Page 277 - The Kite Runner

266 Khaled Hosseini

two days now and his generator needed fixing. We talked for a
while. He told me about growing up in Mazar-i-Sharif, in Jalal-
abad. He told me about a time shortly after he and his father
joined the jihad and fought the Shorawi in the Panjsher Valley.
They were stranded without food and ate locust to survive. He
told me of the day helicopter gunfire killed his father, of the day
the land mine took his two daughters. He asked me about Amer-
ica. I told him that in America you could step into a grocery store
and buy any of fifteen or twenty different types of cereal. The
lamb was always fresh and the milk cold, the fruit plentiful and
the water clear. Every home had a TV, and every TV a remote, and
you could get a satellite dish if you wanted. Receive over five hun-
dred channels.
“Five hundred?” Farid exclaimed.
“Five hundred.”
We fell silent for a while. Just when I thought he had fallen
asleep, Farid chuckled. “Agha, did you hear what Mullah Nasrud-
din did when his daughter came home and complained that her
husband had beaten her?” I could feel him smiling in the dark and
a smile of my own formed on my face. There wasn’t an Afghan in
the world who didn’t know at least a few jokes about the bumbling
mullah.
“What?”
“He beat her too, then sent her back to tell the husband that
Mullah was no fool: If the bastard was going to beat his daughter,
then Mullah would beat his wife in return.”
I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor
never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and
a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we
were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes. “Did you hear about the