spring of 1983

Spring of 1983 found Baba and Amir living in a cramped apartment in Fremont, California, two years after their harrowing escape from Soviet-occupied Kabul. The season, which in Afghanistan had once meant the renewal of kite-fighting tournaments and picnics at Ghargha Lake, now brought only the gray realities of exile: the sting of Bay Area smog in Baba's eyes, the incessant traffic noise that gave him headaches, and the pollen that made him cough. For Baba, a man who had built the most beautiful house in Wazir Akbar Khan and once wrestled a black bear in Baluchistan, America was not a land of opportunity but a place to mourn his lost world. For Amir, however, America was a river in which he could drown his sins, a place with no ghosts, no memories, and no harelipped reminders of his betrayal of Hassan.

The Nguyens Incident and the Clash of Worlds

One Sunday in the spring of 1983, the cultural chasm between Baba's old-world honor and American bureaucratic norms erupted in a small grocery store. While Amir browsed a used bookstore, Baba entered Fast & Easy, a market run by the elderly Vietnamese couple Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen. When Mr. Nguyen asked for identification to cash a check for oranges, Baba exploded. "Almost two years we've bought his damn fruits and put money in his pocket and the son of a dog wants to see my license!" he bellowed in Farsi, overturning a magazine rack and shattering a jar of beef jerky. Mr. Nguyen, stepping in front of his wife with his cane, declared, "You're nice young man but your father, he's crazy. Not welcome anymore." Mrs. Nguyen threatened to call the police. Amir, mortified, led Baba away and returned to apologize, promising to pay for the damages. The incident crystallized Baba's alienation: in Kabul, a simple wooden stick with notches carved by the bread maker had sufficed as a credit system, a world of trust where "no one asked for ID." In America, that world was gone.

Baba's Labor and the Refusal of Welfare

Baba's struggle for dignity defined the spring of 1983. He worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, as an assistant at a gas station owned by an Afghan acquaintance, pumping gas, running the register, changing oil, and washing windshields. Amir would bring him lunch and find him pale and exhausted under the fluorescent lights, his eyes watering from fatigue. Yet when the family received food stamps, Baba refused them. He marched into the office of Mrs. Dobbins, their eligibility officer in San Jose, and dropped the stack of stamps on her desk. "Thank you but I don't want," he said. "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don't like it free money." Mrs. Dobbins, an overweight black woman with twinkling eyes who sang in church, blinked in disbelief. "Fifteen years I been doin' this job and nobody's ever done this," she said. Baba walked out of the welfare office "like a man cured of a tumor," having alleviated his greatest fear: that an Afghan would see him buying food with charity money.

Amir's Graduation and the Promise of a New Beginning

That summer of 1983, Amir graduated from high school at the age of twenty, by far the oldest senior tossing his mortarboard on the football field. He found Baba near the twenty-yard line, hands shoved in his pockets, camera dangling on his chest. Baba's beard was graying, his hair thinning at the temples, and he seemed shorter than Amir remembered from Kabul. He was wearing his only suit, the brown one he wore to Afghan weddings and funerals, and the red tie Amir had bought for his fiftieth birthday. Baba motioned for Amir to wear his mortarboard and took a picture with the school's clock tower in the background. "I am moftakhir, Amir," he said—proud. That night, Baba took Amir to an Afghan kabob house in Hayward, ordered far too much food, and told the owner his son was going to college in the fall. Later, at a bar across the street, Baba bought rounds for strangers, loosened his tie, and yelled "Fuck the Russia!" to the cheers of the patrons. On the drive home, he revealed a gift: a used Ford Grand Torino, navy blue, which he had bought for Amir to drive to college. "I wish Hassan had been with us today," Baba said, and the name sent a pair of steel hands closing around Amir's windpipe.

The Weight of the Past

For Amir, spring of 1983 was a season of deliberate forgetting. He enrolled in junior college classes, declaring an English major with a focus on creative writing, a choice that Baba met with skepticism. "They pay for that, making up stories?" Baba asked. Amir stood his ground, deciding he would not sacrifice for Baba anymore—the last time he had done so, he had damned himself. He drove his Ford Torino for hours through the East Bay, up the Peninsula and back, past the shabby houses of Fremont and the estates of Los Altos, marveling at the vastness of America. He drove to Santa Cruz and watched the fog roll in from the sea, remembering how he had once told Hassan that someday they would walk on a beach together. The first time he saw the Pacific, he almost cried. But the ghosts of Kabul—the city of harelipped ghosts—still haunted him. America was a river, roaring along, unmindful of the past, and Amir waded into it, hoping to let his sins drown to the bottom.