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THE KITE RUNNER

- Khaled Hosseini

PRE-READING DELIBERATIONS

i. Describe your friend by mentioning his/her unique qualities.

ii. Conduct a debate on society’s expectation(s) of male and

female behaviour.

iii. Discuss your love-hate relationship with a person and throw

light on how it has impacted your growth as an individual.

AUTHOR ACQUAINTANCE
Khaled Hosseini (1965-present) is an Afghan-American
novelist and physician. His notable works are The Kite Runner
(2003), A Thousand Golden Suns (2007), The Mountains Echoed
(2013) and Sea Prayer (2018). His works are set in Afghanistan
and his characters deal with their lives in a highly charged
political atmosphere. He has won the Exclusive Books Boeke
Prize, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, ALA
Notable Award, Alex Award and Barnes Original Voices Award,
2003. In 2006, Khaled was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. He has established The Khaled
Hosseini Foundation, a non-profit, which provides humanitarian
assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

TEXT OUTLINE
The Kite Runner is about Amir, a young boy from the Wazir
Akbar Khan district of Kabul, whose closest friend is Hassan.
Hassan is introduced as the son of Ali, Amir’s father Baba’s
servant. The fact that Hassan is the son of Baba is revealed later.
Amir resents Baba’s attention on Hassan. At a crucial point in
the novel, Amir fails to protect Hassan from sexual abuse by a
senior boy. The story is placed against the backdrop of turbulent
political conditions beginning from the descent of Afghanistan’s

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empire through the Soviet armed intrusion, the departure of
refugees to Pakistan and America and the growth of the regime
of Taliban. Given below is an excerpt from Chapter 3.

TEXT
Lore has it my father once wrestled a black bear in
Baluchistan with his bare hands. If the story had been about
anyone else, it would have been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan
tendency to exaggerate—sadly, almost a national affliction; if
someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the
kid had once passed a biology test in high school. But no one
ever doubted the veracity of any story about Baba. And if they did,
well, Baba did have those three parallel scars coursing a jagged
path down his back. I have imagined Baba’s wrestling match
countless times, even dreamed about it. And in those dreams, I
can never tell Baba from the bear.

It was Rahim Khan who first referred to him as what

eventually became Baba’s famous nickname, Toophan agha, or
“Mr. Hurricane.” It was an apt enough nickname. My father was
a force of nature, a towering Pashtun specimen with a thick
beard, a wayward crop of curly brown hair as unruly as the man
himself, hands that looked capable of uprooting a willow tree,
and a black glare that would “drop the devil to his knees begging
for mercy,” as Rahim Khan used to say. At parties, when all six-
foot-five of him thundered into the room, attention shifted to him
like sunflowers turning to the sun. Baba was impossible to ignore,
even in his sleep. I used to bury cotton wisps in my ears, pull the
blanket over my head, and still the sounds of Baba’s snoring—so
much like a growling truck engine—penetrated the walls. And
my room was across the hall from Baba’s bedroom. How my
mother ever managed to sleep in the same room as him is a
mystery to me. It’s on the long list of things I would have asked
my mother if I had ever met her.

In the late 1960s, when I was five or six, Baba decided to

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build an orphanage. I heard the story through Rahim Khan. He
told me Baba had drawn the blueprints himself despite the fact
that he’d had no architectural experience at all. Skeptics had
urged him to stop his foolishness and hire an architect. Of course,
Baba refused, and everyone shook their heads in dismay at his
obstinate ways. Then Baba succeeded and everyone shook their
heads in awe at his triumphant ways. Baba paid for the
construction of the two-story orphanage, just off the main strip
of Jadeh Maywand south of the Kabul River, with his own money.
Rahim Khan told me Baba had personally funded the entire
project, paying for the engineers, electricians, plumbers, and
laborers, not to mention the city officials whose “mustaches
needed oiling.” It took three years to build the orphanage. I was
eight by then.

I remember the day before the orphanage opened, Baba took

me to Ghargha Lake, a few miles north of Kabul. He asked me to
fetch Hassan too, but I lied and told him Hassan had the runs. I
wanted Baba all to myself. And besides, one time at Ghargha
Lake, Hassan and I were skimming stones and Hassan made
his stone skip eight times. The most I managed was five. Baba
was there, watching, and he patted Hassan on the back. Even
put his arm around his shoulder. We sat at a picnic table on the
banks of the lake, just Baba and me, eating boiled eggs with
kofta sandwiches—meatballs and pickles wrapped in naan. The
water was a deep blue and sunlight glittered on its looking glass-
clear surface. On Fridays, the lake was bustling with families
out for a day in the sun. But it was midweek and there was only
Baba and me, us and a couple of longhaired, bearded tourists—
”hippies,” I’d heard them called. They were sitting on the dock,
feet dangling in the water, fishing poles in hand. I asked Baba
why they grew their hair long, but Baba grunted, didn’t answer.

