March 1991

March 1991 arrives as a season of reckoning for Amir and Soraya. The couple has spent the preceding months in a grueling cycle of fertility treatments—basal body temperatures, blood tests, a hysteroscopy, injections of Clomiphene and hMG, and finally in vitro fertilization paid for with the advance from Amir's first novel. All of it has failed. Dr. Rosen, the round-bellied specialist with a passion for trains and a habit of calling human anatomy "plumbing," has used the word "adoption" for the first time. Soraya cried all the way home.

The Backyard Conversation

On an early evening in March 1991, Amir and Soraya sit on picnic chairs in the Taheris' backyard, grilling trout and sipping yogurt dogh. Khala Jamila has watered her roses and new honeysuckles, and their fragrance mixes with the smell of cooking fish. Twice already, she has reached across her chair to caress Soraya's hair and say, "God knows best, bachem. Maybe it wasn't meant to be." Soraya keeps looking down at her hands, tired of it all. When she finally murmurs that the doctor said they could adopt, General Taheri's head snaps up. He closes the barbecue lid. The conversation that follows exposes the fault lines of tradition, pride, and blood.

The General's Objection

General Taheri sits beside his daughter and delivers a measured but firm argument against adoption. "This adoption... thing, I'm not so sure it's for us Afghans," he says. He warns that adopted children grow up wanting to know their natural parents, and sometimes leave the home where their adoptive parents labored for years to provide for them. "Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, never forget that." He invokes Amir's own lineage—his father, his grandfather in Kabul, his great-grandfather—as proof that family identity is traceable and knowable. "That's why when his father—God give him peace—came khastegari, I didn't hesitate." He contrasts this with American practice: "People here marry for love, family name and ancestry never even come into the equation. They adopt that way too, as long as the baby is healthy, everyone is happy. But we are Afghans, bachem." Soraya, exhausted, asks only whether the fish is almost ready.

Amir's Complicity and Private Guilt

When Khala Jamila asks what Amir thinks, he answers, "I think I agree with General Sahib." Reassured, the general nods and goes back to the grill. But Amir's agreement is not rooted in the same pride or tradition as his father-in-law's. He has his own reason for not pushing adoption: the suspicion that his past sins—the betrayal of Hassan, the lies, the cowardice—have caught up with him. "Perhaps something, someone, somewhere, had decided to deny me fatherhood for the things I had done. Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so." Khala Jamila's platitude—"It wasn't meant to be"—becomes, in Amir's mind, "maybe it was meant not to be."

Consequences and Aftermath

The conversation in March 1991 does not end the couple's desire for a child, but it deepens the silence between them. A few months later, Amir and Soraya use the advance for his second novel to place a down payment on a two-bedroom Victorian house in San Francisco's Bernal Heights, moving nearly an hour away from the Taheris. Khala Jamila bemoans the distance, especially since she thinks Soraya needs all the love and support she can get—oblivious to the fact that her well-intended but overbearing sympathy is precisely what is driving Soraya away. In the quiet of their new home, the emptiness in Soraya's womb seeps into the marriage, into their laughs and their lovemaking. Late at night, Amir feels it rising from Soraya and settling between them, sleeping between them "like a newborn child." The wound of infertility, opened in March 1991, will not heal for years—and will shape the couple's response when, a decade later, Amir brings Sohrab home from Afghanistan.