My Confession

Through this short story I tried to give a voice to Sanaubar, a minor character in The Kite Runner. The only thing we know about her character is that she leaves her family and runs away. I wrote a story narrated by her, trying to explain the reasons why she did this. She is a very cold woman who blames life for her own faults and who is not sorry for the things she did. This is my version of her personality and this is also how I felt when I read about her in the book.


It is really hard to describe what I felt when I got the news: it was simply… unbelievable. I felt guilty enough already, that feeling of bretrayal was eating me inside, but we all make mistakes, don’t we? We’ve got to deal with them and just get over them, and I thought I had, until I found out I was pregnant and it wasn’t my husband’s baby, it was actually his best friend’s.
It might seem terrible, but it wasn’t. I mean I don’t want to sound like an awful person, but let’s be realistic: a woman’s dream is, and will always be, getting married with the perfect man, have the perfect family and live happily ever after in a perfect house. At least that was my dream, my idea of the perfect life, but it never came true: I married a man who, to be honest, was really far from being perfect, we didn’t have babies and we lived miserably, but when you’re young and in love… again, I guess we can make a lot of mistakes in life and this was a really big one.
There was something I couldn’t live with, and it is hard for me to face, but I was so jealous of her. She had everything I had ever dreamed of, my ideal of the perfect life: she was married to that strong, powerful and wealthy –wealthy above all- young man. They lived in the perfect mansion and she was pregnant, and the baby was obviously supposed to be as perfect as they, as their love, as their family, as their life. And who was I? The insignificant wife of that hideous servant and our lives were devoted to serving them. Why was I supposed to watch how their lives blossomed every single day while I was sleeping next to a man who would never give me babies? I didn’t even choose to live with him, my whole life had been planned since I was young: our families knew each other and they figured we should get married, even though we weren’t in love, at least I wasn’t. I have to admit it wasn’t that bad, Ali was a nice man and all but once you start to realize none of your dreams is becoming true, it all gets boring and life just doesn’t make sense anymore.
Oh… it makes me so mad even to think about those times. I never, ever felt like a woman until that unique day came, one of those days you remember for the rest of your life even though the consequences were terrible. It was another happy and lovely day for the perfect family: that child was already born and their lives couldn’t possibly get better. But it happens, I mean, nothing can be THAT perfect, can it? She died, some complications after labour, I heard. She seemed fine at first, but she didn’t last too long, those weak women who know nothing about life never do so.
A couple of months later, Baba and I made what he calls ‘the worst mistake of our whole life’. What were we supposed to do? Lie? We all knew Ali was infertile so the baby was obviously not his. So we just pretended, the three of us, that everything was just fine, I still cannot understand Ali’s reaction: he didn’t say anything, anything at all! Always with that smile and that understanding look on his face. What the hell was going on? Some months after the big news he confessed he could understand me as he was never able to give me what I always wanted: a family. How can someone understand something like that? I cheated on him and all he could say was that he understood my reasons? So he forgave me and promised to raise that child as if he was his own, but no! It wasn’t his baby! That made him even more disgusting to my eyes. Couldn’t he get mad for once in his life? I hated him for loving me so much and for being so forgiving. What can I say? Women can be very complicated sometimes.
Don’t missunderstand me, it’s not like I felt fine with the situation. I had made a terrible mistake but it was already too late to do something about it and at least I had a moment of happines in my life, I deserved it. The lousiest 9 months of my life went by slowly, and they were torturing: Ali was around me all the time and Baba played the friend role the whole time, as if the baby wasn’t his. It was absloutely irritating as you can imagine. That fake situation was driving me crazy. The day Hassan was born finally came. I didn’t know what to feel: I was not happy or pleased at all, but everyone around me seemed to be so, again, I had to pretend that that was the happiest moment in my whole life but I kept feeling so depressed. Wasn’t this what I’d always wanted? Maybe it was, but that wasn’t how I wanted it to happen.
A few days after giving birth I grew restless, suffocated. I couldn’t stand that situation anymore: we were still servants at that luxurious mansion and there was something even worse than that, Hassan was in our lives now. Having to look into Hassan’s eyes every day of my life made me feel really nervous, it’s actually kind of hard to explain. Who was he? It seemed it was Ali’s baby even though I knew very well who his father was, a small version of the man I hate, it was exactly like him, that smile, that gentle look… Running away was my best option. So that’s what I did.

Geraldine Galvez