Page 188 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Adel wanted to say that he knew how Gholam felt. He wanted to tell him how

much he missed Kabul, and his friends, and his half brothers over in Jalalabad.
But he had a feeling Gholam might laugh. Instead he said, “Well, it is pretty
boring around here.”
Gholam laughed anyway. “I don’t think that’s quite what they meant,” he
said.
Adel understood vaguely that he’d been chastised.
Gholam took a drag and blew out a run of rings. Together, they watched the
rings gently float away and disintegrate.

“My father said to me and my brothers, he said, ‘Wait … wait until you
breathe the air in Shadbagh, boys, and taste the water.’ He was born here, my
father, raised here too. He said, ‘You’ve never had water this cool and this
sweet, boys.’ He was always talking to us about Shadbagh, which I guess was
nothing but a small village back when he lived here. He said there was a kind of
grape that you could grow only in Shadbagh and nowhere else in the world.
You’d think he was describing Paradise.”
Adel asked him where he was staying now. Gholam tossed the cigarette butt,

looked up at the sky, squinting at the brightness. “You know the open field over
by the windmill?”
“Yes.”
Adel waited for more, but there was no more.
“You live in a field?”
“For the time being,” Gholam mumbled. “We got a tent.”

“Don’t you have family here?”
“No. They’re either dead or gone. Well, my father does have an uncle in
Kabul. Or he did. Who knows if he’s still alive. He was my grandmother’s
brother, worked for a rich family there. But I guess Nabi and my grandmother
haven’t spoken in decades—fifty years or more, I think. They’re strangers
practically. I guess if he really had to, my father would go to him. But he wants
to make a go of it on his own here. This is his home.”

They spent a few quiet moments sitting on the tree stump, watching the
leaves in the orchards shiver in surges of warm wind. Adel thought of Gholam
and his family sleeping nights in a tent, scorpions and snakes crawling in the
field all around them.
Adel didn’t quite know why he ended up telling Gholam about the reason he
and his parents moved here from Kabul. Or, rather, he couldn’t choose among
the reasons. He wasn’t sure if he did it to dispel Gholam’s impression that he led
a carefree existence simply because he lived in a big house. Or as a kind of