The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

People say that eyes are windows to the soul. Never was that more true than with Ali, who could only reveal himself through his eyes.

there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?”

“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?”

“If there’s a God out there, then I would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.

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

Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice of intersection between those spheres.

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

IN THE WINTER OF 1975, I saw Hassan run a kite for the last time.

Maybe Baba would even read one of my stories. I’d write him a hundred if I thought he’d read one.

And maybe, just maybe, I would finally be pardoned for killing my mother.

And that right there was the single greatest moment of my twelve years of life, seeing Baba on that roof, proud of me at last.

run. In the end, I ran. I ran because I was a coward.

don’t know what I’ve done, Amir agha. I wish you’d tell me. I don’t know why we don’t play anymore.”

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. I wasn’t worthy of this sacrifice; I was a liar, a cheat, and a thief. And I would have told, except that a part of me was glad.

“There are only three real men in this world, Amir,” he’d say. He’d count them off on his fingers: America the brash savior, Britain, and Israel. “The rest of them—” he used to wave his hand and make a phht sound “—they’re like gossiping old women.”

“Thank you but I don’t want,” Baba said. “I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don’t like it free money.”

“Thank you, Baba. Are you all right? Do you feel up to this?” “Up to this? It’s the happiest day of my life, Amir,” he said, smiling tiredly.

“Not tonight,” he said. “There is no pain tonight.” “Okay,” she said. She pulled up his blanket. We closed the door. Baba never woke up.

As words from the Koran reverberated through the room, I thought of the old story of Baba wrestling a black bear in Baluchistan. Baba had wrestled bears his whole life. Losing his young wife. Raising a son by himself. Leaving his beloved homeland, his watan. Poverty. Indignity. In the end, a bear had come that he couldn’t best. But even then, he had lost on his own terms.

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. May Allah be with you always. Hassan

“Ali was sterile,” Rahim Khan said. “No he wasn’t. He and Sanaubar had Hassan, didn’t they? They had Hassan—” “No they didn’t,” Rahim Khan said. “Yes they did!” “No they didn’t, Amir.” “Then who—” “I think you know who.”

He asked me about America. I told him that in America you could step into a grocery store and buy any of fifteen or twenty different types of cereal. The lamb was always fresh and the milk cold, the fruit plentiful and the water clear. Every home had a TV, and every TV a remote, and you could get a satellite dish if you wanted. Receive over five hundred channels.

unaware that it would be the last bit of solid food I would eat for a long time.

But he was already here, in the flesh, sitting less than ten feet from me, after all these years. His name escaped my lips: “Assef.”

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

“Tired.” “I know. Dr. Nawaz said that was to be expected—” He was shaking his head. “What, Sohrab?” He winced when he spoke again in that husky voice, barely above a whisper. “Tired of everything.”

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.

“For you, a thousand times over,” I heard myself say.