When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway

of my father’s house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes
with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on a pair of high
branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried mulberries
and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate mulberries, pelted each other
with them, giggling, laughing. I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering
through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll
chiselled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo
leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire. I can
still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that
looked like it was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of midline,
where the Chinese doll maker’s instrument may have slipped, or perhaps he had
simply grown tired and careless.

Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his slingshot at
the neighbor’s one-eyed German shepherd. Hassan never wanted to, but if I asked,
really asked, he wouldn’t deny me. Hassan never denied me anything. And he was
deadly with his slingshot. Hassan’s father, Ali, used to catch us and get mad, or as
mad as someone as gentle as Ali could ever get. He would wag his finger and wave
us down from the tree. He would take the mirror and tell us what his mother had told
him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims during prayer.
“And he laughs while he does it,” he always added, scowling at his son.

The poplar trees lined the redbrick driveway, which led to a pair of wrought-iron
gates. They in turn opened into an extension of the driveway into my father’s estate.
The house sat on the left side of the brick path, the backyard at the end of it.

Everyone agreed that my father, my Baba, had built the most beautiful house in the
Wazir Akbar Khan district, a new and affluent neighborhood in the northern part of
Kabul. Some thought it was the prettiest house in all of Kabul. A broad entryway
flanked by rosebushes led to the sprawling house of marble floors and wide
windows. Intricate mosaic tiles, handpicked by Baba in Isfahan, covered the floors of
the four bathrooms. Gold-stitched tapestries, which Baba had bought in Calcutta,
lined the walls; a crystal chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling.

Upstairs was my bedroom, Baba’s room, and his study, also known as “the smoking
room,” which perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. Baba and his friends
reclined on black leather chairs there after Ali had served dinner. They stuffed their
pipes -- except Baba always called it “fattening the pipe” -- and discussed their
favorite three topics: politics, business, soccer. Sometimes I asked Baba if I could sit
with them, but Baba would stand in the doorway. “Go on, now,” he’d say. “This is
grown-ups’ time. Why don’t you go read one of those books of yours?” He’d close
the door, leave me to wonder why it was always grown-ups’ time with him. I’d sit by
the door, knees drawn into my chest. Sometimes I sat there for an hour, sometimes
two, listening to their laughter, their chatter.

The living room downstairs had a curved wall with custom-built cabinets. Inside sat
framed family pictures: an old, grainy photo of my grandfather and King Nadir Shah
taken in 1931, two years before the king’s assassination; they are standing over a
dead deer, dressed in knee-high boots, rifles slung over their shoulders. There was a
picture of my parents’ wedding night, Baba dashing in his black suit and my mother a
smiling young princess in white. Here was Baba and his best friend and business
partner, Rahim Kahn, standing outside our house, neither one smiling -- I am a baby
in that photograph and Baba is holding me, looking tired and grim. I’m in his arms,
but it’s Rahim Khan’s pinky my fingers are curled around.

The curved wall led into the dining room, at the center of which was a mahogany
table that could easily sit thirty guests -- and, given my father’s taste for extravagant
parties, it did just that almost every week. On the other end of the dining room was a
tall marble fireplace, always lit by the orange glow of a fire in the wintertime.

A large sliding glass door opened into a semicircular terrace that overlooked two
acres of backyard and rows of cherry trees. Baba and Ali had planted a small
vegetable garden along the eastern wall: tomatoes, mint, peppers, and a row of corn
that never really took. Hassan and I used to call it “the Wall of Ailing Corn.”

On the south end of the garden, in the shadows of a loquat tree, was the servants’
home, a modest mud hut where Hassan lived with his father.

It was there, in that little shack, that Hassan was born in the winter of 1964, just one
year after my mother died giving birth to me.