Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a disturbing, powerful, intense, gripping and provocative novel. It stirs a number of emotions. Once you start reading it, you cannot put it down. The degeneration of Afghanistan, the displacement and migration of people bring back memories of the partition of India. The pain/the struggle, strike a chord even in people who were not directly affected by the partition. We have all grown up listening to stories of how our grandparents fled, escaped, leaving everything behind, hoping to return to their motherland one day. But that day never came. How people adapt to new places, people, situations, occupations is a remarkable thing about mankind. We know this by example. In Hosseini’s novel too, we find Afghan families adapting to the changed situation, earning bread and butter in anyway possible.
Besides this we get involved with the characters and their destinies. At a very early stage in the novel we realize there is more to Hasan’s and Amir‘s father’s relationship. We are angry at Amir’s cowardice and subsequent ill-treatment of his loyal, childhood mate Hasan. It proves how jealousy corrodes the goodness within. That one mistake changes/affects the lives of so many people. We feel sorry for Hasan who has to live life like a hazara and endure all kinds of unimaginable insults. The story would have been different, had young Amir protested and saved Hasan from abuse. Hosseini’s portrayal of childhood with its vulnerabilities, fears, jealousies, tensions, is terrific.
All this in the backdrop of the turbulent Afghanistan – the end of monarchy, invasion by the Russian forces and the rise of the Taliban regime. But it is the personal story of the two childhood friends – Amir and Hasan that binds the story together. And the message ‘there is a way to be good again’ is something we all need to imbibe.