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
Sitting cross-legged, sunlight and shadows of pomegranate leaves
dancing on his face, Hassan absently plucked blades of grass from the ground as
I read him stories he couldn’t read for himself. That Hassan would grow up
illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been
born, perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in Sanaubar’s unwelcomingwomb—after all, what use did a servant have for the written word? But despite
his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan was drawn to the mystery of
words, seduced by a secret world forbidden to him. I read him poems and
stories, sometimes riddles—though I stopped reading those when I saw he was far
better at solving them than I was. So I read him unchallenging things, like the
misadventures of the bumbling Mullah Nasruddin and his donkey. We sat for hours
under that tree, sat there until the sun faded in the west, and still Hassan
insisted we had enough daylight for one more story, one more chapter.
I REALLY like how you told the reader the significance of the word pomegranate. At first, I didn't see why that needed to be explained or even why it was significan, but now I really see and makes a lot of sense. I would have never guessed that a pomegranate could hold such religious importance and reveal so much about a person or place.
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