The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

And that led to another understanding: Hassan knew. He knew I’d seen everything in that alley, that I’d stood there and done nothing. He knew I had betrayed him and yet he was rescuing me once again, maybe for the last time. I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone, and I wanted to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake.

Self aware

Forgive? But theft was the one unforgivable sin, the common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. 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. There is no act more wretched than stealing. Hadn’t Baba sat me on his lap and said those words to me? Then how could he just forgive Hassan? And if Baba could forgive that, then why couldn’t he forgive me for not being the son he’d always wanted? Why— “We are leaving, Agha sahib,” Ali said.

Mmmmm

Forgive? But theft was the one unforgivable sin, the common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. 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. There is no act more wretched than stealing. Hadn’t Baba sat me on his lap and said those words to me? Then how could he just forgive Hassan? And if Baba could forgive that, then why couldn’t he forgive me for not being the son he’d always wanted? Why— “We are leaving, Agha sahib,” Ali said.

Deep

Forgive? But theft was the one unforgivable sin, the common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. 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. There is no act more wretched than stealing. Hadn’t Baba sat me on his lap and said those words to me? Then how could he just forgive Hassan? And if Baba could forgive t...

Ahhhhh

Strangely, I was glad that someone knew me for who I really was; I was tired of pretending.

That was when I understood the depth of the pain I had caused, the blackness of the grief I had brought onto everyone, that not even Ali’s paralyzed face could mask his sorrow. I forced myself to look at Hassan, but his head was downcast, his shoulders slumped, his finger twirling a loose string on the hem of his shirt.

:(

Then I saw Baba do something I had never seen him do before: He cried.

Nooooo

Hassan lugged his mattress, rolled tightly and tied with a rope, on his back. He’d left all of his toys behind in the empty shack—I discovered them the next day, piled in a corner just like the birthday presents in my room.

My baby

I was sorry, but I didn’t cry and I didn’t chase the car.

Why tell us

“Besides, I didn’t bring us here for me, did I?”

My life

I smiled for him—in a way, this was his day more than mine.

sme

“I wish Hassan had been with us today,” he said.

Me too

Hassan wore black for the next forty days.

A few weeks later, the Taliban banned kite fighting. And two years later, in 1998, they massacred the Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif.

And I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.

Heart crushing

“I feel like a tourist in my own country,”

let loose curls of shoulder-length blond hair.

Why

just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed. Then the end. That, I’ll take to my grave:

Then I understood: The brass ball was still stuck in his empty eye socket.

“The worst laceration was on your upper lip,” Armand said. “The impact had cut your upper lip in two, clean down the middle. But not to worry, the

The impact had cut your upper lip in two, he had said, clean down the middle. Clean down the middle. Like a harelip.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer. I hope your suffering comes to an end with this journey to Afghanistan.

but maybe someday you will see that when your father was hard on you, he was also being hard on himself. Your father, like you, was a tortured soul,

Twin

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

Crying

I know that in the end, God will forgive. He will forgive your father, me, and you too. I hope you can do the same. Forgive your father if you can. Forgive me if you wish. But, most important, forgive yourself.

Ahhhhhh

Amir, the socially legitimate half, the half that represented the riches he had inherited and the sin-with-impunity privileges that came with them. Maybe that was why Baba and I had been on such better terms in the U.S., I wondered. Selling junk for petty cash, our menial jobs, our grimy apartment—the American version of a hut; maybe in America, when Baba looked at me, he saw a little bit of Hassan.

“For you a thousand times over,” Farid said. And, just like that, I was crying.

:(

constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

“You will never again refer to him as ‘Hazara boy’ in my presence. He has a name and it’s Sohrab.”

:(

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.