If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate ---sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school.

If culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, [and] to all rooms inside.

My father and I did work for a while at the flea market and there really are rows of Afghans working there, some of whom I am related to.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

Years later, I learned an English word for the creature that Assef was, a word for which a good Farsi equivalent does not exist: sociopath.

For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban. I wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity for decades, that the history of the Afghans in the twentieth century has been largely pacific and harmonious.