Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - A Short Story By Jamil Jan Kochai- Lead Story in his Collection The Haunting of Hajii Hill and Other Stories - 2022

Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - A Short Story By Jamil Jan Kochai- Lead Story in his Collection The Haunting of Hajii Hill and Other Stories - 2022

 Today's Story, along with several others, can be read on the author's website  (or in a Kindle Sample Edition of the collection.)

https://www.jamiljankochai.com/

"Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain" was originally published in The New Yorker, December 20, 2019. (Reading time approximately ten minutes.)

Jamil Jan Kochai is a new to me writer I have now added to my read through list.  He was born in Peshawar, Pakistan in a  camp for Afghanistan refugees.  With his family at age seven he emigrated to California.

He now resides in Sacramento, California. He is a O. Henry Award winner with two published books of fiction.  

Today's story is about a young man whose family emigrated from Lahore to California because the morality police had a death warrant out for his father.  They killed his uncle.  All his life he has heard stories about life in Lahore.   He works at a Taco Bell.  He has a passion for Metal Gear opened games.  A new game has just come out and his cousin works in a game store and gets him a discount.

"When you get to your room, you lock the door and turn up MF Doom on your portable speaker to ward off mothers, fathers, grandmothers, sisters, and brothers who want to harp at you about prayer, Quran, Pashto, Farsi, a new job, new classes, exercise, basketball, jogging, talking, guests, chores, homework help, bathroom help, family time, and usually Madvillainy does the trick. Open the brown paper bag and toss the kush your cousin has stashed with your game because he needs a new smoking buddy and he sees you as a prime target, probably because he thinks you’ve got nothing better to do with your time or you’re not as religious as your brothers or you’re desperate to escape the unrelenting nature of a corporeal existence, and—goddamn, the physical map of Afghanistan that comes with the game is fucking beautiful."

As he plays the opened game he imagines changing the past so his father is not wounded and his uncle not killed. 

I do not wish to say much more about the story Other than to say I highly reccomend this story.  

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and a finalist for 2022 National Book Award. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.  - 

Mel Ulm