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snatched its bloodred pomegranates. After we’d eaten the fruit and wiped our hands on
     the grass, I would read to Hassan.
    Sitting cross-legged, sunlight and shadows of pomegranate leaves dancing on his face, Hassan absently plucked blades of grass
     from the ground as I read him stories he couldn’t read for himself. That Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most
     Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been born, perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in Sanaubar’s unwelcoming
     womb—after all, what use did a servant have for the written word? But despite his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan
     was drawn to the mystery of words, seduced by a secret world forbidden to him. I read him poems and stories, sometimes riddles—though
     I stopped reading those when I saw he was far better at solving them than I was. So I read him unchallenging things, like
     the misadventures of the bumbling Mullah Nasruddin and his donkey. We sat for hours under that tree, sat there until the sun
     faded in the west, and still Hassan insisted we had enough daylight for one more story, one more chapter.
    My favorite part of reading to Hassan was when we came across a big word that he didn’t know. I’d tease him, expose his ignorance.
     One time, I was reading him a Mullah Nasruddin story and he stopped me.
    “What does that word mean?”
    “Which one?”
    “‘Imbecile.’”
    “You don’t know what it means?” I said, grinning.
    “Nay, Amir agha.”
    “But it’s such a common word!”
    “Still, I don’t know it.” If he felt the sting of my tease, his smiling face didn’t show it.
    “Well, everyone in my school knows what it means,” I said. “Let’s see. ‘Imbecile.’ It means smart, intelligent. I’ll use it
     in a sentence for you. ‘When it comes to words, Hassan is an imbecile.’”
    “Aaah,” he said, nodding.
    I would always feel guilty about it later. So I’d try to make up for it by giving him one of my old shirts or a broken toy.
     I would tell myself that was amends enough for a harmless prank.
    Hassan’s favorite book by far was the Shahnamah, the tenth-century epic of ancient Persian heroes. He liked all of the chapters, the shahs of old, Feridoun, Zal, and Rudabeh.
     But his favorite story, and mine, was “Rostam and Sohrab,” the tale of the great warrior Rostam and his fleet-footed horse,
     Rakhsh. Rostam mortally wounds his valiant nemesis, Sohrab, in battle, only to discover that Sohrab is his long-lost son.
     Stricken with grief, Rostam hears his son’s dying words:
    If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thou didst it of thine obstinacy.
     For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted
     of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting . . .
    “Read it again please, Amir agha,” Hassan would say. Sometimes tears pooled in Hassan’s eyes as I read him this passage, and
     I always wondered whom he wept for, the grief-stricken Rostam who tears his clothes and covers his head with ashes, or the
     dying Sohrab who only longed for his father’s love? Personally, I couldn’t see the tragedy in Ros-tam’s fate. After all, didn’t
     all fathers in their secret hearts harbor a desire to kill their sons?
    One day, in July 1973, I played another little trick on Hassan. I was reading to him, and suddenly I strayed from the written
     story. I pretended I was reading from the book, flipping pages regularly, but I had abandoned the text altogether, taken over
     the story, and made up my own. Hassan, of course, was oblivious to this. To him, the words on the page were a scramble of
     codes, indecipherable, mysterious. Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys. After, I started to ask him if he’d
     liked the story, a giggle rising in my throat, when Hassan began to clap.
    “What are you