The mountains echoed

Author's name: Khaled Hosseini

All Pari wanted from her mother was to gather the fragments of her disjointed, scattered memories and help her transform them into a coherent sequence of events. But Mama didn't say much. She withheld much from her about her childhood in Kabul, kept Pari from the past until the little girl stopped asking. And now it appears that Mama confided everything to that magazine reporter. She told Etienne Postoler about herself and her life in that interview, as she had never done with her only daughter over the years. Pari doesn't know that she doesn't know anything. Perhaps this was her mother's real intention from the beginning: to shake up Pari's world, to deliberately turn it upside down, to turn her into a stranger to herself, to increase doubt in her mind about everything Pari thought she knew about her life, to make her feel lost as if she were wandering at night in a desert, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, and to make the truth feel cloudy, like a tiny light flickering intermittently in the distance, moving, elusive, and forever receding. Pari thought that perhaps this was Mama's punishment for her relationship with Julian, for the disappointment she had always been to her mother. Pari, who was supposed to put an end to her mother's struggles with drink and men, and the years wasted trying to find happiness. All those goals had ended as they had. And each lash of disappointment left Mama more broken and twisted, more delusional about happiness. What was I to you, Mama? Pari thought. What was I supposed to be after I was born of you, of your womb, if I ever came into it? Was I the seed of hope in your life? Was I a ticket you bought to free you from the darkness? Was I a bandage you applied to heal that scar on your heart? And if that was true, then I wasn't enough for you. I wasn't enough for you in the slightest. I wasn't the balm for your pain. I was just another dead end in your life, just a burden, and you must have discovered that very early on. You must have realized it. But... what could you do? You can't just go to a store and sell me.