After school, Hassan and I met up,
grabbed a book, and trotted up a bowl-shaped hill just north of my father’s
property in Wazir Akbar Khan. There was an old abandoned cemetery atop the hill
with rows of unmarked headstones and tangles of brushwood clogging the aisles.
Seasons of rain and snow had turned the iron gate rusty and left the cemetery’s
low white stone walls in decay. There was a pomegranate tree near the entrance
to the cemetery. One summer day, I used one of Ali’s kitchen knives to carveour names on it: “Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul.” Those words made it
formal: the tree was ours. After school, Hassan and I climbed its branches and
snatched its bloodred pomegranates. After we’d eaten the fruit and wiped our
hands on the grass, I would read to Hassan.
Sitting cross-legged, sunlight and
shadows of pomegranate leaves dancing on his face, Hassan absently plucked
blades of grass from the ground as I read him stories he couldn’t read for himself.
That Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided
the minute he had been born, perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in
Sanaubar’s unwelcoming womb—after all, what use did a servant have for the
written word? But despite his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan was
drawn to the mystery of words, seduced by a secret world forbidden to him. I
read him poems and stories, sometimes riddles—though I stopped reading those
when I saw he was far better at solving them than I was. So I read him
unchallenging things, like the misadventures of the bumbling Mullah Nasruddin and his donkey. We sat for hours under that tree, sat there until the sun faded
in the west, and still Hassan insisted we had enough daylight for one morestory, one more chapter.
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