بخش 4

March 1981

A young woman sat across from us. She was dressed in an olive green dress with a black shawl wrapped tightly around her face against the night chill. She burst into prayer every time the truck jerked or stumbled into a pothole, her “Bismillah!” peaking with each of the truck’s shudders and jolts. Her husband, a burly man in baggy pants and sky blue turban, cradled an infant in one arm and thumbed prayer beads with his free hand. His lips moved in silent prayer. There were others, in all about a dozen, including Baba and me, sitting with our suitcases between our legs, cramped with these strangers in the tarpaulin-covered cab of an old Russian truck.

My innards had been roiling since we’d left Kabul just after two in the morning. Baba never said so, but I knew he saw my car sickness as yet another of my array of weakness. When the burly guy with the beads asked if I was going to get sick, I said I might. Baba looked away. The man lifted his corner of the tarpaulin cover and rapped on the driver’s window, asked him to stop. But the driver, Karim, a scrawny dark-skinned man with hawk-boned features and a pencil-thin mustache, shook his head.

“We are too close to Kabul,” he shot back. “Tell him to have a strong stomach.”

Baba grumbled something under his breath. I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but suddenly I was salivating, the back of my throat tasting bile. I turned around, lifted the tarpaulin, and threw up over the side of the moving truck. Behind me, Baba was apologizing to the other passengers. As if car sickness was a crime. As if you weren’t supposed to get sick when you were eighteen. I threw up two more times before Karim agreed to stop, mostly so I wouldn’t stink up his vehicle, the instrument of his livelihood. Karim was a people smuggler—it was a pretty lucrative business then, driving people out of Shorawi-occupied Kabul to the relative safety of Pakistan. He was taking us to Jalalabad, about 170 kilometers southeast of Kabul, where his brother, Toor, who had a bigger truck with a second convoy of refugees, was waiting to drive us across the Khyber Pass and into Peshawar.

We were a few kilometers west of Mahipar Falls when Karim pulled to the side of the road. I hopped down the back of the truck and lurched to the dusty embankment on the side of the road. I stooped, hands on my kneecaps, and waited for the bile.

Standing on the shoulder of the road, I thought of the way we’d left the house where I’d lived my entire life, as if we were going out for a bite: dishes smeared with kofta piled in the kitchen sink; laundry in the wicker basket in the foyer; beds unmade.

In the morning, Jalaluddin—our seventh servant in five years—would probably think we’d gone out for a stroll or a drive. We hadn’t told him. You couldn’t trust anyone in Kabul any-more—for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend.

What was I doing on this road in the middle of the night? This had to be a dream. Had to be. Tomorrow morning, I’d wake up, peek out the window: No grim-faced Russian soldiers patrolling the sidewalks, no tanks rolling up and down the streets of my city, no rubble, no curfews. Then, behind me, I overheard him telling Baba how he and his brother knew the Russian and Afghan soldiers who worked the checkpoints, how they had set up a “mutually profitable” arrangement. This was no dream. As if on cue, a MiG suddenly screamed past overhead. I wondered where Hassan was. Then the inevitable. I vomited on a tangle of weeds, my retching and groaning drowned in the deafening roar of the MiG.

We pulled up to the checkpoint at Mahipar twenty minutes later. Our driver let the truck idle and hopped down to greet the approaching voices. Feet crushed gravel. Words were exchanged, brief and hushed. A flick of a lighter. “Spasseba.” Someone said.

Boot heels clicked on asphalt. Someone flung open the tarpaulin hanging over the back of the truck, and three faces peered in. One was Karim, the other two were soldiers, one Afghan, the other a grinning Russian, face like a bulldog’s, cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. Behind them, a bone-colored moon hung in the sky. Karim and the Afghan soldier had a brief exchange in Pashtu. I caught a little of it—something about Toor and his bad luck. The Russian soldier thrust his face into the rear of the truck. Even in the dim light of the moon, I saw the glazed look in his eyes as they skipped from passenger to passenger. His eyes settled on the young woman wearing the black shawl. He spoke in Russian to Karim without taking his eyes off her. Karim gave a curt reply in Russian, which the soldier returned with an even curter retort. I could feel Baba tightening up next to me. Karim cleared his throat, dropped his head. Said the soldier wanted a half hour with the lady in the back of the truck.

