Page 271 - The Kite Runner

260 Khaled Hosseini

Farid nodded. “You can get good money for it on the black
market. Feed your kids for a couple of weeks.”

To my surprise, most of the houses in the Wazir Akbar Khan
district still had roofs and standing walls. In fact, they were in
pretty good shape. Trees still peeked over the walls, and the
streets weren’t nearly as rubble-strewn as the ones in Karteh-Seh.
Faded streets signs, some twisted and bullet-pocked, still pointed
the way.
“This isn’t so bad,” I remarked.
“No surprise. Most of the important people live here now.”
“Taliban?”
“Them too,” Farid said.
“Who else?”
He drove us into a wide street with fairly clean sidewalks and
walled homes on either side. “The people behind the Taliban. The
real brains of this government, if you can call it that: Arabs,
Chechens, Pakistanis,” Farid said. He pointed northwest. “Street
15, that way, is called Sarak-e-Mehmana.” Street of the Guests.
“That’s what they call them here, guests. I think someday these
guests are going to pee all over the carpet.”
“I think that’s it!” I said. “Over there!” I pointed to the land-
mark that used to serve as a guide for me when I was a kid. If you
ever get lost, Baba used to say, remember that our street is the one
with the pink house at the end of it. The pink house with the
steeply pitched roof had been the neighborhood’s only house of
that color in the old days. It still was.
Farid turned onto the street. I saw Baba’s house right away.

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