The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

People say that eyes are windows to the soul. Never was that more true than with Ali, who could only reveal himself through his eyes.

there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft.

That Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been born,

The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

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.

And maybe, just maybe, I would finally be pardoned for killing my mother.

Maybe I should take off my shirt, take a swim in the lake. Why not?

Then I was screaming, and everything was color and sound, everything was alive and good.

PANIC. You open your mouth. Open it so wide your jaws creak. You order your lungs to draw air, NOW, you need air, need it NOW. But your airways ignore you. They collapse, tighten, squeeze, and suddenly you’re breathing through a drinking straw. Your mouth closes and your lips purse and all you can manage is a strangled croak. Your hands wriggle and shake. Somewhere a dam has cracked open and a flood of cold sweat spills, drenches your body. You want to scream. You would if you could. But you have to breathe to scream.

She was standing behind us, a slim-hipped beauty with velvety coal black hair, an open thermos and Styrofoam cup in her hand. I blinked, my heart quickening. She had thick black eyebrows that touched in the middle like the arched wings of a flying bird, and the gracefully hooked nose of a princess from old Persia—maybe that of Tahmineh, Rostam’s wife and Sohrab’s mother from the Shahnamah. Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away.

Fathers and sons could talk freely about women. But no Afghan girl—no decent and mohtaram Afghan girl, at least—queried her father about a young man.

“Not tonight,” he said. “There is no pain tonight.” “Okay,” she said. She pulled up his blanket. We closed the door. Baba never woke up.

LIFE IS A TRAIN. GET ON BOARD.