Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the following colleagues for their advice, assistance, or support: Dr. Alfred
Lerner, Don Vakis, Robin Heck, Dr. Todd Dray, Dr. Robert Tull, and Dr. Sandy Chun. Thanks
also to Lynette Parker of East San Jose Community Law Center for her advice about adoption
procedures, and to Mr. Daoud Wahab for sharing his experiences in Afghanistan with me. I am
grateful to my dear friend Tamim Ansary for his guidance and support and to the gang at the
San Francisco Writers Workshop for their feed back and encouragement. I want to thank my
father, my oldest friend and the inspiration for all that is noble in Baba; my mother who prayed
for me and did nazr at every stage of this book's writing; my aunt for buying me books when I
was young. Thanks go out to Ali, Sandy, Daoud, Walid, Raya, Shalla, Zahra, Rob, and Kader for
reading my stories. I want to thank Dr. and Mrs. Kayoumy--my other parents--for their warmth
and unwavering support.
I must thank my agent and friend, Elaine Koster, for her wisdom, patience, and gracious ways,
as well as Cindy Spiegel, my keen-eyed and judicious editor who helped me unlock so many doors
in this tale. And I would like to thank Susan Petersen Kennedy for taking a chance on this book and
the hardworking staff at Riverhead for laboring over it.
Last, I don't know how to thank my lovely wife, Roya--to whose opinion I am addicted--for her
kindness and grace, and for reading, re-reading, and helping me edit every single draft of this
novel.
For your patience and understanding, I will always love you, Roya jan.
Chapter 1
_December 2001_
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I
remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near
the frozen creek. 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. Looking back now, I realize
I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He asked me to come see him.
Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn't just Rahim Khan on the line.
It was my past of unatoned sins. After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the
northern edge of Golden Gate Park. The early-afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens
of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze. Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites,
red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of
the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San
Francisco, the city I now call Home. And suddenly Hassan's voice whispered in my head:
_For you, a thousand times over_. Hassan the harelipped kite runner.
I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he
hung up, almost as an after thought. _There is a way to be good again_. I looked up at those twin
kites. I thought about Hassan. Thought about Baba. Ali. Kabul. I thought of the life I had lived
until the winter of 1975 came and changed everything. And made me what I am today.
Chapter 2
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. We
would sit across from each other on a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser
pockets filled with dried mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate
mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing; I can still see Hassan up on that
tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a
Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo
leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire I can still see his
tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was
added as a mere afterthought. 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.
Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his slingshot at the
neighbor's one-eyed German shepherd. Hassan never wanted to, but if I asked, _really_ asked,
he wouldn't deny me. Hassan never denied me anything. And he was deadly with his slingshot.
Hassan's father, Ali, used to catch us and get mad, or as mad as someone as gentle as Ali could
ever get. He would wag his finger and wave us down from the tree. He would take the mirror and tell
us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims
during prayer. "And he laughs while he does it,?he always added, scowling at his son.
"Yes, Father,?Hassan would mumble, looking down at his feet. But he never told on me. Never told
that the mirror, like shooting walnuts at the neighbor's dog, was always my idea.
The poplar trees lined the redbrick driveway, which led to a pair of wrought-iron gates. They in
turn opened into an extension of the driveway into my father's estate. The house sat on the left
side of the brick path, the backyard at the end of it.
Everyone agreed that my father, my Baba, had built the most beautiful house in the Wazir Akbar
Khan district, a new and affluent neighborhood in the northern part of Kabul. Some thought it was
the prettiest house in all of Kabul. A broad entryway flanked by rosebushes led to the sprawling
house of marble floors and wide windows. Intricate mosaic tiles, handpicked by Baba in Isfahan,
covered the floors of the four bathrooms. Gold-stitched tapestries, which Baba had bought in
Calcutta, lined the walls; a crystal chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling.
Upstairs was my bedroom, Baba's room, and his study, also known as "the smoking room,?which
perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. Baba and his friends reclined on black leather chairs
there after Ali had served dinner. They stuffed their pipes--except Baba always called it
"fattening the pipe?-and discussed their favorite three topics: politics, Business, soccer.
Sometimes I asked Baba if I could sit with them, but Baba would stand in the doorway. "
Go on, now,?he'd say. "This is grown-ups?time. Why don't you go read one of those books
of yours??He'd close the door, leave me to wonder why it was always grown-ups?time with
him. I'd sit by the door, knees drawn to my chest. Sometimes I sat there for an hour, sometimes
two, listening to their laughter, their chatter.