The young woman pulled the shawl down over her face. Burst into tears. The husband’s face had become as pale as the moon hovering above. He told Karim to ask “Mister Soldier Sahib” to show a little mercy, maybe he had a sister or a mother, maybe he had a wife too. The Russian listened to Karim and barked a series of words.

“It’s his price for letting us pass,” Karim said. He couldn’t bring himself to look the husband in the eye.

That was when Baba stood up. “I want you to ask this man something,” Baba said. He said it to Karim, but looked directly at the Russian officer. “Ask him where his shame is.” They spoke. “He says this is war. There is no shame in war.”

“Tell him he’s wrong. War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.”

Do you have to always be the hero? I thought, my heart fluttering. Can’t you just let it go for once?

The Russian soldier said something to Karim, a smile creasing his lips.

“What did he say?”

“He says he’ll enjoy putting a bullet in you almost as much as . . .” Karim trailed off, but nodded his head toward the young woman who had caught the guard’s eye. The soldier flicked his unfinished cigarette and unholstered his handgun.

“Tell him I’ll take a thousand of his bullets before I let this indecency take place,” Baba said. The Russian soldier’s grin never faltered when he heard the translation. He clicked the safety on the gun. Pointed the barrel to Baba’s chest. Heart pounding in my throat, I buried my face in my hands.

The gun roared.

It’s done, then. I’m eighteen and alone. I have no one left in the world. Baba’s dead and now I have to bury him. Where do I bury him? Where do I go after that?

I cracked my eyelids, found Baba still standing. I saw a second Russian officer with the others. It was from the muzzle of his upturned gun that smoke swirled. The soldier who had meant to shoot Baba had already holstered his weapon.

The second Russian officer, gray-haired and heavyset, spoke to us in broken Farsi. He apologized for his comrade’s behavior. “Russia sends them here to fight,” he said. “But they are just boys, and when they come here, they find the pleasure of drug.” He gave the younger officer the rueful look of a father exasperated with his misbehaving son. “This one is attached to drug now. I try to stop him . . .” He waved us off. Moments later, we were pulling away.

We rode in silence for about fifteen minutes before the young woman’s husband suddenly stood and did something I’d seen many others do before him: He kissed Baba’s hand.

We rolled into Jalalabad about an hour before sunrise. Karim ushered us quickly from the truck into a one-story house at the intersection of two dirt roads.

Once he had us inside the dimly lit, bare living room, Karim locked the front door, pulled the tattered sheets that passed for curtains. Then he took a deep breath and gave us the bad news: His brother Toor couldn’t take us to Peshawar. It seemed his truck’s engine had blown the week before and Toor was still waiting for parts.

“Last week?” someone exclaimed. “If you knew this, why did you bring us here?”

I caught a flurry of movement out of the corner of my eye. Then a blur of something zipping across the room, and the next thing I saw was Karim slammed against the wall, his sandaled feet dangling two feet above the floor. Wrapped around his neck were Baba’s hands.

“I’ll tell you why,” Baba snapped. “Because he got paid for his leg of the trip. That’s all he cared about.” Karim was turning red and kicking his legs. Baba kept choking him until the young mother, the one the Russian officer had fancied, begged him to stop.

Karim collapsed on the floor and rolled around fighting for air when Baba finally let go. The room fell silent. Less than two hours ago, Baba had volunteered to take a bullet for the honor of a woman he didn’t even know. Now he’d almost choked a man to death, would have done it cheerfully if not for the pleas of that same woman.

Something thumped next door. No, not next door, below.

“What’s that?” someone asked.

“The others,” Karim panted between labored breaths. “In the basement.”

“How long have they been waiting?” Baba said, standing over Karim.

“Two weeks.”

“I thought you said the truck broke down last week.”

Karim rubbed his throat. “It might have been the week before,” he croaked.

I was glad for the darkness. I didn’t want to see the murderous look on Baba’s face.

The stench of something dank, like mildew, bludgeoned my nostrils the moment Karim opened the door that led down the creaky steps to the basement. We descended in single line. Standing in the cold basement, I felt watched by eyes blinking in the dark. I saw shapes huddled around the room, their silhouettes thrown on the walls by the dim light of a pair of kerosene lamps.

