Vocabulary from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

I remember one day, when I was eight, Ali was taking me to the bazaar to buy some _naan_.

Thought about Baba.

There was a tandoor in the corner in the shadow of an acacia tree and I saw a man squatting beside it.

His was _Amir_.

Ali. Kabul.

As I waited for his reply, my mind flashed back to a winter day from long ago, Hassan and I sitting on the snow beneath a leafless sour cherry tree.

They brought with them pakoras, _naan_, sa,nosas, biryani.

My roommates� families--old women in bright shalwar-kameezes, children, men wearing skullcaps--shuffled noisily in and out of the room.

And not only did she teach classic Farsi literature at the university she was a descendant of the royal family, a fact that my father playfully rubbed in the skeptics� faces by referring to her as �my princess.�

We passed the famous Shah Faisal Mosque on the way there, reputedly the biggest mosque in the world, with its giant concrete girders and soaring minarets.

Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky.

One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan.

My roommates� families--old women in bright shalwar-kameezes, children, men wearing skullcaps--shuffled noisily in and out of the room.

It occurred to me that somewhere between the time we had left Peshawar for Afghanistan and now, we had become friends.

Baba gave us each a weekly allowance of ten Afghanis and we spent it on warm Coca-Cola and rosewater ice cream topped with crushed pistachios.

In the late 1960s, when I was five or six, Baba decided to build an orphanage.

Baba was wearing a green suit and a caracul hat.

Ali. Kabul.

�As soon as you can walk, I�ll take you to Islamabad.

And the cleft lip, just left of midline, where the Chinese doll maker�s instrument may have slipped; or perhaps he had simply grown tired and careless.

�Have you ever been to Mazar-i-Sharif?�

She wore a beige blouse and black slacks--the first woman I�d seen in weeks dressed in something other than a burqa or a shalwar-kameez.

The unentitled, unprivileged half.

He lectured us about the virtues of _zakat_ and the duty of _hadj_; he taught us the intricacies of performing the five daily _namaz_ prayers, and made us memorize verses from the Koran--and though he never translated the words for us, he did stress, sometimes with the help of a stripped willow branch, that we had to pronounce the Arabic words correctly so God would hear us better.

On benches nearby, families snacked on samosas and pakoras.

By the time I dragged myself out of bed and lumbered to the bathroom, Hassan had already washed up, prayed the morning _namaz_ with Ali, and prepared my breakfast: hot black tea with three sugar cubes and a slice of toasted _naan_ topped with my favorite sour cherry marmalade, all neatly placed on the dining table.

His name was Mullah Fatiullah Khan, a short, stubby man with a face full of acne scars and a gruff voice.

�But that is not going to make the INS issue this young fellow a visa.�

There was a pomegranate tree near the entrance to the cemetery.

�Ins hallah.�

On the south end of the garden, in the shadows of a loquat tree, was the servants� home, a modest little mud hut where Hassan lived with his father.

Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his slingshot at the neighbor�s one-eyed German shepherd.

Some had taken to calling him _Babalu_, or Boogeyman.

�The Taliban have friends here.

Aisha asked him something in Urdu.

We saw our first Western together, _Rio Bravo_ with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore.

Baba was always telling us about the mischief he and Ali used to cause, and Ali would shake his head and say, �But, Agha sahib, tell them who was the architect of the mischief and who the poor laborer?�

I had kneeled on the prayer rug, remembering only fragments of verses I had learned in school.

We passed the famous Shah Faisal Mosque on the way there, reputedly the biggest mosque in the world, with its giant concrete girders and soaring minarets.

The streets were wider than Peshawar�s, cleaner, and lined with rows of hibiscus and flame trees.

My eyes were drawn again to his wrist wrapped tightly with white gauze bandages.

He�d sit at the kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies darting from wall to wall, buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed.

�I remember there were so many pigeons outside the masjid, and they weren�t afraid of people.

�They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written in a tongue they don�t even understand.�

Somewhere, a radio played a Hindi song I thought I remembered from an old movie, maybe Pakeeza.

