The Kite Runner – Lending grace to Afghan people

Book Review

 

When a work of art transcends the ordinary, it becomes a landmark; a credible gauge of the society that gave it life. More often than not, the careers of many gifted writers run their full courses without ever producing works whose sublimity define their time. There are only few writers who have achieved this. By my reckoning, this little tribe has names like – Chinua Achebe, Leo Tolstoy of Russia, Jean-Paul Satre of France, England’s William Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Francis Scot Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway of America, Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda of Chile among others . We can add Khaled Hosseini of Afghanistan to this list. 

In his joyously received debut novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini seized a high chair among the elders of the word and made himself very comfortable in it. In a world defined by America’s viewpoint; America’s enemies are the world’s enemies. For well over a decade now, the South-Central Asian country of Afghanistan has been the epicenter of America’s war on terror. As a result, what the world seems to know of Afghanistan is largely what America and her powerful media networks have to say. Afghanistan and her hapless citizens who have had the short end of history’s stick; from Alexander the Great’s invasion in 330 BC through a string of invasions by Arab Muslims, the Mongols and Ghengis Khan, through the British and Soviet invasions to the Taliban menace of the 90s have known nothing more than vilification, depersonalization and devaluation. The cumulative effect of America’s war on terror on Afghan history is that it effectively blotted out whatever beauties it possessed and primed the ears of the world for dark, sinister tales. And so, the Tajiks and the fiercely proud Pashtuns who live and die for Nang and Namoos (honour and pride) suddenly began to look so despicable that you wondered if they deserved a place on God’s green earth. It is this stereotype, this deep-rooted profiling of Afghanistan that Khaled Hosseini set out to repudiate when he wrote the opening paragraph of The Kite Runner in March 2001. He had just completed his Residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and was practicing as an intern when the urge took him. And what an historical urge it has turned out to be?   

On the surface, The Kite Runner seems a highly unlikely title for a book as ambitious as Hosseini had set out to write. But whatever reservations the reader might have about the title soon fizzles out with the enchantment of the opening line; I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. With the pregnant innocence of this opening, Hosseini lurches out in a grand attempt to restore dignity to a vilified people. The Kite Runner is a bold effort to lend the world an alternative story on Afghanistan; but it is also a nuanced tale of betrayal and redemption. It is a simple, moving story of Amir and Hassan and Baba and Ali which grows into the story of the resilient Afghan people, trapped in a prose lucid beyond our imagining. However, you wouldn’t be wrong, if you see The Kite Runner as an intricate web inside which Khaled Hosseini hides to laugh at all the hypocrisies of life.  

One thing is clear from the outset, though: Khaled Hosseini seems quite incapable of penning a boring paragraph. Every sentence shimmers with life in The Kite Runner. Every phrase sings with the clarity of a nightingale. But the key to understanding this 324-page book lies in one refreshingly elegant statement – there is a way to be good again, uttered by a dying Rahim Khan in a long distance phone call to Amir, the narrator. Rahim Khan is Hosseini’s silent moral force in the story, who knew so much but neither gave secrets away nor allowed what he knew to influence his judgment of people close to him.  

As the story begins, we glean that Amir has had uneasy peace in America since he fled Kabul with his father following the Soviet invasion of the 1970s. True, America had offered the promise of a new life, but dark shadows from the past deny Amir any chance at experiencing real peace. That was until Rahim Khan’s call came and swivels him round to look back at a tainted past; a past that would not go away. From this furtive glance springs green memories of a near perfect childhood of innocence that shattered like a broken glass in Amir’s hallway of life from where a fragment would always pop up to cut his feet as he journeys on.  