Karim told us it should be a matter of a couple of short days before the truck was fixed. Then we’d be on our way to Peshawar. On to freedom. On to safety.

Once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I counted about thirty refugees in that basement. We sat shoulder to shoulder along the walls, ate crackers, bread with dates, apples. It was later that first night when I discovered that two of the people hiding with us were Kamal and his father. That was shocking enough, seeing Kamal sitting in the basement just a few feet away from me. But when he and his father came over to our side of the room and I saw Kamal’s face, really saw it …

He had withered—there was simply no other word for it. His eyes gave me a hollow look and no recognition at all registered in them. His shoulders hunched and his cheeks sagged like they were too tired to cling to the bone beneath. His father, who’d owned a movie theater in Kabul, was telling Baba how, three months before, a stray bullet had struck his wife in the temple and killed her. Then he told Baba about Kamal. I caught only snippets of it: Should have never let him go alone . . . always so handsome, you know …four of them . . . tried to fight …God … took him . . . bleeding down there . . . his pants . . . doesn’t talk anymore . . . just stares . . .

There would be no truck, Karim told us after we’d spent a week in the rat-infested basement. The truck was beyond repair.

“There is another option,” Karim said, his voice rising amid the groans. His cousin owned a fuel truck and had smuggled people with it a couple of times. He was here in Jalalabad and could probably fit us all.

Everyone except an elderly couple decided to go.

We left that night. One by one, we mounted the idling truck’s rear deck, climbed the rear access ladder, and slid down into the tank.

The basement had been dark. The fuel tank was pitch-black. I looked right, left, up, down, waved my hands before my eyes, didn’t see so much as a hint of movement. I blinked, blinked again. Nothing at all. The air wasn’t right, it was too thick, almost solid. Air wasn’t supposed to be solid. I wanted to reach out with my hands, crush the air into little pieces, stuff them down my windpipe. And the stench of gasoline. My eyes stung from the fumes, like someone had peeled my lids back and rubbed a lemon on them. My nose caught fire with each breath. You could die in a place like this, I thought.

The rest of that ride is scattered bits and pieces of memory that come and go, most of it sounds and smells: MiGs roaring past overhead; staccatos of gunfire; a donkey braying nearby; the jingling of bells and mewling of sheep; gravel crushed under the truck’s tires; a baby wailing in the dark; the stench of gasoline, vomit, and shit.

What I remember next is the blinding light of early morning as I climbed out of the fuel tank. I remember turning my face up to the sky, squinting, breathing like the world was running out of air. I lay on the side of the dirt road next to a rocky trench, looked up to the gray morning sky, thankful for air, thankful for light, thankful to be alive.

“We’re in Pakistan, Amir,” Baba said. He was standing over me. “Karim says he will call for a bus to take us to Peshawar.”

I rolled onto my chest, still lying on the cool dirt, and saw our suitcases on either side of Baba’s feet. Through the upside down V between his legs, I saw the truck idling on the side of the road, the other refugees climbing down the rear ladder. They made me sad for Baba. After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life: one disappointing son and two suitcases.

Someone was screaming. No, not screaming. Wailing. I saw the passengers huddled in a circle, heard their urgent voices. Someone said the word “fumes.” Someone else said it too. The wail turned into a throat-ripping screech.

Baba and I hurried to the pack of onlookers and pushed our way through them. Kamal’s father was sitting cross-legged in the center of the circle, rocking back and forth, kissing his son’s ashen face.

“He won’t breathe! My boy won’t breathe!” he was crying. Kamal’s lifeless body lay on his father’s lap. Baba knelt beside him and curled an arm around his shoulder. But Kamal’s father shoved him away and lunged for Karim who was standing nearby with his cousin. I saw an arm swing, a leg kick. A moment later, Kamal’s father was standing with Karim’s gun in his hand.

“Don’t shoot me!” Karim cried.

But before any of us could say or do a thing, Kamal’s father shoved the barrel in his own mouth. I’ll never forget the echo of that blast. Or the flash of light and the spray of red.

