“A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”- Words that a young Amir hid from, grew up with, and found refuge in.

Khalid Hosseini’s debut novel, The Kite Runner, is the coming of age story of two young Afghan boys – the privileged protagonist, Amir and the guileless underdog Hassan. In the 60’s and early 70’s Afghanistan saw a period of relative political stability and peace and it is in this period that the novel begins. Growing up in the lap of luxury, Amir spends a seemingly idyllic childhood flying kites and climbing trees with his Hazara servant boy, Hassan.

The bane of Amir’s existence ironically is his Baba (father) who he worships with almost religious fervour. His need to measure up in Baba’s eyes dictates his every move and eventually causes him to betray his soulmate, Hassan. In the winter of 1975 Hassan becomes the hapless victim of a group of young fanatics. Life changes irrevocably for the boys and Amir’s inability to forgive himself causes them to part ways. In the years that follow Amir and Baba flee the soviets and seek asylum in America. The young boy who witnesses his friend’s humiliation, however, becomes the doppelganger that continues to prey on an adult Amir. Twenty years later Amir returns to Kabul to redeem himself.

The story is so passionately told that the narrative often borders on the melodramatic. Emotions ride high and after a point all conversations carry the dead weight of profundity.  The predominant emotion is guilt. The guilt of a boy whose mother dies giving birth to him, the guilt of a boy who sells his friend down the river and a father’s guilt at having stolen his son’s right to the truth. 

Hosseini’s narrative is uncomplicated and yet complex. A brutally honest account of a friendship gone wrong reflects the realities of the larger canvas that the story is set against.  Having fed at the same breast, the boys grow up conscious of an unbreakable bond between them. Hassan, is willing to stand up for Amir and take on bullies on his behalf, armed, David- like, with nothing but a slingshot. Amir’s love for his friend, however, is far more cautious and is restricted to a hug and a few words of comfort in the darkness of a movie theatre. Despite being joined at the hip Amir never lets himself think of, let alone call, Hassan his friend. He is always the Hazara, the servant boy. Casteism persists even in a household headed by one who instructs Amir to ‘piss on the beards of the self righteous.’ The Kite Runner explores a much glossed over aspect of childhood, the inherent cruelty of an unequal friendship.

Baba becomes the metaphor for the Afghan way of life. A ‘force of nature’ who believes in pride and honour, philanthropy and fairness.  Someone who loses his invulnerability bit by bit as the story progresses. In America, the country whose ‘idea’ he loves, Baba works at a gas station to put his son through school. With a Jimmy Carter photograph and his tired brown suit Baba determines to embrace the American way of life. The affirmative redness of Baba’s personality is all but leeched of colour in a life that he has no choice but to accept. It is he more than any other character in the book who proves a window into Afghan culture.

Some of the characters in the book are uni- dimensional, bordering on caricatures. Assef, the blond, blue eyed half-German bully who grows up to join the Taliban is an unabashed stereotype and his resurrection almost farcical.

The Kite Runner’s fatal flaw, however, is Hosseini’s obsession with karmic justice. In order to bring the tale full circle he relies on techniques that make the end seem like a rerun of the beginning with a not too gentle reshuffle of characters and events. Two-thirds into the book and there is practically a genre shift and in the end there is a Shakespearean, contrived tying together of loose ends. What tempers the gimmickry is Amir’s metamorphosis. His shrugging off of the cloak of cowardice he so willingly draped around himself happens unceremoniously and matter-of-factly. What he lacks in craft Hosseini makes up with an honesty that is born of absolute conviction.

The Kite Runner is the first English novel to come out of Afghanistan.

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