[Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns] is not just unique to books, but films and music.

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

When I went to Afghanistan in 2003, I walked into a war zone. Entire neighborhoods had been demolished. There were an overwhelming number of widows and orphans and people who had been physically and emotionally damaged; every 10-year-old kid on the street knew how to dismantle a Kalashnikov in under a minute. I would flip through math textbooks intended for third grade, fourth grade, and they would include word problems such as, "If you have 100 grenades and 20 mujahideen, how many grenades per mujahideen do you get?" War has infiltrated every facet of life.

Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end…crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis (nomads).

I’m all you have in this world Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You ARE nothing!