mindfields :: a journal about ideas and alternative education

"I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history. For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban.

I wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity for decades, that the history of the Afghans in the 20th has been largely pacific and harmonious."

Khaled Hosseini, on the Newsline website, www.newsline.com

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
ISBN: 0747566534
text: Richa Kapoor

Thumbing through my copy of The Kite Runner I come across a scene that I think captures my experience of engaging with the book. In the scene, Amir and Hassan climb together the bowl-shaped hill north of Amir’s house. With memories of many languid, summer days spent there, resting against the cool, decaying wall of the abandoned cemetery, sitting in the dappled shade of the pomegranate tree, eating its ripe fruit, reading stories, Amir and Hassan face each other for the last time. With pages of the story he had promised to read Hassan lying on the ground, fluttering in the breeze, Amir picks up a pomegranate instead and hurls it at Hassan. The ripe fruit strikes Hassan on the chest and explodes in a spray of pulp, seeds and streaming juice. Hassan stands dazed. Again and again and again, Amir pelts Hassan with fruit till the latter is smeared red all over.

I feel like Hassan after putting down The Kite Runner. Like him, I am colored completely. The tale has stained me a rich, deep, dark hue that might fade somewhat with time, but is never quite going to rub off completely.

So what is the The Kite Runner about? It is a tale of loyalty and love, guile and guilt, memory, and of course, redemption. Amir and Hassan, two boys growing up in the same household, though worlds apart. Amir, born to a wealthy Pashtun father and Hassan, a poor illiterate Hazara. Striving to be the son his father always wanted, Amir takes on the weight of living up to unrealistic expectations and places the fate of his relationship with his father on the outcome of a kite running tournament, a popular challenge in which participants must cut down the kites of others with their own kite.

Amir wins the tournament. But the aftermath of it is that young Hassan is sexually brutalized by some teenagers in a neighbourhood alley. Amir’s failure to defend his friend from this assault haunts him for the rest of his life. The backdrop of childhood sexual assault (see article on next page) remains throughout the book, even as the lives and fates of the characters, as well as the political and historical events in Afghanistan unfold. The coup against Zahir Khan, the coming of the Roussis, the conflict between the Afghans and the Mujahedins, the setting up of the puppet-government of Najibullah, and then, the terror reign of the Taliban.

On another level, The Kite Runner is about an Afghani’s sense of irreparable loss – the destruction of his beautiful watan, the lost, wasted lives of his fellow countrymen. Hosseini details the indignities of the lives of both kinds of Afghanis, those who, like Amir, Baba and General Taheri, fled to find political asylum elsewhere and those who stayed back in Afghanistan. Baba gets his hands grubby, calloused, with dirt under his fingernails, working as an assistant at a gas station and General Tahiri, despite the outward bravado has to subsist on foodstamps, while those who stayed back in Afghanistan, like the former university teacher of Farsi Poetry who Amir comes across in Taliban-ruled Kabul, is reduced to begging on the streets in a threadbare chapan.

Of course the spirit of a warm, wonderful, brave people, and their small joys are detailed too. The book wraps itself around you, and pulls you deep within every moment, whether it is Amir and Hassan drinking warm coca cola and slurping on rosewater ice cream, or the unique vocabulary of kite-flying. The moments are too numerous to list here.

The beauty and the rhythm of the everyday and the unspectacular - more precious since that way of life is fast disappearing - makes a rich, ethnography of The Kite Runner.

Hosseini has the ability to capture sensitive, minute details of the Afghani way of life - something the rest of the world knows little about, and perhaps cares about even less. A significant part of the story concerns the writer’s desire to record, to commit to posterity, a culture that is disappearing. To tell those people “sipping lattes at Starbucks” that there is much more to Afghanistan then the battle for Kunduz and much more to Afghanis than their caracul hats and chapans. n