Page 368 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 357

Vaughn.” He gave me a pinch-faced look, as if I had just spat in
his soda. “Thanks a lot, man,” he said, shaking his head and mut-
tering something as he walked away. That was when I learned
that, in America, you don’t reveal the ending of the movie, and if
you do, you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for
having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.
In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan
and I came home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab,
what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba, or the myriad of Baba’s friends—sec-
ond and third cousins milling in and out of the house—wanted to
know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did the
bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become kamyab and fulfill his
dreams, or was he nah-kam, doomed to wallow in failure?
Was there happiness at the end, they wanted to know.
If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan,
Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say.
Does anybody’s?
After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans
like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab,
nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty car-
avan of kochis.
I wouldn’t know how to answer that question. Despite the
matter of last Sunday’s tiny miracle.

We arrived home about seven months ago, on a warm day
in August 2001. Soraya picked us up at the airport. I had never
been away from Soraya for so long, and when she locked her arms
around my neck, when I smelled apples in her hair, I realized how
much I had missed her. “You’re still the morning sun to my yelda,”
I whispered.
“What?”