Chapter between 9 and 10 for The Kite Runner

I didn’t even know why I had to leave. That Amir wanted me to had been obvious for days, but what was the reason? I could instantly notice the feeling of rejection in his eyes. He needed me out of the house as soon as it could be possible. I thought I was the one that should be mad with him after he ran away while I was being attacked by Assef and his friends, but it was the other way round, he didn’t even want to see me. After so many years living like brothers, being obliged in some way to quit the life with which I was happy, starting a new one sounded unfair to me. What did I do wrong? But it seemed not to have an answer. I had to move on.
Dad lied to Baba that day we were leaving about going to uncle Hazarajat’s house. We had to look for a new house, a new home, somewhere new to live. This was something that we had never had to do. We always had Baba’s comfortable mansion in Kabul. We had never had to worry about living in the street and be homeless. Ali, my father, had always lived with Baba and his father. We had always had the peace of a secure house and family. But this time there wasn’t any Baba, or any Amir either.
That was something about which I was really concerned. Being alone was new to me, I never had to deal a similar situation, it was something in which I had no experience at all. I was born and raised next to Amir, and he had never been absent for me through all these years. Thinking that those stories, games, runs to the pomegranate tree wouldn’t be there anymore terrified me. And all guided me to the same question, why?
Days passed and we had to move to a very old abandoned house and look for a job, and luckily maybe a new “Baba’s mansion”. At first it was very hard, and as days went by we started to get used to it. But for me there was nothing left to do. It was like being born again, a new life had started and this time I had to deal with it alone.
Our neighbours were quite nice people. They were Hazara servants, just like us. Their son, Borat, was a twelve-year-old boy. He reminded me of Amir. He was a natural leader, always knew some new game to play all afternoon. Why not give him a chance. I decided to try.
At first it was impossible to get along with this new lifestyle. All the comfortable aspects of our past life were gone and I started to learn what real life was like, and sometimes even without our basic necessities. Dad always reminded me that this experience would help me in my future, but how could I stand having less food and money? I suppose it was something of my age that I couldn’t understand, but dad was always right and I trusted him. Things should get better.
Borat taught me many things about how to get by in my new life. Playing with him always up till late was great, we never got tired, just like with Amir. It made me very happy to have a playing partner again, although I knew it wasn’t the same. Borat wasn’t Amir.
I talked a lot with him about Amir, I taught him all the games we used to play, told him all the stories he used to tell me, all the places we had visited and obviously the big kite tournament we won together. I avoided the details of my meeting with Assef when I was looking for the much desired blue kite for Amir. But he wasn’t really interested in it. In these situations he usually changed the theme we were talking about and proposed some new recently invented game. That made me feel a little uncomfortable sometimes. I liked to talk about Amir, he was part of my life and he would always be.
I missed him so much. But what made me so sad was the anger of feeling that I would never talk to him again. In some way my brother started to disappear. I began to forget his face, and also Baba’s too. But, in some way, I felt them in my heart. At that time, I started with the obsession of writing him letters that I thought I would never send him, like kind of pretending to be in contact with him. But they never got to his hands until I asked Rahim Kahn to do it many years later. I hope that they did.



Felipe Martínez Devoto