I doubled over again and dry-heaved on the side of the road.

Fremont, California. 1980s

Baba loved the idea of America.

It was living in America that gave him an ulcer.

The Bay Area’s smog stung his eyes, the traffic noise gave him headaches, and the pollen made him cough. The fruit was never sweet enough, the water never clean enough, and where were all the trees and open fields? For two years, I tried to get Baba to enroll in ESL classes to improve his broken English. But he scoffed at the idea. “Maybe I’ll spell ‘cat’ and the teacher will give me a glittery little star so I can run home and show it off to you,” he’d grumble.

One Sunday in the spring of 1983, I walked into a small bookstore that sold used paperbacks, next to the Indian movie theater just west of where Amtrak crossed Fremont Boulevard. I told Baba I’d be out in five minutes and he shrugged. He had been working at a gas station in Fremont and had the day off. I watched him jaywalk across Fremont Boulevard and enter Fast & Easy, a little grocery store run by an elderly Vietnamese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen.

I was flipping through a worn copy of a Mike Hammer mystery when I heard screaming and glass breaking. I dropped the book and hurried across the street. I found the Nguyens behind the counter, all the way against the wall, faces ashen, Mr. Nguyen’s arms wrapped around his wife. On the floor: oranges, an overturned magazine rack, a broken jar of beef jerky, and shards of glass at Baba’s feet.

It turned out that Baba had had no cash on him for the oranges. He’d written Mr. Nguyen a check and Mr. Nguyen had asked for an ID. “He wants to see my license,” Baba bellowed in Farsi. “Almost two years we’ve bought his damn fruits and put money in his pocket and the son of a dog wants to see my license!” “Baba, it’s not personal,” I said, smiling at the Nguyens. “They’re supposed to ask for an ID.”

“What kind of a country is this? No one trusts anybody!”

“I call police,” Mrs. Nguyen said, poking out her face. “You get out or I call police.”

“Please, Mrs. Nguyen, don’t call the police. I’ll take him home. Just don’t call the police, okay? Please?”

“Yes, you take him home. Good idea,” Mr. Nguyen said. “My father is still adjusting to life in America,” I said, by way of explanation.

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.

But I didn’t tell them. I thanked Mr. Nguyen for not calling the cops. Took Baba home. He sulked and smoked on the balcony while I made rice with chicken neck stew. A year and a half since we’d stepped off the Boeing from Peshawar, and Baba was still adjusting.

We ate in silence that night. After two bites, Baba pushed away his plate.

I glanced at him across the table, his nails chipped and black with engine oil, his knuckles scraped, the smells of the gas sta-tion—dust, sweat, and gasoline—on his clothes. Baba was like the widower who remarries but can’t let go of his dead wife. He missed the sugarcane fields of Jalalabad and the gardens of Paghman. He missed people milling in and out of his house, missed walking down the bustling aisles of Shor Bazaar and greeting people who knew him and his father, knew his grandfather, people who shared ancestors with him, whose pasts intertwined with his.

For me, America was a place to bury my memories.

For Baba, a place to mourn his.

“Maybe we should go back to Peshawar,” I said, watching the ice float in my glass of water. We’d spent six months in Peshawar waiting for the INS to issue our visas. Our grimy one-bedroom apartment smelled like dirty socks and cat droppings, but we were surrounded by people we knew—at least people Baba knew.

“You were happier there, Baba. It was more like home,” I said.

“Peshawar was good for me. Not good for you.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on his. My student hand, clean and soft, on his laborer’s hand, grubby and calloused. I thought of all the trucks, train sets, and bikes he’d bought me in Kabul. Now America. One last gift for Amir.

That summer of 1983, I graduated from high school at the age of twenty, by far the oldest senior tossing his mortarboard on the football field that day. I remember losing Baba in the swarm of families, flashing cameras, and blue gowns. I found him near the twenty-yard line, hands shoved in his pockets, camera dangling on his chest. He was wearing his brown suit—his only suit, the same one he wore to Afghan weddings and funerals—and the red tie I had bought for his fiftieth birthday that year. Then he saw me and waved. Smiled. He motioned for me to wear my mortarboard, and took a picture of me with the school’s clock tower in the background. I smiled for him—in a way, this was his day more than mine. He walked to me, curled his arm around my neck, and gave my brow a single kiss. “I am moftakhir, Amir,” he said. Proud. His eyes gleamed when he said that and I liked being on the receiving end of that look.

