And the Mountains Echoed: The Long Return
Reading Note: And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
Abdullah gives away his shoes for a peacock feather. His little sister, Pari, collects feathers, and a boy in another village has a peacock. The bargain leaves Abdullah walking home barefoot, with thorns in his soles and blood marking his steps; back in the village, he hides his injured feet until he can wake Pari and produce the feather from behind his back. She kisses his cheeks, and when he tickles her chin, her delight is enough to make him forget the pain.
Hosseini gives this small gift a history before the separation that will govern And the Mountains Echoed. We know the walk, the bargaining, the fear of being caught without the shoes his father worked to buy. We also know why Abdullah does it. Since their mother died, he has washed and comforted Pari; she sleeps against him, reaches for his hand, and expects him to remain beside her. The feather gives her a pleasure he has gone out to find for her alone.
Later in the same chapter, Pari receives another gift: yellow shoes bought by Nila Wahdati, the wealthy woman who will take her into her household. Pari goes off to try them and returns delighted, just as Abdullah breaks down. Her happiness and his grief occupy the same moment. We have watched him spend something precious to make her happy; now she is happy at the edge of a loss she cannot yet understand.
The novel carries us a long way from these children. A servant writes an account of his life; a daughter grows up knowing that she bears another girl's name. Each has reasons to tell the story differently. As their lives accumulate, we keep remembering the brother and sister, sometimes with knowledge the person speaking cannot share. Hosseini makes their return depend on what has survived that distance.
The bedtime story
Before the journey to Kabul, their father, Saboor, tells the children about a farmer forced to surrender a beloved son to a div, a fearsome supernatural creature. When the father reaches its palace, he finds the boy thriving among other children. He can take him home to poverty or leave him in this abundance. He leaves him, and receives a potion that erases his memory of the loss.
We hear the fable before we know that Saboor is about to sell Pari. Its circumstances acquire a second, painful meaning as the journey unfolds. The story imagines a world in which a child can be given away for his own good and the parent relieved of unbearable grief. Saboor asks Abdullah to understand this forgetting as mercy. His own decision is approaching, and he has found a language in which it might be endured.
Yet the audience has changed while he speaks. Pari falls asleep just after the child is handed over. Saboor tells Abdullah to cover her feet, then continues for the older boy. The child who cares for his sister must listen to the consolations of losing her. A small instruction about a blanket brings the living relationship into the middle of the tale that would explain its destruction.
Even the potion leaves something behind. The farmer later hears what seems to be the jingle of his son's bell and feels a sadness he cannot explain. Hosseini lets the sound outlast the story the man can tell about himself. After Pari is taken away, Abdullah longs for the same medicine, but the places where she stood keep bringing her back. He adds another feather to her tea tin and keeps it. The book has begun a separation whose duration the boy cannot imagine.
What Nabi had not seen
In chapter four, the story passes to Nabi, the children's stepuncle and the Wahdatis' cook and chauffeur. His long letter revisits the transaction from an uncomfortable position. He helped arrange it partly because he wanted Nila's love. The man who seemed to be conveying a poor family toward opportunity was also trying to make himself indispensable to a woman who scarcely saw him as he wished to be seen.
Nabi has been looking past someone too. He accompanies Nila's husband, Suleiman, on silent walks and drives him around Kabul without an apparent destination. Suleiman draws, but keeps the drawings private. To his servant, this seems a life without much purpose. Years later, while cleaning a closet after Suleiman's stroke, Nabi opens the sketchbooks. Page after page contains Nabi: at the car, in the garden, pouring tea, asleep. There is even a drawing of their car beside the lake, with Nabi at the wheel and Suleiman a faint figure in the backseat.
Those early drives become intimate when we remember them. The arrangement of the two men has hardly changed, but we can now see why Suleiman wanted it to continue. Hosseini has reconstructed Nabi's earlier understanding long enough for the drawings to change an entire stretch of the past. Affection has been present in scenes that appeared to contain only habit and silence.
The discovery troubles Nabi. He considers leaving, then remains while searching for a suitable replacement, and the years pass. The companionship they develop includes irritation, jokes, chess, outings, and the bodily work of care. Suleiman eventually speaks of his love and urges Nabi to marry. Nabi's own account of staying has changed by then: he has found a home in which he is loved and needed. Their desires remain unequal, though the life they have made together matters to both.
