Page 257 - The Kite Runner

246 Khaled Hosseini

and restaurants. I used to buy kites from an old man named Saifo.
He ran a little kite shop by the old police headquarters.”
“The police headquarters is still there,” Farid said. “No short-
age of police in this city. But you won’t find kites or kite shops on
Jadeh Maywand or anywhere else in Kabul. Those days are over.”
Jadeh Maywand had turned into a giant sand castle. The
buildings that hadn’t entirely collapsed barely stood, with caved in
roofs and walls pierced with rockets shells. Entire blocks had
been obliterated to rubble. I saw a bullet-pocked sign half buried
at an angle in a heap of debris. It read DRINK COCA CO—. I saw
children playing in the ruins of a windowless building amid jagged
stumps of brick and stone. Bicycle riders and mule-drawn carts
swerved around kids, stray dogs, and piles of debris. A haze of dust
hovered over the city and, across the river, a single plume of
smoke rose to the sky.
“Where are the trees?” I said.
“People cut them down for firewood in the winter,” Farid said.
“The Shorawi cut a lot of them down too.”
“Why?”
“Snipers used to hide in them.”
A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running
into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn’t been good
to him, that he’d become homeless and destitute.
“My father built an orphanage in Shar-e-Kohna, the old city,
south of here,” I said.
“I remember it,” Farid said. “It was destroyed a few years ago.”
“Can you pull over?” I said. “I want to take a quick walk here.”
Farid parked along the curb on a small backstreet next to a
ramshackle, abandoned building with no door. “That used to be a
pharmacy,” Farid muttered as we exited the truck. We walked back