I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great.
In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.
Life is a train, get on board.
All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I’ve ever written was because I don’t have a choice. I write stories because I can’t wait to tell it, I can’t wait to see how it ends.
For a novelist, it’s kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture. That said, I’m in a unique position to speak on behalf of Afghanistan on certain issues that I feel are important, particularly the issue of Afghan refugees.
President Karzai is an incredibly kind and decent man. I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he genuinely cares for his people. But I think he had too much of a tendency to want to rule by listening to all voices at all times.
I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It’s the only way I know how to write.
Without women taking an active role in Afghan society, rebuilding Afghanistan is going to be very difficult.
The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it’s story, it’s something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can’t get rid of, and I’ve got to see it through.
But Laila has decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way. ‘What’s the sense?’ she would say with a smile both innocent and wise. ‘What good is it, Laila jo?’ And so Laila has resigned herself to moving on. For her own sake, for Tariq’s, for her children’s. And for Mariam, who still visits Laila in her dreams, who is never more than a breath or two below her consciousness. Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.
I wanted to tell them that, in Kabul, we snapped a tree branch and used it as a credit card. Hassan and I would take the wooden stick to the bread maker. He’d carve notches on our stick with his knife, one notch for each loaf of naan he’d pull for us from the tandoor’s roaring flames. At the end of the month, my father paid him for the number of notches on the stick. That was it. No questions. No ID.
Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya’s womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I’d feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child.
At times, he didn’t understand the meaning of the Koran’s words. But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they comforted him, eased his heart. “They’ll comfort you to. Mariam jo,” he said. “You can summon then in your time of your need, and they won’t fail you. God’s words will never betray you, my girl.
I see the creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing... and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly.
I used to picture us as two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen.
I know. I know. But he’s always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he’s lost in some dream.” “And?” “I wasn’t like that.” Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t colouring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favourite colours.
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing.
How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
And I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.
I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.