The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words. Mine was Baba. His was Amir. My name.

With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.

“Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do

“When you kill a man, you steal a life,” Baba said. “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?”

I was always learning things about Baba from other people.

“Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

Sometimes, my entire childhood seems like one long lazy summer day with Hassan,

The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born.

I wondered briefly what it must be like to live with such an ingrained sense of one’s place in a hierarchy.

And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

Sad for who Hassan was, where he lived. For how he’d accepted the fact that he’d grow old in that mud shack in the yard, the way his father had.

But this was my one chance to become someone who was looked at, not seen, listened to, not heard.

If there was a God, He’d guide the winds, let them blow for me so that, with a tug of my string, I’d cut loose my pain, my longing. I’d endured too much, come too far. And suddenly, just like that, hope became knowledge. I was going to win. It was just a matter of when.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything—that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories, people who have fed from the same breast.

I didn’t remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

My eyes returned to our suitcases. They made me sad for Baba. After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life: one disappointing son and two suitcases.

He missed the sugarcane fields of Jalalabad and the gardens of Paghman. He missed people milling in and out of his house, missed walking down the bustling aisles of Shor Bazaar and greeting people who knew him and his father, knew his grandfather, people who shared ancestors with him, whose pasts intertwined with his.

For me, America was a place to bury my memories. For Baba, a place to mourn his.

I reached across the table and put my hand on his. My student hand, clean and soft, on his laborer’s hand, grubby and calloused. I thought of all the trucks, train sets, and bikes he’d bought me in Kabul. Now America. One last gift for Amir.

“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime, Amir,”

Listening to them, I realized how much of who I was, what I was, had been defined by Baba and the marks he had left on people’s lives. My whole life, I had been “Baba’s son.” Now he was gone. Baba couldn’t show me the way anymore; I’d have to find it on my own.

We’re a melancholic people, we Afghans, aren’t we? Often, we wallow too much in ghamkhori and self-pity.We give in to loss, to suffering, accept it as a fact of life, even see it as necessary. Zendagi migzara, we say, life goes on.

it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place.

I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land . . . it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a half-moon, I sensed Afghanistan humming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either.

he pointed to mud-hut villages along the way where he’d known people years before. Most of those people, he said, were either dead or in refugee camps in Pakistan. “And sometimes the dead are luckier,” he said.

something Baba had said to me a long time ago: Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys. They do nothing but thumb their rosaries and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand. God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.

A kinship exists between people who’ve fed from the same breast. Now, as the boy’s pain soaked through my shirt, I saw that a kinship had taken root between us too. What had happened in that room with Assef had irrevocably bound us.

Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty.

After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis.

Sohrab’s silence wasn’t the self-imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird’s flight. But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.