THE KITE RUNNER

I have finished reading yet another book titled The Kite Runner. The debut by Afghanistani American author Khaled Hosseini is lauded with numerous accolades, including amongst all, being "third best seller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen. BookScan.[2] It was also voted 2006's reading group book of the year. Hosseini's first novel headed a list of 60 titles submitted by entrants to the Penguin/Orange Reading Group prize (UK).[3]" (Courtesy of Wikipedia).

The Kite Runner is a moving and intimate account of a young boy in Afghanistan, superimposed on the state of affairs in Afghanistan. The story flows with an introspective touch, and in many instances, the author is grappled by the spectres of his haunting past. The intial pages are centered on the protaganist life in Afghanistan. The author gave us a glimpse into the rarefied life of an upper-class household in Afghanistan. Baba, the father of Amir, is a highly successful businessmen with an even more impressive heritage that precedes him. The author introduces him as a formidable figure of austere demeanour, and highlighted especially the estrangement between Baba and his son. This eventually proves to be one of the key undergirdings of the story.

Slowly, the characters of Hassan and Ali are introduced. Ali is a servant of Baba, having worked through 3 decades in the household and having grown up with Baba together. Hassan is the son of ali, a illiterate, yet athletic and sanguine character. From the outset, the author has elucidated and reinforced the close-ness of the relationship between Hassan and Amir. Slowly the readers are given the impression that Hassan and Amir are no longer divided by hierachal milieu but instead are inseperable playmates, spending huge portion of their time frolicking together.

However, slowly the author jerked the readers back to the ambivalence coursing through Amirs mind. In many instances, Amir expressed implicit jealously,and many a times this is succeeded by a sort of passive dislike for, ironically, his "inseparable playmate". As mentioned earlier, the author has lived a childhold mired in negligence and dysfunction, and the author made plenty of effort to illustrate this. Baba always exclude him from discussions, while Amir has to make do with sitting down outside the room and eavesdropping on such discussions. And Baba was always stoically indifferent, and his reserved nature did not help much. All this culminated in one single sentence which reached the ears of Amir, with Bapa saying that had he not seen Amir come out from his mother's womb, he would not have thought this child to be his. This was the clincher, and this subsequently worsened Amirs dislike for Hassan, from a milder form to somewhere near vindictiveness.

From then on, the author superbly leads the readers into a world of guilt, of salvation, of restituition. More importantly, the author has cleverly interweave Afghanistan as a context into the personal experience of Amir, and hence the book served a larger purpose than just offering a story on love, regret, guilt, kindness. It also opened the readers eyes to the shocking travails in Afghanistan, with its languid societal progress, with the tyrannic and brutal Taliban regime, with the far reaching influence of religion, with the economic malaise that purveys throughout the regime, and most importantly, how both external and sectarian wars have torn the country asunder. Through the eyes of Amir, we are able to vicariously see the world of Afghanistan and more importantly, the real insufferable conditions faced by the true victimes of war - the Afghanistan commoners. This is manifested in the frequent displacements (indeed this was the reason why amir and baba moved from their house to Pakistan and further on to America) caused by war disruptions and devastations, and also in the abject poverty that has crippled the entire country.

If nothing esle, The Kite runner deserves a read because of the very humane issues it protrays. Compelling, gripping and moving, The Kite runner promulgates a closet issue that many of us have avidly avoided - all of us live in the shadows of our guilt and regret. There is a dirty linen in all of us and the real barrier to absolving ourselves of such a smear is not so much an outsider as we ourselves. We are the real cumbents, the real barriers, and the inertia to amend and rectify is due to our intrinsic tendency to hide from our less than glamorous past. So despite the ugliness within all of us, the more important thing is not recognise that we are not stainless, and similarly to possess the courage to step forth and take charge of all the wrongs that we have done, because rectifying late, is better than not doing so at all.