I had a friend there once,” Farid
said. “He was a very good bicycle repairman. He played the tabla
well too. The Taliban killed him and his family and burned the
village.”
We drove past the burned village, and the dog didn’t move.

In the old days, the drive from Jalalabad to Kabul took two
hours, maybe a little more. It took Farid and me over four hours to
reach Kabul. And when we did ...Farid warned me just after we
passed the Mahipar dam.
“Kabul is not the way you remember it,” he said.
“So I hear.”
Farid gave me a look that said hearing is not the same as see-
ing. And he was right. Because when Kabul finally did unroll
before us, I was certain, absolutely certain, that he had taken a
wrong turn somewhere. Farid must have seen my stupefied
expression; shuttling people back and forth to Kabul, he would
have become familiar with that expression on the faces of those
who hadn’t seen Kabul for a long time.
He patted me on the shoulder. “Welcome back,” he said
morosely.