Redemption: A Kite Runner Epilogue

Hope

    Five years has passed since that fateful day running kites in the park; where I first saw the hint of a smile, an emotion in Sohrab’s face. That which was nothing but a hard, beaten face of numbness has now become that of awareness. Maybe it was not the need of a therapist, of talking; but the need of the fun that once was there in a child’s life. Before there became so many children in Afghanistan with so little childhood. But the joy of once more running a kite, winning the last fallen kite, getting the glory was like no other feeling in the world.

      Maybe that is what really brings the light back into a child’s eyes...the hope of being brought back to where it all began.

       I am sitting in the living room of the same apartment Soraya and I moved into after we married. Sohrab is once more running round; playing pirate through the rooms of our apartment, pretending it is one large ship. Soraya sits at the kitchen table, grading papers from her students, while at the same time cooking dinner and watching the news. She always was good at multi-tasking with anything.

       I watch Sohrab run through the hall, yelling at an invisible enemy, holding his sword aloft striking in and out, dodging, jumping, and ducking swipes from his opponent’s blade. I can’t help but wonder at how far the little nephew of mine has come. Once such a troubled, quiet, secluded boy who shut himself off from the world has now become an outgoing, talkative, and a thoroughly wild child. I remember my thoughts as I saw the slight smile creep onto his face when we cut that fateful kite five years back.

       It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing….But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.

       I had been right.