In Kabul, hot running water had been like fathers, a rare commodity.

I don't know whom or what he was defying. [...] [M]aybe the God he had never believed in.

I'm sorry," Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

The Kite Runner is a story of two boys and a father, and the strange love triangle that binds them.

You have these crops of poppies that supply something like 90% of the heroin sold in Europe and actually represents more than half of the Afghanistan's GDP.

But then it passed, as all things do.