In the opening chapters, we see Amir and Hassan growing up under the imperial influence of Baba, Amir’s father who Hosseini portrays as the quintessence of Afghan manliness with sizeable Nang and Namoos. Through Amir’s precocious eyes, we are led into the hidden pathways of Afghan culture and life unbeknown to the world. We learn that Afghanistan was not always a dark parch of earth with a semblance of humanity but a land peopled by peaceful human beings whose cravings are not different from those of any other community. Amir’s keen eyes lead us through the throbbing streets of Kabul and Jalalabad to the fiendish kite-fighting in the very dead of winter when Afghan kids perform what would pass for a symbolic rite of passage. But there is also the symbolism of the kite in the tale which we would confront later in the story – no matter how high a kite flies, it must return to earth; a subtle suggestion that every true search for redemption brings us back to the point of transgression. Hosseini’s highest achievement in this unimaginable debut novel is not just the majesty of his language but his ability to detach himself from all emotions of kinship and present Afghan life in its most evocative depiction, showing just as many triumphs as tragedies. In a surprising sort of way, The Kite Runner is so reminiscent of Achebe’s detached, unsentimental presentation of the Igbo culture in Things Fall Apart; a state of aesthetic grace that pronounces no harried judgment on the subject of the story but lends the reader a functional compass with which to navigate to a balanced perspective.  

We hear Hosseini’s mocking laughter at the duplicities of Afghan life which place much premium on pride and honor but deny the humanity of the Hazara. To the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, the Hazara, descendants of the Mongols and Shi’a Muslims, are a mere tribe of donkeys; good only as domestic servants. In a mocking interrogation of this curious mindset in The Kite Runner, Baba who is seen as the glory of the Pashtun masculinity turns to Sanaubar, the whoring wife of his Hazara servant, Ali, to sire a son; Hassan. Here, Hosseini silently hints on the interconnectedness of humanity; a theme that certain peoples of the world would do anything to repudiate. The secret of Baba’s socially “incorrect” behaviour and its unwanted fruit are conveniently buried between Baba and Rahim Khan, his close friend, for as Amir would later learn from Khan, long after Baba had died; in Kabul of that time, some things mattered more than the truth. We also see this hypocrisy in Asef, Hosseini’s darkest character in the story who in spite of being a pervert could not understand why Amir would have anything to do with Hassan whose only flaw is that he is Hazara. Nonetheless, Hosseini brilliantly shows us that other things are just as important; such as friendship and loyalty, betrayal and redemption. We see a most unusual loyalty in Hassan’s attachment to Amir. But there is an irony here as both have no clue that they are bound by blood. We also see Amir’s fascination with Baba whose love and approval he endlessly pines for but never wins. As Baba’s only child, Amir feels a sense of entitlement to his love. He hates the fact that he almost always shares Baba’s affection with Hassan. He craves Baba’s rambunctious physicality, his daredevilry and gumption in much the same way as Hassan longs for his fragile superior airs, his bookish aloofness. Hassan’s father, mercilessly portrayed as a hideously ugly Hazara with a tremulous walk, is faithful to Baba beyond logic. Similarly, Rahim Khan, Baba’s friend is presented as a dignified, sensitive man whose belief in Baba’s strong ways is total even though he does not live Baba’s lifestyle. With deft craftsmanship, Khaled Hosseini piles ironies upon ironies in this tale. Hassan’s telling declaration of his unwavering devotion to Amir echoes like a haunting gong through the pages of the book: for you, a thousand times over.  

Khaled Hosseini knows that in life, great loyalty usually precedes great betrayal. And so, from the complex, iron-cast loyalties in the plot spews great betrayals in the personal relationship of the characters against the backdrop of a greater betrayal of the Afghan people by the ruling class which could not chisel out a stable leadership. First, Baba betrays his ‘despised’ Hazara servant and sires Hassan from his wayward wife, Sanaubar. Then, Sanaubar betrays the strong bond between mother and child and abandons Hassan shortly after he is born to elope with some gypsies. Then Amir betrays Hassan by failing to stand up for him when the vicious thug, Asef rapes him in an alley. It happens on a near perfect day; a day when Amir finally wins Baba’s approval by proving his manliness in the yearly kite-fighting tournament after cutting down the last kite in the sky. Hassan proves his loyalty by running to catch the fallen kite to present to Amir as is the custom. But that is not to be. A cruel incident that would alter the magic of their idyllic childhood occurs as Hassan is running home with the fallen kite. He is seized upon and brutally raped by the pervert, Asef, in an alley while cowardly Amir watches awestruck. That incident ruptures their relationship, leading to virulent resentment by Amir and a cold betrayal that forces Hassan and his father to flee the only home they have ever known. From this moment on, Hosseini deftly sets the stage for cause and effect as Amir sets out on a journey for restitution and atonement.  