The living room downstairs had a curved wall with custombuilt cabinets. Inside sat framed family
pictures: an old, grainy photo of my grandfather and King Nadir Shah taken in 1931, two years
before the king's assassination; they are standing over a dead deer, dressed in knee-high boots,
rifles slung over their shoulders. There was a picture of my parents?wedding night, Baba dashing
in his black suit and my mother a smiling young princess in white. Here was Baba and his best
friend and Business partner, Rahim Khan, standing outside our house, neither one smiling--I am
a baby in that photograph and Baba is holding me, looking tired and grim. I'm in his arms, but it's
Rahim Khan's pinky my fingers are curled around.
The curved wall led into the dining room, at the center of which was a mahogany table that could
easily sit thirty guests-- and, given my father's taste for extravagant parties, it did just that
almost every week. On the other end of the dining room was a tall marble fireplace, always lit by
the orange glow of a fire in the wintertime.
A large sliding glass door opened into a semicircular terrace that overlooked two acres of backyard
and rows of cherry trees. Baba and Ali had planted a small vegetable garden along the eastern wall:
tomatoes, mint, peppers, and a row of corn that never really took. Hassan and I used to call it
"the Wall of Ailing Corn.?
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.
It was there, in that little shack, that Hassan was born in the winter of 1964, just one year after
my mother died giving birth to me.
In the eighteen years that I lived in that house, I stepped into Hassan and Ali's quarters only a
handful of times. When the sun dropped low behind the hills and we were done playing for the day,
Hassan and I parted ways. I went past the rosebushes to Baba's mansion, Hassan to the mud shack
where he had been born, where he'd lived his entire life. I remember it was spare, clean, dimly lit
by a pair of kerosene lamps. There were two mattresses on opposite sides of the room, a worn Herati
rug with frayed edges in between, a three-legged stool, and a wooden table in the corner where
Hassan did his drawings. The walls stood bare, save for a single tapestry with sewn-in beads
forming the words _Allah-u-akbar_. Baba had bought it for Ali on one of his trips to Mashad.
It was in that small shack that Hassan's mother, Sanaubar, gave birth to him one cold winter day in
1964. While my mother hemorrhaged to death during childbirth, Hassan lost his less than a week
after he was born. Lost her to a fate most Afghans considered far worse than death: She ran off
with a clan of traveling singers and dancers.
Hassan never talked about his mother, as if she'd never existed. I always wondered if he dreamed
about her, about what she looked like, where she was. I wondered if he longed to meet her.
Did he ache for her, the way I ached for the mother I had never met? One day, we were walking
from my father's house to Cinema Zainab for a new Iranian movie, taking the shortcut through
the military barracks near Istiqlal Middle School--Baba had forbidden us to take that shortcut,
but he was in Pakistan with Rahim Khan at the time. We hopped the fence that surrounded the
barracks, skipped over a little creek, and broke into the open dirt field where old, abandoned
tanks collected dust. A group of soldiers huddled in the shade of one of those tanks, smoking
cigarettes and playing cards. One of them saw us, elbowed the guy next to him, and called Hassan.
"Hey, you!?he said. "I know you.?
We had never seen him before. He was a squatly man with a shaved head and black stubble on his
face. The way he grinned at us, leered, scared me. "Just keep walking,?I muttered to Hassan.
"You! The Hazara! Look at me when I'm talking to you!?the soldier barked. He handed his cigarette
to the guy next to him, made a circle with the thumb and index finger of one hand. Poked the middle
finger of his other hand through the circle. Poked it in and out. In and out. "I knew your mother,
did you know that? I knew her real good. I took her from behind by that creek over there.?
The soldiers laughed. One of them made a squealing sound. I told Hassan to keep walking,
keep walking.
"What a tight little sugary cunt she had!?the soldier was saying, shaking hands with the others,
grinning. Later, in the dark, after the movie had started, I heard Hassan next to me, croaking.
Tears were sliding down his cheeks. I reached across my seat, slung my arm around him, pulled
him close. He rested his head on my shoulder. "He took you for someone else,?I whispered.
"He took you for someone else.?
I'm told no one was really surprised when Sanaubar eloped. People _had_ raised their eyebrows
when Ali, a man who had memorized the Koran, married Sanaubar, a woman nineteen years
younger, a beautiful but notoriously unscrupulous woman who lived up to her dishonorable
reputation. Like Ali, she was a Shi'a Muslim and an ethnic Hazara. She was also his first cousin
and therefore a natural choice for a spouse. But beyond those similarities, Ali and Sanaubar
had little in common, least of all their respective appearances. While Sanaubar's brilliant green
eyes and impish face had, rumor has it, tempted countless men into sin, Ali had a congenital
paralysis of his lower facial muscles, a condition that rendered him unable to smile and left him
perpetually grimfaced. It was an odd thing to see the stone-faced Ali happy, or sad, because only
his slanted brown eyes glinted with a smile or welled with sorrow. 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.