He took me to an Afghan kabob house in Hayward that night and ordered far too much food. He told the owner that his son was going to college in the fall. I had debated him briefly about that just before graduation, and told him I wanted to get a job. Help out, save some money, maybe go to college the following year. But he had shot me one of his smoldering Baba looks, and the words had vaporized on my tongue.

After dinner, I drove us home in Baba’s old, ochre yellow Buick Century. When I stopped the car and said in a hoarse voice, “Keep driving to the end of the block.” “Why, Baba?”

“Just go.” He had me park at the south end of the street. He reached in his coat pocket and handed me a set of keys. “There,” he said, pointing to the car in front of us. It was an old model Ford, long and wide, a dark color I couldn’t discern in the moonlight. “It needs painting, and I’ll have one of the guys at the station put in new shocks, but it runs.” I took the keys, stunned. I looked from him to the car.

“You’ll need it to go to college,” he said.

I took his hand in mine. Squeezed it. My eyes were tearing over and I was glad for the shadows that hid our faces. “Thank you, Baba.”

We got out and sat inside the Ford. It was a Grand Torino. Navy blue, Baba said. I drove it around the block, testing the brakes, the radio, the turn signals. I parked it in the lot of our apartment building and shut off the engine. “Tashakor, Baba jan,” I said. I wanted to say more, tell him how touched I was by his act of kindness, how much I appreciated all that he had done for me, all that he was still doing. But I knew I’d embarrass him. “Tashakor,” I repeated instead.

He smiled and leaned back against the headrest, his forehead almost touching the ceiling. We didn’t say anything. Just sat in the dark, listened to the tink-tink of the engine cooling, the wail of a siren in the distance. Then Baba rolled his head toward me. “I wish Hassan had been with us today,” he said.

A pair of steel hands closed around my windpipe at the sound of Hassan’s name. I rolled down the window. Waited for the steel hands to loosen their grip.

I would enroll in junior college classes in the fall, I told Baba the day after graduation. He was drinking cold black tea and chewing cardamom seeds.

“I think I’ll major in English,” I said. I winced inside, waiting for his reply.

“English?”

“Creative writing.”

He considered this. Sipped his tea. “Stories, you mean. You’ll make up stories.” I looked down at my feet.

He took a deep breath and sipped his tea. Grunted something about medical school, law school, and “real work.” My cheeks burned and guilt coursed through me, the guilt of indulging myself at the expense of his ulcer, his black fingernails and aching wrists. But I would stand my ground, I decided. I didn’t want to sacrifice for Baba anymore. The last time I had done that, I had damned myself.

Baba sighed and, this time, tossed a whole handful of cardamom seeds in his mouth.

The following summer, the summer of 1984—the summer I turned twenty-one—Baba sold his Buick and bought a dilapidated ‘71 Volkswagen bus for $550 from an old Afghan acquaintance who’d been a high-school science teacher in Kabul. The bus was a sad carcass of rusted metal, shattered windows replaced with black garbage bags, balding tires, and upholstery shredded down to the springs. But the old teacher had reassured Baba that the engine and transmission were sound and, on that account, the man hadn’t lied.

On Saturdays, Baba woke me up at dawn. As he dressed, I scanned the classifieds in the local papers and circled the garage sale ads. We mapped our route—Fremont, Union City, Newark, and Hayward first, then San Jose, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and Campbell if time permitted. Baba drove the bus, sipping hot tea from the thermos, and I navigated. By midafternoon, we’d filled the back of the VW bus with used goods. Then early Sunday mornings, we drove to the San Jose flea market off Berryessa, rented a spot, and sold the junk for a small profit: a Chicago record that we’d bought for a quarter the day before might go for $1, or $4 for a set of five; a ramshackle Singer sewing machine purchased for $10 might, after some bargaining, bring in $25.

By that summer, Afghan families were working an entire section of the San Jose flea market. Afghan music played in the aisles of the Used Goods section.