He was preparing his speech for the next day, flipping through
a havoc of handwritten pages, making notes here and there with
a pencil. I bit into my egg and asked Baba if it was true what a
boy in school had told me, that if you ate a piece of eggshell, you’d

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have to pee it out. Baba grunted again. I took a bite of my
sandwich. One of the yellow-haired tourists laughed and slapped
the other one on the back. In the distance, across the lake, a
truck lumbered around a corner on the hill. Sunlight twinkled
in its side-view mirror.

“I think I have saratan,” I said. Cancer. Baba lifted his head

from the pages flapping in the breeze. Told me I could get the
soda myself, all I had to do was look in the trunk of the car.
Outside the orphanage, the next day, they ran out of chairs. A lot
of people had to stand to watch the opening ceremony. It was a
windy day, and I sat behind Baba on the little podium just outside
the main entrance of the new building. Baba was wearing a green
suit and a caracul hat. Midway through the speech, the wind
knocked his hat off and everyone laughed. He motioned to me to
hold his hat for him and I was glad to, because then everyone
would see that he was my father, my Baba. He turned back to the
microphone and said he hoped the building was sturdier than
his hat, and everyone laughed again. When Baba ended his
speech, people stood up and cheered. They clapped for a long time.
Afterward, people shook his hand. Some of them tousled my hair
and shook my hand too. I was so proud of Baba, of us.

But despite Baba’s successes, people were always doubting

him. They told Baba that running a business wasn’t in his blood
and he should study law like his father. So Baba proved them all
wrong by not only running his own business but becoming one of
the richest merchants in Kabul. Baba and Rahim Khan built a
wildly successful carpet-exporting business, two pharmacies, and
a restaurant. When people scoffed that Baba would never marry
well—after all, he was not of royal blood—he wedded my mother,
Sofia Akrami, a highly educated woman universally regarded as
one of Kabul’s most respected, beautiful, and virtuous ladies. And
not only did she teach classic Farsi literature at the university
she was a descendant of the royal family, a fact that my father
playfully rubbed in the skeptics’ faces by referring to her as “my
princess.”

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 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.

In school, we used to play a game called Sherjangi, or “Battle

of the Poems.” The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went
something like this: You recited a verse from a poem and your
opponent had sixty seconds to reply with a verse that began with
the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my class wanted
me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could
recite dozens of verses from Khayyam, Hãfez, or Rumi’s famous
Masnawi. One time, I took on the whole class and won. I told
Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded, muttered, “Good.”
That was how I escaped my father’s aloofness, in my dead
mother’s books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything,
Rumi, Hãfez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian
Fleming. When I had finished my mother’s books—not the boring
history ones, I was never much into those, but the novels, the
epics—I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a
week from the bookstore near Cinema Park, and stored them in
cardboard boxes when I ran out of shelf room. Of course, marrying
a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying
his face in poetry books to hunting... well, that wasn’t how Baba
had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn’t read poetry- -and
God forbid they should ever write it! Real men—real boys—played
soccer just as Baba had when he had been young. Now that was
something to be passionate about. In 1970, Baba took a break
from the construction of the orphanage and flew to Tehran for a
month to watch the World Cup games on television, since at the
time Afghanistan didn’t have TVs yet.

He signed me up for soccer teams to stir the same passion

in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team,
always in the way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking
an open lane. I shambled about the field on scraggy legs, squalled