I have heard that Sanaubar's suggestive stride and oscillating hips sent men to reveries of
infidelity. 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. I remember one day, when I was
eight, Ali was taking me to the bazaar to buy some _naan_. I was walking behind him, humming,
trying to imitate his walk. I watched him swing his scraggy leg in a sweeping arc, watched his
whole body tilt impossibly to the right every time he planted that foot. It seemed a minor miracle
he didn't tip over with each step. When I tried it, I almost fell into the gutter.
That got me giggling. Ali turned around, caught me aping him. He didn't say anything.
Not then, not ever. He just kept walking.
Ali's face and his walk frightened some of the younger children in the neighborhood. But the real
trouble was with the older kids. They chased him on the street, and mocked him when he hobbled
by. Some had taken to calling him _Babalu_, or Boogeyman.
"Hey, Babalu, who did you eat today??they barked to a chorus of laughter. "Who did you eat, you
flat-nosed Babalu??
They called him "flat-nosed?because of Ali and Hassan's characteristic Hazara Mongoloid features.
For years, that was all I knew about the Hazaras, that they were Mogul descendants, and that they
looked a little like Chinese people. School text books barely mentioned them and referred to their
ancestry only in passing. Then one day, I was in Baba's study, looking through his stuff, when I
found one of my mother's old history books. It was written by an Iranian named Khorami. I blew the
dust off it, sneaked it into bed with me that night, and was stunned to find an entire chapter on
Hazara history. An entire chapter dedicated to Hassan's people! In it, I read that my people, the
Pashtuns, had persecuted and oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against
the Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had "quelled them with unspeakable
violence.?The book said that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from their lands,
burned their Homes, and sold their women. The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had
oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi'a. The
book said a lot of things I didn't know, things my teachers hadn't mentioned. Things Baba hadn't
mentioned either. It also said some things I did know, like that people called
Hazaras _mice-eating, flat-nosed, load-carrying donkeys_. I had heard some of the kids in the
neighborhood yell those names to Hassan.
The following week, after class, I showed the book to my teacher and pointed to the chapter on the
Hazaras. He skimmed through a couple of pages, snickered, handed the book back. "That's the one
thing Shi'a people do well,?he said, picking up his papers, "passing themselves as martyrs.?He
wrinkled his nose when he said the word Shi'a, like it was some kind of disease.
But despite sharing ethnic heritage and family blood, Sanaubar joined the neighborhood kids in
taunting Ali. I have heard that she made no secret of her disdain for his appearance.
"This is a husband??she would sneer. "I have seen old donkeys better suited to be a husband.?
In the end, most people suspected the marriage had been an arrangement of sorts between Ali and his
uncle, Sanaubar's father. 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.
Ali never retaliated against any of his tormentors, I suppose partly because he could never catch
them with that twisted leg dragging behind him. But mostly because Ali was immune to the insults
of his assailants; he had found his joy, his antidote, the moment Sanaubar had given birth to
Hassan. It had been a simple enough affair. No obstetricians, no anesthesiologists, no fancy
monitoring devices. Just Sanaubar lying on a stained, naked mattress with Ali and a midwife helping
her. She hadn't needed much help at all, because, even in birth, Hassan was true to his nature:
He was incapable of hurting anyone. A few grunts, a couple of pushes, and out came Hassan. Out he
came smiling.
As confided to a neighbor's servant by the garrulous midwife, who had then in turn told anyone who
would listen, Sanaubar had taken one glance at the baby in Ali's arms, seen the cleft lip, and
barked a bitter laughter.
"There,?she had said. "Now you have your own idiot child to do all your smiling for you!?She had
refused to even hold Hassan, and just five days later, she was gone.
Baba hired the same nursing woman who had fed me to nurse Hassan. Ali told us she was a
blue-eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan, the city of the giant Buddha statues. "What a sweet singing
voice she had,?he used to say to us.
What did she sing, Hassan and I always asked, though we already knew--Ali had told us countless
times. We just wanted to hear Ali sing.
He'd clear his throat and begin:
_On a high mountain I stood,
And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.
O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men,
Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts._
Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same
breast, a kinship that not even time could break.
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.
Mine was _Baba_.
His was _Amir_. My name.
Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975--and all
that followed--was already laid in those first words.