These intense interpersonal conflicts play out simultaneously along bitter rivalries in the country’s leadership, the Soviet invasion and the harrowing escape of Baba and Amir to America, Baba’s eventual death and Amir’s personal struggles for respite from the vicis-situdes of life until Rahim Khan’s call points him homewards for true redemption and final denouement. However, before Amir’s return, we see Sanaubar, Hassan’s whoring mother make a redemptive return to his son. After throwing her legs wide to diverse winds, Sanaubar returns, a broken hag to the forgiving arms of his son. Hosseini captures Sanaubar’s return in a gripping prose thusly – we saw a toothless woman with stringy hair and sores on her arms. She looked like she had not eaten for days. But the worst of it by far was her face. Somebody had taken a knife to it and the slashes cut this way and that way. But Sanaubar’s true redemption comes in the quantum emotion she invests in nursing Sohrab, Hassan’s son when he is born. Thus in Sohrab, Sanaubar gets life’s second chance to make right what she made wrong by abandoning Hassan. Hosseini invokes the full symbolism of the wandering kite coming back to earth here. Baba’s own act of restitution is slightly different, though. He builds an orphanage and performs little acts of charity; subtle little acts of goodness that make up for his betrayal of his faithful servant.  

And so, prodded on by that ominous call from Rahim Khan, Amir the kite flier returns kite-like to his beloved Kabul to find a society in the cold grips of a most bizarre tyranny. The Taliban had taken over from where the Russians had left off with his childhood enemy, Asef as their supreme leader. In a cruel replay of macabre history, Asef seizes Sohrab, Hassan’s son and turns him into a sex slave. To atone for his horrid sin, Amir must rescue Sohrab from the devilish Asef and prove for once in his miserable life that he is capable of dying for something. 

In plot, characterization, historicity and language, The Kite Runner is almost flawless. From Kabul to Peshawar to California, Hosseini makes our journey pleasurable with the incandescent flame of his language, his acute humour and his power of observation as the narrative voice transits from the innocent perplexity of a child to the wise timbre of a guilt-ridden adult. A major accomplishment of The Kite Runner is that the reader would no longer need a physical visit to Afghanistan to understand its ways after reading this book. However, one of the many unwritten rules of assessing a good work of fiction says that it should show rather than tell. Hosseini fails on this score as there are many instances in the book where after providing all the subtle hints that would enable the reader to arrive at the answer, Hosseini goes on to draw the conclusions for the reader still. But even so, the sublimity of language in The Kite Runner makes it difficult for the average reader to notice this flaw. And so does the foreboding irony that runs through the life of almost every character in the novel.  

Perhaps, few writers in our time understand characterization as Khaled Hosseini. In The Kite Runner, Hosseini succeeds in giving us characters that are heroic but adorably flawed; whose known and implied qualities entitle us to a sense of kinship with them. Baba is one massive lump of a character, clutching tenaciously, though dubiously, to his Nang and Namoos, Asef is a devil but a brilliant one with an amazing sense of history and pride, Amir the narrator is cerebral and bookish but calculative and cowardly, Sanaubar may be a reckless whore but she carries a good sense of justice. But Baba’s life offers us the supreme irony; a fiercely proud Pashtun man that places his Nang and Namoos above every things else, Baba dies with the shame of not openly admitting his paternal debt to Hassan for fear that he would lose face if it were known that he had impregnated the Hazara wife of his Hazara servant. He struggles all through his life to balance his parental obligation to Amir and Hassan without giving away this defining secret. Almost in all instance, Hosseini succeeds in giving us fully realized characters.  

On page 28 of the book, Hosseini writes as though he knew what he would achieve with his debut effort. In the note Rahim Khan left for Amir after reading his first short story, he tells him that his story had irony; it is something that some writers reach for their entire careers and never attain. You have achieved it with your first story. This self prophecy is richly fulfilled in The Kite Runner with over 8 million copies sold worldwide, a soar away motion picture version of the book and a publication in 48 countries of the world at the last count. If Khaled Hosseini decides not to write again after this debut offering, like Ralph Ellison, author of the monumental Invincible Man, his legacy in The Kite Runner is enough reminder of his indubitable genius.