The Kite Runner Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Indians, insect torture—with our crowning achievement undeniably the time we plucked the stinger
     off a bee and tied a string around the poor thing to yank it back every time it took flight.
    We chased the Kochi, the nomads who passed through Kabul on their way to the mountains of the north. We would hear their caravans approaching our
     neighborhood, the mewling of their sheep, the baa ing of their goats, the jingle of bells around their camels’ necks. We’d run outside to watch the caravan plod through our
     street, men with dusty, weather-beaten faces and women dressed in long, colorful shawls, beads, and silver bracelets around
     their wrists and ankles. We hurled pebbles at their goats. We squirted water on their mules. I’d make Hassan sit on the Wall
     of Ailing Corn and fire pebbles with his slingshot at the camels’ rears.
    We saw our first Western together, Rio Bravo with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore. I remember begging Baba to take us to Iran
     so we could meet John Wayne. Baba burst out in gales of his deep-throated laughter—a sound not unlike a truck engine revving
     up—and, when he could talk again, explained to us the concept of voice dubbing. Hassan and I were stunned. Dazed. John Wayne
     didn’t really speak Farsi and he wasn’t Iranian! He was American, just like the friendly, longhaired men and women we always
     saw hanging around in Kabul, dressed in their tattered, brightly colored shirts. We saw Rio Bravo three times, but we saw our favorite Western, The Magnificent Seven, thirteen times. With each viewing, we cried at the end when the Mexican kids buried Charles Bronson—who, as it turned out,
     wasn’t Iranian either.
    We took strolls in the musty-smelling bazaars of the Shar-e-Nau section of Kabul, or the new city, west of the Wazir Akbar
     Khan district. We talked about whatever film we had just seen and walked amid the bustling crowds of bazarris. We snaked our way among the merchants and the beggars, wandered through narrow alleys cramped with rows of tiny, tightly packed
     stalls. Baba gave us each a weekly allowance of ten Afghanis and we spent it on warm Coca-Cola and rosewater ice cream topped
     with crushed pistachios.
    During the school year, we had a daily routine. By the time I dragged myself out of bed and lumbered to the bathroom, Hassan
     had already washed up, prayed the morning namaz with Ali, and prepared my breakfast: hot black tea with three sugar cubes and a slice of toasted naan topped with my favorite sour cherry marmalade, all neatly placed on the dining table. While I ate and complained about homework,
     Hassan made my bed, polished my shoes, ironed my outfit for the day, packed my books and pencils. I’d hear him singing to
     himself in the foyer as he ironed, singing old Hazara songs in his nasal voice. Then, Baba and I drove off in his black Ford
     Mustang—a car that drew envious looks everywhere because it was the same car Steve McQueen had driven in Bullitt, a film that played in one theater for six months. Hassan stayed home and helped Ali with the day’s chores: hand-washing dirty
     clothes and hanging them to dry in the yard, sweeping the floors, buying fresh naan from the bazaar, marinating meat for dinner, watering the lawn.
    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 carve our 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