Suleiman also teaches him to read better. Nabi had some literacy when he arrived, but these lessons develop his reading and writing, and he begins reading aloud to the man who taught him. That detail acquires a further consequence in the letter we are reading. The relationship has helped give Nabi the means to record what happened to Pari. He leaves the letter with Markos, a surgeon working in Kabul, and asks him to find her. This long departure into another life becomes one of the ways the siblings can be found again.
Another Pari speaks
The final chapter belongs to Abdullah's daughter, named after the sister he lost. We meet this second Pari through the bedtime games she played with her father. He would pretend to remove her nightmares and give her happy dreams. When she returned the favor, she always gave him the same one: himself and his sister lying together beneath a flowering apple tree.
She grew up imagining her absent aunt as a twin who shared her school day and her secrets. Yet carrying her father's love has also been difficult. As she approaches adulthood, his fear of losing her bears on the choices she wants to make. An offer from art school means a chance to leave home; to him, it means another departure he can barely endure. Hosseini casts the daughter to tell this part. The boy whose devotion we loved has become a father whose devotion can constrict someone else's life, and her account asks us to hold both experiences together.
When the older Pari finally arrives from France, Abdullah's memory has deteriorated. His daughter recognizes his grin in the face of this woman she has never met. She can feel the joy of finding her while also knowing how little her father can now make of the visit. The reunion is filtered through someone who has wanted it since childhood and who understands, from caring for him, its limits.
Abdullah sings part of the old nursery rhyme. Their conversation has required English, yet his sister supplies the missing verse in Farsi. For a moment, the daughter hopes that something has reached him, but he rejects the words. When Pari takes his hands and presses them to her cheeks, his answering emotion looks to her like recognition. The daughter knows how he responds to affection and sees the mistake. All three are together; they cannot inhabit the same understanding of the meeting.
Pari stays for a month. She asks for his television schedule, the times of his pills, the snacks he likes. She wants to learn the brother who exists now, and she makes it possible for his daughter to work while she keeps him company. The scene's tenderness develops through this willingness to stay after the hoped-for recognition has failed. Meanwhile, the two women begin a relationship of their own. The younger Pari can finally show someone the childhood postcards she addressed to an aunt she had never seen.
Opening the tea tin
Later, in France, Abdullah's daughter gives her aunt a package he prepared when he was first diagnosed, years before they found one another. There is a note in Farsi. His sister needs it translated; his daughter can read it because he insisted on language lessons she resented as a girl. A piece of his demanding fatherhood has become useful to a meeting he can no longer take part in. The book allows that consequence to emerge without undoing what the lessons and restrictions felt like to her.
Inside the package is the tea tin. Among its feathers lies the peacock feather. Neither woman knows the story of the shoes, the barefoot walk, the pleasure of making a little girl laugh. We do. Hosseini has kept that knowledge available across all the people and places between the gift and its return. The object arrives with a history the reader can supply and the women can only partly recover.
Pari brushes a feather against her wrist. She understands that her brother kept thinking of her, though she cannot remember what this particular feather meant. Its touch lets the old affection reach her in a smaller, surviving form. Beside her sits a niece who once wished her into existence, and whose life has begun to open toward travel, study, and a family she did not know.
That night, the younger Pari watches her aunt sleeping and rests a hand on her forehead, repeating the bedtime gesture she shared with her father. The last scene is the dream she once gave him: the children resting beneath the apple tree. Hosseini places it inside her imagination, where she can give them the afternoon their adult reunion could not restore. As the little girl drifts toward sleep, “his face is too close and she can’t see the whole of it.” She can make out his brow, his nose, his eyelashes. After so much distance, the novel ends with the closeness of a face.
Sources
Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed, Bloomsbury electronic edition, 2013, eISBN 978-1-4088-4244-7. Chapters 1–2, “Fall 1952”: Saboor's tale, the journey, the gifts and the tea tin; chapter 4: Nabi's letter, Suleiman's sketchbooks and their life together; chapter 9, “Winter 2010”: the younger Pari's narration, the reunion, the translated note and the closing dream. English original.
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