Hassan stayed home and helped Ali with the day�s chores: hand-washing dirty clothes and hanging them to dry in the yard, sweeping the floors, buying fresh _naan_ from the bazaar, marinating meat for dinner, watering the lawn.

What had I done, other than become an insomniac?

TWO

When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father�s house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror.

On the south end of the garden, in the shadows of a loquat tree, was the servants� home, a modest little mud hut where Hassan lived with his father.

�If it has rained and the air is clear, you can even see past Rawalpindi,� he said.

He was wearing a new outfit, light brown pirhan-tumban that looked a bit big for him, and a black skullcap.

She told me she had called a few adoption agencies that arranged international adoptions.

�As usual you�re oversimplifying.�

Suddenly this young bearded fellow who was patrolling the aisles, eighteen years old at most by the look of him, he walked up to me and struck me on the forehead with the butt of his Kalashnikov.

I remember one day, when I was eight, Ali was taking me to the bazaar to buy some _naan_.

He shared the room with a teenaged Punjabi boy who, I later learned from one of the nurses, had broken his leg when he had slipped off the roof of a moving bus.

OMAR FAISAL WAS CHUBBY, dark, had dimpled cheeks, black button eyes, and an affable, gap-toothed smile.

They called him �flat-nosed� because of Ali and Hassan�s characteristic Hazara Mongoloid features.

We saw our first Western together, _Rio Bravo_ with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore.

We would hear their caravans approaching our neighborhood, the mewling of their sheep, the _baa_ing of their goats, the jingle of bells around their camels� necks.

I dreamed a lot, and most of it I only remember as a hodge podge of images, snippets of visual memory flashing in my head like cards in a Rolodex: Baba marinating lamb for my thirteenth birthday party.

Someone lighted coal in a barbecue and soon the smell of garlic and morgh kabob flooded my senses.

I cheered with him when Kabul�s team scored against Kandahar and yelped insults at the referee when he called a penalty against our team.

Sometimes, I read to him at night, played riddles with him, taught him card tricks.

One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan.

The walls stood bare, save for a single tapestry with sewn-in beads forming the words _Allah-u-akbar_.

I thought about the orphanage in Karteh-Seh, thought about the rat that had scurried between my feet in Zaman�s office.

There was a band of sunlight on the bed between us, and, for just a moment, the ashen gray face looking at me from the other side of it was a dead ringer for Hassan�s, not the Hassan I played marbles with until the mullah belted out the evening azan and Ali called us home, not the Hassan I chased down our hill as the sun dipped behind clay rooftops in the west, but the Hassan I saw alive for the last time, dragging his belongings behind Ali in a warm summer downpour, stuffing them in ...

I KEPT THINKING OF THAT DAY in 1974, in the hospital room, Just after Hassan�s harelip surgery.

They said Ali had married his cousin to help restore some honor to his uncle�s blemished name, even though Ali, who had been orphaned at the age of five, had no worldly possessions or inheritance to speak of.

The streets were wider than Peshawar�s, cleaner, and lined with rows of hibiscus and flame trees.

But polio had left Ali with a twisted, atrophied right leg that was sallow skin over bone with little in between except a paper-thin layer of muscle.

Upstairs was my bedroom, Baba�s room, and his study, also known as �the smoking room,� which perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon.

�Collateral damage,� Rahim Khan said.

The time Baba had taken Hassan and me to a strawberry field in Jalalabad--the owner had told us we could eat as much as we wanted to as long as we bought at least four kilos--and how we�d both ended up with bellyaches.

I bow to the west and kiss the ground and promise that I will do _zakat_, I will do _namaz_, I will fast during Ramadan and when Ramadan has passed I will go on fasting, I will commit to memory every last word of His holy book, and I will set on a pilgrimage to that sweltering city in the desert and bow before the Ka�bah too.

He wept into my shirt until his tears dried, until his shaking stopped and his frantic pleas dwindled to indecipherable mumbles.