Sunday, April 4, 2004


The heartbreak of displacement
M.L. Raina

The Kite Runner: A Novel
by Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead (Penguin) Books, New York. Pages 324.
$ 24.95 (hardback)

The Kite Runner: A NovelIT is a strange irony that while Muslims are demonised as congenitally prone to terrorism, there are young Muslims writers settled abroad who have written some soul-searching fiction exploring cultural tensions and the tugs of old-world tradition in the new world. They present sympathetic Muslim characters trying to make sense of their lives in changed environments. Of these, Khaled Hosseini, a California-based psychiatrist, is a prominent representative.

At a recent public reading in Boston, Hosseini told me that his was the first Afghan novel in English and that he was the first Afghan-American writer to have written about the Taliban terror and its aftermath. He is not nagged by the ‘crisis-of-identity-in-an–alienated-land’ syndrome — a state made much of by all kinds of hyphenated writers in America and Europe. In fact, the novel is about contemporary Afghanistan, not about an imagined border country between different homelands. Hosseini clearly loves Afghanistan as much as he hates what has become of it.

In many ways The Kite Runner is a conventional novel, raw and excruciating to read, especially in the descriptions of homosexual rape (that of Hassan by Aref). Drawing on the time-tried practice of well-plotted novels and insertion of letters and dream sequences, it traces the friendship of an upper class Afghan boy Amir and his servant Hassan. But woven round it are relationships between fathers and sons, loyalty and betrayal in the backdrop of recent Afghan history, particularly in the post-Soviet and Taliban phases.

The story is narrated from the point of view of Amir, though there are sub-plots paralleling the development of Amir and Hassan as main protagonists. Besides, we have a rich lode of characters such as Amir’s father, Hassan’s father, Aref who becomes a Taliban functionary, Amir’s wife, Soraya, the family retainer and many others. Some of these characters are physically deformed like Hassan’s father, yet all remain endearingly noble.

The author’s agony over the destruction of Afganistan, his homeland, is palpable
The author’s agony over the destruction of Afganistan, his homeland, is palpable

The novel acquires solidity (no sham postmodernism here) both in detail and theme as it is embedded in a particular historical situation and is vividly realised in scenes of folk rituals like the kite-flying games among Kabul’s residents (Hassan is Amirkite- runner), scenes of family picnics and palpitatingly evocative descriptions of the rugged Afghan social life, in elaborate dinner parties at Amir’s house and in the intimacies of his later courtship with Soraya in California. One cannot help recalling Samira Makhmalbaf’s recent film The Blackboard in this connection.

After leaving the country during the Soviet occupation, Amir’s redemptive journey back into Afghanistan is to atone for his betrayal of Hassan, a Hazara boy whom he had helplessly watched being sodomised by Aref in a street fight early in the book. These early pages have a melancholy feel about them as they register Amir’s self-disgust at his failure to save his friend’s honour.

His return to Afghanistan to recover Hassan’s son Sohrab from the Taliban may be regarded as his penance for the earlier sin of betrayal. Through his eyes the Taliban emerge as the loathsome tyrants that we all know. But what makes Amir’s disgust worse is the discovery that Sohrab has become a pansy in Aref’s Taliban court. The rescue operation reads straight out of a Le Carre thriller and stands out among other special pleasures afforded by this novel.

Here one cannot help feeling that Hosseini’s depiction of Hassan is a little grotesque since the latter is simply a puppet in others’ hands. But this is par for the course in that the author’s purpose is better served by the rescue operation itself than by making Hassan a rounded personality in his own right.

Amir’s experience of Taliban-infested Afghanistan includes poignant encounters with ordinary people such as the truck driver who drives the family to Peshawar in Pakistan and discovers that his brother’s children go hungry while feeding the new guest. One of these characters tells Amir, ‘you have always been a tourist here’.

This statement, passingly made by a minor character in the book, shows up Amir-Hosseini’s guilt about his displacement and return. It has deeper ramifications, though: once displaced, can one return only as a tourist? Amir himself is not beset by any pangs of conscience in this regard, but for us who want to understand the phenomenon of home and homelessness it remains a source of constant heartbreak. That Sohrab is ambivalent about America does nothing to alleviate this heartbreak.

The Kite Runner comes alive in simple brushstrokes of character drawing rather than in the epic sweep of its historical gesture. Closer to Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes than to Mahfouz’s Trilogy, it unfolds in slow silent waves of agony over the destruction of Afghanistan. In spite of Hossieni’s new status as an American citizen, his fidelity to Afghan reality remains unquestionably strong.

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