Page 182 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

spotted him in the big mirror of her dresser.

“Want to join me?” she panted over the loud music.
“I’ll just sit here,” he said. He slid down to the carpeted floor and watched his
mother, whose name was Aria, leapfrog her way across the room and back.
Adel’s mother had delicate hands and feet, a small upturned nose, and a pretty
face like an actress from one of Kabir’s Bollywood films. She was lean, agile,
and young—she had been only fourteen when she’d married Baba jan. Adel had
another, older mother too, and three older half brothers, but Baba jan had put
them up in the east, in Jalalabad, and Adel saw them only once a month or so
when Baba jan took him there to visit. Unlike his mother and stepmother, who

disliked each other, Adel and his half brothers got along fine. When he visited
them in Jalalabad, they took him with them to parks, to bazaars, the cinema, and
Buzkashi tournaments. They played Resident Evil with him and shot the zombies
in Call of Duty with him, and they always picked him on their team during
neighborhood soccer matches. Adel wished so badly that they lived here, near
him.
Adel watched his mother lie on her back and raise her straightened legs off
the floor and lower them down again, a blue plastic ball tucked between her bare
ankles.

The truth was, the boredom here in Shadbagh was crushing Adel. He hadn’t
made a single friend in the two years they had lived here. He could not bike into
town, certainly not on his own, not with the rash of kidnappings everywhere in
the region—though he did sneak out now and then briefly, always staying within
the perimeter of the compound. He had no classmates because Baba jan
wouldn’t let him attend the local school—for “security reasons,” he said—so a
tutor came to the house every morning for lessons. Mostly, Adel passed the time
reading or kicking the soccer ball around on his own or watching movies with
Kabir, often the same ones over and over. He wandered listlessly around the
wide, high-ceilinged hallways of their massive home, through all the big empty
rooms, or else he sat looking out the window of his bedroom upstairs. He lived
in a mansion, but in a shrunken world. Some days he was so bored, he wanted to
chew wood.

He knew that his mother too was terribly lonely here. She tried to fill her days
with routines, exercise in the morning, shower, then breakfast, then reading,
gardening, then Indian soaps on TV in the afternoon. When Baba jan was away,
which was often, she always wore gray sweats and sneakers around the house,
her face unmade, her hair pinned in a bun at the back of her neck. She rarely
even opened the jewelry box where she kept all the rings and necklaces and