For you, a thousand times over.” Then I turned and ran. It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything alright. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.
Entering my childhood home is a little disorienting, like reading the end of a novel that I’d started, then abandoned, long ago.
I see you’ve confused what you’re learning in school with actual education.
With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.
For an hour or two every Thursday, when Jalil came to see her, all smiles and gifts and endearments, Mariam felt deserving of all the beauty and bounty that life had to give. And, for this, Mariam loved Jalil.
I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.
In the middle of the night, when Laila woke up thirsty, she found their hands still clamped together, in the white-knuckle, anxious way of children clutching balloon strings.
You have to do it now. If you wait until morning, you’ll lose heart.
Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice of intersection between those spheres.
I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.
Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people’s lives. My whole life, I had been “Baba’s son.” Now he was gone. Baba couldn’t show me the way anymore; I’d have to find it on my own. The thought of it terrified me.
This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.
A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn’t been good to him, that he’d become homeless and destitute.
What I have in ample supply here is children who’ve lost their childhood. But the tragedy is that these are the lucky ones.
Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. ‘It wasn’t meant to be’, Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.
So it would begin. The obligatory questions, the perfunctory answers. Both pretending. Unenthusiastic partners, the two of them, in this tired old dance.
I laughed. Clutched him in a hug and planted a kiss on his cheek. “What was that for?” he said; startled, blushing. I gave him a friendly hug, smiled. “You’re a prince, Hassan. You’re a prince and I love you.
I lay on the side of the dirt road next to a rocky trench, looked up to the gray morning sky, thankful for air, thankful for light, thankful to be alive.
If I’ve learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.
But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.