Page 199 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

it was Baba jan who had pushed him through it. Dormant gears in Adel’s mind

had begun to turn. Adel felt as though, overnight, he had acquired an altogether
new auxiliary sense, one that empowered him to perceive things he never had
before, things that had stared him in the face for years. He saw, for instance, how
his mother had secrets inside of her. When he looked at her, they practically
rippled over her face. He saw her struggles to keep from him all the things she
knew, all the things she kept locked up, closed off, carefully guarded, like the
two of them in this big house. He saw for the first time his father’s house for the
monstrosity, the affront, the monument to injustice, that it privately was to
everyone else. He saw in people’s rush to please his father the intimidation, the
fear, that was the real underpinning of their respect and deference. He thought
Gholam would be proud of him for this insight. For the first time, Adel felt truly
aware of the broader movements that had always governed his life.
And of the wildly conflicting truths that resided within a person. Not just in
his father, or his mother, or Kabir.

But within himself too.
This last discovery was, in some ways, the most surprising to Adel. The
revelations of what he now knew his father had done—first in the name of jihad,
then for what he had called the just rewards of sacrifice—had left Adel reeling.
At least for a while. For days after that evening the rocks had come crashing
through the window, Adel’s stomach ached whenever his father walked into the
room. He found his father barking into his mobile phone, or even heard him

humming in the bath, and he felt his spine crumpling, his throat going painfully
dry. His father kissed him good night, and Adel’s instinct was to recoil. He had
nightmares. He dreamt he was standing at the edge of the orchards, watching a
thrashing about among the trees, the glint of a metal rod rising and falling, the
sound of metal striking meat and bone. He woke from these dreams with a howl
locked in his chest. Bouts of weeping side-swiped him at random moments.
And yet.
And yet.
Something else was happening as well. The new awareness had not faded

from his mind, but slowly it had found company. Another, opposing current of
consciousness coursed through him now, one that did not displace the first but
claimed space beside it. Adel felt an awakening to this other, more troubling part
of himself. The part of him that over time would gradually, almost
imperceptibly, accept this new identity that at present prickled like a wet wool
sweater. Adel saw that, in the end, he would probably accept things as his
mother had. Adel had been angry with her at first; he was more forgiving now.