Page 279 - The Kite Runner

268 Khaled Hosseini

garbanzo beans in spicy sauce hung in the air, mixed with the
smell of dung and sweat. Farid and I walked past street peddlers
selling cigarettes, pine nuts, and biscuits.
A scrawny boy in a tweed jacket grabbed my elbow and spoke
into my ear. Asked me if I wanted to buy some “sexy pictures.”
“Very sexy, Agha,” he said, his alert eyes darting side to side—
reminding me of a girl who, a few years earlier, had tried to sell me
crack in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. The kid peeled
one side of his jacket open and gave me a fleeting glance of his
sexy pictures: postcards of Hindi movies showing doe-eyed sultry
actresses, fully dressed, in the arms of their leading men. “So
sexy,” he repeated.
“Nay, thanks,” I said, pushing past him.
“He gets caught, they’ll give him a flogging that will waken his
father in the grave,” Farid muttered.
There was no assigned seating, of course. No one to show us
politely to our section, aisle, row, and seat. There never had been,
even in the old days of the monarchy. We found a decent spot to
sit, just left of midfield, though it took some shoving and elbowing
on Farid’s part.
I remembered how green the playing field grass had been in
the ’70s when Baba used to bring me to soccer games here. Now
the pitch was a mess. There were holes and craters everywhere,
most notably a pair of deep holes in the ground behind the south-
end goalposts. And there was no grass at all, just dirt. When the
two teams finally took the field—all wearing long pants despite
the heat—and play began, it became difficult to follow the ball in
the clouds of dust kicked up by the players. Young, whip-toting
Talibs roamed the aisles, striking anyone who cheered too loudly.
They brought them out shortly after the halftime whistle blew.
A pair of dusty red pickup trucks, like the ones I’d seen around