After All, Life Is Not A Hindi

She Was An Extraordinary Woman, And I Went To Bed That Night Feeling Like I Was Perhaps More Than Ordinary Myself. This Was The Effect She Had On Me.

And Suddenly, Just Like That, Hope Became Knowledge. I Was Going To Win. It Was Just A Matter Of When.

My Memories Of Kabul Are Vastly Different Than The Way It Is When I Go There Now. My Memories Are Of The Final Years Before Everything Changed. When I Grew Up In Kabul, It Couldn't Be Mistaken For Beirut Or Tehran, As It Was Still In A Country That's Essentially Religious And Conservative, But It Was Suprisingly Progressive And Liberal.

For Courage, There Must Be Something At Stake. I Come Here With Nothing To Lose.

I Wanted To Tell Them That, In Kabul, We Snapped A Tree Branch And Used It As A Credit Card. Hassan And I Would Take The Wooden Stick To The Bread Maker. He'd Carve Notches On Our Stick With His Knife, One Notch For Each Loaf Of Naan He'd Pull For Us From The Tandoor's Roaring Flames. At The End Of The Month, My Father Paid Him For The Number Of Notches On The Stick. That Was It. No Questions. No Id.