July 25, 2008

The Kite Runner - An Absorbing Book, A Wonderful Film

 

The film version of Khaled Hosseini’s highly acclaimed, best selling novel of 2003, The Kite Runner, is now available on compact disc at video shops almost everywhere.  The book is still on the list of popular books of various booksellers.
The Afghan-American author who lives in San Francisco has painted a true-to-life picture of his native land on a vast canvas covering almost four decades.
A high-achieving Afghan, a born storyteller, Hosseini weaves an absorbing tale of friendship, family, betrayal and the resultant anguish between two boys caught in the shifting societal milieu of a country suffering a series of convulsions after the fall of the monarchy in 1973 till after the fall of the Taliban in 2001-2.    
A master storyteller, Hosseini draws the portraits of all his characters with sympathy. Their interactions against the changing socio-political scenario cause the surfacing of problems for which no one could be blamed totally.
The story revolves essentially around two boys: one, Amir, a Pushtun and son of a rich businessman, the other, Hassan, a Hazara, son of the servant of the family. A bond develops between the two. Amir, a born storyteller, reads out his stories to Hassan who is genuinely excited to hear them and whose pure joy is evident whenever they are together. Amir too enjoys the company of Hassan.
Amir’s mother dies while giving birth to him. Hassan’s mother runs away with a group of entertainers. Her husband, Ali, crippled by polio, was sterile too.
Amir was a shy and timid introvert unlike his father who had a towering personality and matching courage. Amir felt that his father showed more affection towards Hassan than to him. That made him jealous of Hassan. He attributed his father’s lack of love towards him to his mother’s death during his birth, as if he had himself killed her. That leaves him inwardly scarred. Twenty years later he learns that Hassan was the (illegitimate) son of his own father – his stepbrother that way. 
The best times for the two boys were during the kite contests during which each tries to cut another’s string. Hassan is not only the best kite runner around with the innate ability to know exactly where a defeated and loose kite will fall, he also knows the tricks to entrap an opponent’s kite.
One day, the greatest day for both, a day having the greatest impact on the life of Amir, Hassan runs off to collect the last kite Amir has cut to win the tournament, but he encounters a bully named Assef and his cohorts after he gets hold of the kite in a deserted alley. The hoodlums ask him to either surrender the kite or himself.  Hassan does not want to part with the kite, a real prize for Amir to be framed and hung on a wall in the house. The hoods overpower him, rape, humiliate and  physically injure him. Amir sees the incident but his timidity freezes him into complete immobility. Hassan, in a similar situation, would have gladly put his own life on line for his best mate.
Amir, the protagonist of the story, starts his narrative: “I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near a frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it is wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past crawls its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-seven years.”
His inability, owing chiefly to his cowardice, to do anything to help his friend, did keep haunting him even in his dreams.  When the young lady he was falling in love with discloses the dark spot in her life when at age 18 she had eloped with a much older person, he describes how he had let down his friend in a matching incident of guilt.
The story moves fast forward to life in San Francisco after he and his father escape there from Kabul. The 70 pages allotted to that portion of the story seem somewhat unrelated to the thrust of the plot, with the exception of his admission of his guilt to the girl he was courting.
The story moves back to the track when he reaches Afghanistan in response to a family friend’s call.  The family benefactor informs him of his being the stepbrother of Hassan who and his wife had both been killed in the tumultuous developments in the country. Their son, Sohrab, was living in an orphanage and Amir could perhaps provide a better arrangement for him.
In his pursuit of the boy, he runs once more into Assef, who had become a leader of Taliban but was in reality a sadist debauch. Assef recognizes him and starts badly beating him up in a show of his power and his rage over his bid to rescue Sohrab from his clutches.  Amir is severely injured and could have even been killed but for the courage of Sohrab who lands a missile in the eye of the hoodlum by his slingshot.
The two escape and manage to reach Peshawar where he was treated for the broken jawbone, broken ribs and other injuries. They moved then to Islamabad on their way to the US. Hosseini’s accounts of Peshawar and Islamabad are quite complimentary.
While in Kabul, he witnesses the atrocities of the Taliban including the stoning to death of a couple for adultery. His encounter with Assef, the fight, the sufferance and his tenacity in rescuing the boy from the clutches of evil served as the redemption for his failure years back to help Hassan in that deserted alley. 
The novel is so close to life that one would hesitate before placing the book in the category of fiction. It is history fictionalized. The film has moved several steps forward in this respect. The book is in English but a notable portion of the book has been recast in Afghan Persian in the film with subtitles of the dialogues in English. That transplants the viewer to the bazaars and alleys of Kabul and he starts smelling the kebobs and the skinless carcasses of lambs. 
The book was on the NY Times bestseller list and rightly so. Like Hemmingway, Hosseini has used the simplest language with the minimum use of similes, metaphors and other decorative frills of the language. He merely tells the story and lets the reader interpret and find deeper meaning in what he has put before him.
         (arifhussaini@hotmail.com)