“So did Genghis Khan,” Baba said. “But enough of that. You asked about sin and I want to tell you. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” I said, pressing my lips together. But a chortle escaped through my nose and made a snorting sound. That got me giggling again.
Baba’s stony eyes bore into mine and, just like that, I wasn’t laughing anymore. “I mean to speak to you man to man. Do you think you can handle that for once?”
“Yes, Baba-jan,” I muttered, marveling, not for the first time, at how badly Baba could sting me with so few words. We’d had a fleeting good moment- it wasn’t often Baba talked to me, let alone on his lap- and I’d been a fool to waste it.
“Good,” Baba said, but his eyes wondered. “Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?”
“No, Baba-jan,” I said, desperately wishing I did. I didn’t want to disappoint him again.
Baba heaved a sigh of impatience. That stung too, because he was not an impatient man. I remembered all the times he didn’t come home until after dark, all the times I ate dinner alone. I’d ask Ali where Baba was, when is he coming home, though I knew full well he was at the construction site, overlooking this, supervising that. Didn’t that take patience? I already hated all the kids he was building the orphanage for; sometimes I wished they’d all died along with their parents.
“When you kill a man, you steal his life.” Baba said. “You steal his wife’s right to a husband; rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal his right to fairness. Do you see?”
I did. When Baba was six, a thief walked into my grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. My grandfather, a respected judge, confronted him, but the thief stabbed him in the throat, killing him instantly-and robbing Baba of a father. The towns-people caught the killer just before noon the next day; he turned out to be a wanderer from the Kunduz region. They hanged him from the branch of an oak tree with still two hours to go before the afternoon prayer. It was Rahim Khan, not Baba, who had told me that story. I was always learning things about Baba from other people.
“There is no act more wretched than stealing, Amir,” Baba said. “A man who takes what’s not his to take, be it a life or a loaf of naan… I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him. do you understand?”
I found the idea of Baba clobbering a thief both exhilarating and terribly frightening. “Yes, Baba.”
“If there’s a God out there, then I would hope he has more important things to attend to then to my drinking scotch or eating pork. Now, hop down. All this talk about sin has made me thirsty again.”
-Adapted from The Kite Runner by Khaled Hossein
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Due to my ultimate boredom from staying at home, I've begun to watch Princess Hours aka Goong, which happens to be a love story and the last thing of all things I should be watching.
But I was bored and my sister had the whole of season 1. So I decided, what the heck.
For that, Min-er has labelled me GAY.
Oh well.
SCM in 3 days. I really need to run.
Bye. @ 18:24