The Kite Runner at last

Trying to get back to a normal sleep routine after a topsy-turvy travel schedule from half-way around the world is a mixed blessing.  A couple of nights there was a tangled bundle of arms and legs stuffed like a tortilla between the two of us as our daughter's internal clock tricked her around 2 a.m. and she wasn't about to hang around in bed all by herself. Climbing over me and shooing away the dog sandwiched in the trough seemed like the next best thing to not missing school.

   I might have woken up on and off myself a few nights in a row but I did catch up on movies - some very good ones that I'd somehow missed. For this clandestine activity, a subscription to Amazon Prime and an iPad by the bed is very helpful, along with a pair of earbuds, a couple of times covered by a sheet like a kid with a flashlight and a really good book.

I love to go to films on my own and I see almost every good one that comes out but surprisingly I missed The Kite Runner and this one I watched in the early morning hours of the weekend. Embarrassingly tardy since I've worked on two fundraisers for the novel's author, Khaled Hosseini, who has a foundation that provides shelters for families and educational opportunities for girls in his native Afghanistan.  I got involved because Hosseini is the cousin of a friend, the amazing Maral who owns a unique clothing boutique in our small downtown shopping district.  Maral has an ongoing and ever-changing collection of couture, runway one-offs, and other exquisite pieces which she mixes with finds, small design labels, chunky Afghan jewelry and one treasure after another.  The fundraisers I've helped her with are fashion shows featuring items from her collection and she manages to make the women (mostly customers) of every size and shape look beautiful, fabulous, and very sexy.  Who wouldn't want to wear clothes like that?

Maral was very excited that Hosseini was to be the beneficiary of her show and auction, and he sent along signed copies of The Kite Runner, and one of A Thousand Splendid Suns to auction off.  The novels had been recommended to me many times but during periods when I was writing myself and was avoiding reading someone else's good work.  I think I thumbed through a copy at a bookstore and had a general idea what it was about but the film was so visceral and stunning I felt like a complete fool for having waited so long.

    The experience left me with an overwhelming desire to see Maral.  I knew her father had passed away when we were gone,  but it wasn't just that.  I'd been skirting around the edges of her culture, brought in as an observer, but only to the immigrant she had become, straddling worlds, one very far away.

The store was quiet when I arrived, and Maral wasn't there.  A friend, also Afghani, was minding it for her.  I browsed through the racks and somehow the subject of Hosseini's book came up.  She smiled and told me that her story was not so different. When the moujadin were fighting the Russians, she had three small children under five years old, and a comfortable life in an upscale neighborhood of Kabul.  Life before the Russians is remembered in many fictional works by Afgani authors, none more poignantly than in The Kite Runner.  Everyone with enough money to find a way out fled during this time, and that included Maral, her family, and her friend, who as she stood there, calmly recounted her exodus.  

    They left everything in their house.  Furniture, artwork, dishes, photographs, toys, clothing, everything.  Forever. She had one small bag, two children in hand, and a baby on her hip.  When they neared the Pakistan border, she told me, they ordered everyone out of the car.

"They told us it was too dangerous because the Russians would bomb any vehicles near the border," she told me. "So I had to walk for two hours carrying my baby."  She was smiling as she told me this, but I knew that the distance from the memory was hard-won. "You know, in Kabul in those days, before the Taliban, we wore Western clothes, like this," she indicated her skirt and blouse.  "And we had to put on a burka when we fled, it was so dark and difficult to see, I kept tripping on it."

As a fellow immigrant I do understand something of a sense of loss when it comes to being separated from your primal roots and I asked her if she ever wanted to go back, even for a visit.  He people, after all went back thousands of years there.
"No," she answered firmly.  "I am afraid, and it is not like it was when we lived there. The people are different."
A pre-war scene from The Kite Runner came back to me - the vibrant, noisy markets, busy daily life, children running through the streets with their colorful kites, hundreds of them dipping and diving in the sky. Then the images after the Russians and the Taliban had swept through, the litter, broken buildings, fearful shadows, skies empty of the now-forbidden kites.

"But what about your children?" I asked Maral's friend.
"They grew up here," was her simple answer. "They are happy and I am happy.  I have my mother and father, aunts, uncles, cousins. Everyone I love is here."
    Her daughter, she told me, married a Japanese/American man, and another child married a German. It was clear the family with an ancient familial legacy had truly embraced the new way of things and it had changed their future forever.

American troops may be muddying the political and social situation in Afghanistan but families like hers are here to stay and the connection, at least for the foreseeable future, is gone. And by a trick of fate and the growing personal connection to Maral's world, mine, it appears, is just beginning.

For more information on Khaled Hosseini's work in Afghanistan:
http://www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org/about-ourwork.htm

For more information and great photographs for Maral Designs:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/maral-designs-san-pedro