and the mountains echoed

This is a story of colliding lives.  This is the story of Pari and Abdullah, brother and sister separated by unfortunate circumstances; of Nila, unhappily married; of Nabi, bound by duty to stay by the side of a sick man and stayed out of love that he himself could not understand.  There are other little stories: of Markos, a Greek volunteer in post-war Afghanistan; Timur and Idris, the affluent Afghan-American cousins who try to 'give back;' of the little boy Adel who discovers in a heartbreaking way that fathers are not gods; the other Pari, who chooses to be the dutiful daughter at the cost of her own dreams.  They come together, eventually leading us back to Pari and Abdullah, the brother and sister, to see where their separate lives have taken them.

The book is not as powerful as The Kite Runner or as moving as A Thousand Splendid Suns, but it evokes a certain yearning.  The words stir in you the lost chances, the what-ifs, the dreams you let go, the love you did not choose.

Take a look at Idris, who went to Afghanistan to try to recover his family's old lands, and meets a badly injured girl in a hospital.  He became attached to the little girl, and he promises to help her.  When he returned to the States, he became busy with his home theater, his Americanized sons, the good life he worked hard for.  At one point he asks his wife if they 'needed all that.'  For the price of his precious home theater, he says he could build a school in Afghanistan.  His wife tells him, 'Then why don't you do both?'

But Idris soon forgets how strongly he felt for the little girl in Afghanistan, and in the end does nothing.  Several years down the road, he meets the girl again, not so little anymore, healed and signing the book she wrote.  She autographs the book for him, writing 'Don't worry.  You're not in it.'

That is just one of the little stories.  They come so real.  They come with a little barb that stings you, and you feel it for a while, or at least until the next good book comes along.  I ended the book feeling a little unfulfilled, wishing that all the people in it had happier endings.

In real life, though, you don't always have happy endings.  You take what life throws at you, and you do the best you can.  There's a prayer framed in my office desk that begins with 'O God, help me to make this day a perfect day, a day at the end of which I will have nothing to regret.'

So be it with our lives.