Page 376 - The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner 365

Sohrab stayed under the canopy for a moment, then stepped back
out into the rain, hands stuffed in the pockets of his raincoat, his
hair—now brown and straight like Hassan’s—plastered against
his scalp. He stopped near a coffee-colored puddle and stared at
it. No one seemed to notice. No one called him back in. With
time, the queries about our adopted—and decidedly eccentric—
little boy had mercifully ceased, and, considering how tactless
Afghan queries can be sometimes, that was a considerable relief.
People stopped asking why he never spoke. Why he didn’t play
with the other kids. And best of all, they stopped suffocating us
with their exaggerated empathy, their slow head shaking, their tsk-
tsks, their “Oh gung bichara.” Oh, poor little mute one. The nov-
elty had worn off. Like dull wallpaper, Sohrab had blended into
the background.
I shook hands with Kabir, a small, silver-haired man. He intro-
duced me to a dozen men, one of them a retired teacher, another
an engineer, a former architect, a surgeon who was now running a
hot dog stand in Hayward. They all said they’d known Baba in
Kabul, and they spoke about him respectfully. In one way or
another, he had touched all their lives. The men said I was lucky
to have had such a great man for a father.
We chatted about the difficult and maybe thankless job Karzai
had in front of him, about the upcoming Loya jirga, and the king’s
imminent return to his homeland after twenty-eights years of
exile. I remembered the night in 1973, the night Zahir Shah’s
cousin overthrew him; I remembered gunfire and the sky lighting
up silver—Ali had taken me and Hassan in his arms, told us not to
be afraid, that they were just shooting ducks.
Then someone told a Mullah Nasruddin joke and we were all
laughing. “You know, your father was a funny man too,” Kabir said.