Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name. Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975 —and all that followed— was already laid in those first words.

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

But then it passed, as all things do.

We will also be funding projects that empower women and children in Afghanistan and now and then give scholarships to Afghan students here in the Bay Area.

She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

The problem, of course, was that [he] saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.