The only thing that flowed more than tea in those aisles was Afghan gossip. The flea market was where you sipped green tea with almond kolchas, and learned whose daughter had broken off an engagement and run off with her American boyfriend, who used to be Parchami—a communist—in Kabul, and who had bought a house with under-the-table money while still on welfare. Tea, Politics, and Scandal, the ingredients of an Afghan Sunday at the flea market.

I ran the stand sometimes as Baba sauntered down the aisle, hands respectfully pressed to his chest, greeting people he knew from Kabul: mechanics and tailors selling hand-me-down wool coats and scraped bicycle helmets, alongside former ambassadors, out-of-work surgeons, and university professors.

One early Sunday morning in July 1984, while Baba set up, I bought two cups of coffee from the concession stand and returned to find Baba talking to an older, distinguished-looking man.

“Amir,” Baba said, motioning me over, “this is General Sahib, Mr. Iqbal Taheri. He was a decorated general in Kabul. He worked for the Ministry of Defense.”

Taheri. Why did the name sound familiar?

The general laughed like a man used to attending formal parties where he’d laughed on cue at the minor jokes of important people. He had wispy silver-gray hair combed back from his smooth, tanned forehead, and tufts of white in his bushy eyebrows. He smelled like cologne and wore an iron-gray three-piece suit, shiny from too many pressings; the gold chain of a pocket watch dangled from his vest.

“Such a lofty introduction,” he said, his voice deep and cultured. “Salaam, bachem.” Hello, my child.

“Salaam, General Sahib,” I said, shaking his hand. His thin hands belied a firm grip, as if steel hid beneath the moisturized skin.

“Amir is going to be a great writer,” Baba said. I did a double take at this. “He has finished his first year of college and earned A’s in all of his courses.”

“Junior college,” I corrected him.

“Mashallah,” General Taheri said. “Will you be writing about our country, history perhaps? Economics?”

“I write fiction,” I said, thinking of the dozen or so short stories I had written in the leather-bound notebook Rahim Khan had given me, wondering why I was suddenly embarrassed by them in this man’s presence.

“Ah, a storyteller,” the general said. “Well, people need stories to divert them at difficult times like this.”

General Taheri managed a simultaneously sad and polite smile, heaved a sigh, and gently patted Baba’s shoulder.

“Padar jan, you forgot your tea.” A young woman’s voice. She was standing behind us, a slim-hipped beauty with velvety coal black hair, an open thermos and Styrofoam cup in her hand. I blinked, my heart quickening. She had thick black eyebrows that touched in the middle like the arched wings of a flying bird, and the gracefully hooked nose of a princess from old Persia—maybe that of Tahmineh, Rostam’s wife and Sohrab’s mother from the Shahnamah. Her eyes, walnut brown and shaded by fanned lashes, met mine. Held for a moment. Flew away.

“You are so kind, my dear,” General Taheri said. He took the cup from her. Before she turned to go, I saw she had a brown, sickle-shaped birthmark on the smooth skin just above her left jawline. She walked to a dull gray van two aisles away and put the thermos inside.

“My daughter, Soraya jan,” General Taheri said. He took a deep breath like a man eager to change the subject and checked his gold pocket watch. “Well, time to go and set up.” He and Baba kissed on the cheek and he shook my hand with both of his. “Best of luck with the writing,” he said, looking me in the eye. His pale blue eyes revealed nothing of the thoughts behind them.

For the rest of that day, I fought the urge to look toward the gray van.

It came to me on our way home. Taheri. I knew I’d heard that name before.

“Wasn’t there some story floating around about Taheri’s daughter?” I said to Baba, trying to sound casual.

“Why do you ask?” He was looking at me coyly.

I shrugged and fought back a smile. “Just curious, Baba.”

“Really? Is that all?” he said, his eyes playful, lingering on mine.

He smiled, and swung the bus out of the flea market. We headed for Highway 680. We drove in silence for a while. “All I’ve heard is that there was a man once and things …didn’t go well.” He said this gravely, like he’d disclosed to me that she had breast cancer.

“Oh.”

“I hear she is a decent girl, hardworking and kind. But no khastegars, no suitors, have knocked on the general’s door since.” Baba sighed. “It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir,” he said.