Quotes Flashcards
That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
“A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”
Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended.
I actually aspired to cowardice, because the alternative, the real reason I was running, was that Assef was right: Nothing was free in this world. Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay, the lamb I had to slay, to win Baba.
My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.
Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.
All I saw was the blue kite. All I smelled was victory. Salvation. Redemption.
I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan—the way he’d stood up for me all those times in the past—and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run. In the end, I ran.
I thought about Hassan’s dream, the one about us swimming in the lake. There is no monster, he’d said, just water. Except he’d been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was that monster.
Baba and I were more alike than I’d ever known. We had both betrayed the people who would have given their lives for us. And with that came this realization: that Rahim Khan had summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too.
There is a way to be good again, he’d said. A way to end the cycle. With a little boy. An orphan. Hassan’s son. Somewhere in Kabul.
Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.
The book said a lot of things I didn’t know, things my teachers hadn’t mentioned…It also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras mice-eating, flat-nosed, load-carrying donkeys.
Then I saw Baba on our roof. He was standing on the edge, pumping both of his fists. Hollering and clapping. And that right there was the single greatest moment of my twelve years of life
We’d actually deceived ourselves into thinking that a toy made of tissue paper, glue, and bamboo could somehow close the chasm between us.
In one of those brief bursts of light, I saw something I’ll never forget: Hassan serving drinks to Assef and Wali from a silver platter. The light winked out, a hiss and a crackle, then another flicker of orange light: Assef grinning, kneading Hassan in the chest with a knuckle.
He cried. It scared me a little, seeing a grown man sob. Fathers weren’t supposed to cry. ‘Please,’ Baba was saying,
Behind me, Baba was apologizing to the other passengers. As if car sickness was a crime.
You couldn’t trust anyone in Kabul anymore—for a few or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend.
And I remember wondering if Hassan too had married. And if so, whose face he had seen in the mirror under the veil? Whose henna-painted hands had he held?
We all had our reasons for not adopting. Soraya had hers, the general his, and I had this: that perhaps something, someone, somewhere had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I had done.
Rich scents, both pleasant and not so pleasant, drifted to me through the passenger window, the spicy aroma of pakor and the nihari Baba had loved so much blended with the sting of diesel fumes, the stench of rot, garbage, and feces.
They named him Sohrab, after Hassan’s favorite hero from the Shahnamah, as you know.
There is only one sin. And that is theft…When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.
But how could I pack up and go back home when my actions may have cost Hassan a chance at those very same things?