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for passes that never came my way. And the harder I tried, waving
my arms over my head frantically and screeching, “I’m open! I’m
open!” the more I went ignored. But Baba wouldn’t give up. When
it became abundantly clear that I hadn’t inherited a shred of his
athletic talents, he settled for trying to turn me into a passionate
spectator. Certainly, I could manage that, couldn’t I? I faked
interest for as long as possible. I cheered with him when Kabul’s
team scored against Kandahar and yelped insults at the referee
when he called a penalty against our team. But Baba sensed my
lack of genuine interest and resigned himself to the bleak fact
that his son was never going to either play or watch soccer. I
remember one time Baba took me to the yearly Buzkashi
tournament that took place on the first day of spring, New Year’s
Day. Buzkashi was, and still is, Afghanistan’s national passion.
A chapandaz, a highly skilled horseman usually patronized by
rich aficionados, has to snatch a goat or cattle carcass from the
midst of a melee, carry that carcass with him around the stadium
at full gallop, and drop it in a scoring circle while a team of other
chapandaz chases him and does everything in its power—kick,
claw, whip, punch—to snatch the carcass from him. That day,
the crowd roared with excitement as the horsemen on the field
bellowed their battle cries and jostled for the carcass in a cloud
of dust. The earth trembled with the clatter of hooves. We watched
from the upper bleachers as riders pounded past us at full gallop,
yipping and yelling, foam flying from their horses’ mouths.

At one-point Baba pointed to someone. “Amir, do you see that

man sitting up there with those other men around him?” I did.
“That’s Henry Kissinger.” “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know who Henry
Kissinger was, and I might have asked. But at the moment, I
watched with horror as one of the chapandaz fell off his saddle
and was trampled under a score of hooves. His body was tossed
and hurled in the stampede like a rag doll, finally rolling to a stop
when the melee moved on. He twitched once and lay motionless,
his legs bent at unnatural angles, a pool of his blood soaking
through the sand. I began to cry. I cried all the way back home. I

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remember how Baba’s hands clenched around the steering wheel.
Clenched and unclenched. Mostly, I will never forget Baba’s
valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted look on his face as he
drove in silence.

Later that night, I was passing by my father’s study when I

overheard him speaking to Rahim Khan. I pressed my ear to the
closed door. “—grateful that he’s healthy,” Rahim Khan was saying.
“I know, I know. But he’s always buried in those books or shuffling
around the house like he’s lost in some dream.” “And?” “I wasn’t
like that.” Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry. Rahim Khan
laughed. “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them
with your favorite colors.” “I’m telling you,” Baba said, “I wasn’t
like that at all, and neither were any of the kids I grew up with.”
“You know, sometimes you are the most self-centered man I
know,” Rahim Khan said. He was the only person I knew who
could get away with saying something like that to Baba.

“It has nothing to do with that.” “Nay?” “Nay.” “Then what?” I

heard the leather of Baba’s seat creaking as he shifted on it. I
closed my eyes, pressed my ear even harder against the door,
wanting to hear, not wanting to hear. “Sometimes I look out this
window and I see him playing on the street with the
neighbourhood boys. I see how they push him around, take his
toys from him, give him a shove here, a whack there. And, you
know, he never fights back. Never. He just... drops his head and...”
“So, he’s not violent,” Rahim Khan said. “That’s not what I mean,
Rahim, and you know it,” Baba shot back. “There is something
missing in that boy.” “Yes, a mean streak.” “Self-defense has
nothing to do with meanness. You know what always happens
when the neighbourhood boys tease him? Hassan steps in and
fends them off. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And when they
come home, I say to him, ‘How did Hassan get that scrape on his
face?’ And he says, ‘He fell down.’ I’m telling you, Rahim, there is
something missing in that boy.” “You just need to let him find
his way,”

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 Rahim Khan said. “And where is he headed?” Baba said. “A
boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t
stand up to anything.” “As usual you’re oversimplifying.” “I don’t
think so.” “You’re angry because you’re afraid he’ll never take
over the business for you.” “Now who’s oversimplifying?” Baba
said. “Look, I know there’s a fondness between you and him and
I’m happy about that. Envious, but happy. I mean that. He needs
someone who...understands him, because God knows I don’t. But
something about Amir troubles me in a way that I can’t express.
It’s like...” I could see him searching, reaching for the right words.

He lowered his voice, but I heard him anyway. “If I hadn’t

seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d
never believe he’s my son.” The next morning, as he was
preparing my breakfast, Hassan asked if something was bothering
me. I snapped at him, told him to mind his own business. Rahim
Khan had been wrong about the mean streak thing.

WORD STOCK
• Aficionados- (Noun) enthusiast, fan

• Bleachers- (Noun) benches, seats

• Bustling- (Adj.) full of lively activity

• Jagged- (Adj.) craggy, broken

• Twitched- (Verb) jerk, toss, writhe

• Skeptics- (Noun) cynics, doubters

POST-READING REFLECTIONS
1. List the themes in this excerpt from The Kite Runner.

2. What is Sherjangi? Is there an Indian version of a similar

game?

3. How is Afghanistan presented in the text?

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