The Kite Runner, Passage Fifteen (Chapter 20 – pages 244-245)
In the old days, the drive from
Jalalabad to Kabul took two hours, maybe a little more. It took Farid and me
over four hours to reach Kabul. And when we did... Farid warned me just after
we passed the Mahipar dam.
“Kabul
is not the way you remember it,” he said.
“So I
hear.”
Farid gave me a look that said
hearing is not the same as seeing. And he was right. Because when Kabul finally
did unroll before us, I was certain, absolutely certain, that he had taken a
wrong turn somewhere. Farid must have seen my stupefied expression; shuttling
people back and forth to Kabul, he would have become familiar with that
expression on the faces of those who hadn’t seen Kabul for a long time.
He patted me on the shoulder. “Welcome
back,” he
said morosely.
Rubble and beggars. Everywhere I
looked, that was what I saw. I remembered beggars in the old days too—Baba
always carried an extra handful of Afghani bills in his pocket just for them; I’d
never seen him deny a peddler. Now, though, they squatted at every street
corner, dressed in shredded burlap rags, mud-caked hands held out for a coin.
And the beggars were mostly children now, thin and grim-faced, some no older
than five or six. They sat in the laps of their burqa-clad mothers alongside
gutters at busy street corners and chanted “Bakhshesh, bakhshesh!” And something else, something I hadn’t
noticed right away: Hardly any of them sat with an adult male—the wars had made
