The Afghan years

There was a hit show in the ’80s called The Wonder Years about Kevin Arnold, a boy experiencing growing pains in late ’60s American suburbia. Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner (recently turned film) runs down the same concrete street except it takes a seriously twisted turn. The young Afghan Kevin Arnold is Amir, who lives in the district of Kabul and has a baba (father) who gives him flak (speaking in Pashlish, a mix of Pashto-English like our Taglish) for not being athletic like the other kids. His best friend is his hare-lipped servant-slave Hassan who is as annoyingly nice as a Care Bear to the point of saying things such as, “For you, a thousand times over” and is willing to eat dirt for his friend if asked. Ain’t that cute? The kids eat naan (pita bread) all day and share stories beside their friendship tree.

There are also the kite fights, a local game where kids coat their kite strings with broken glass bits and try to slice an opponent’s rope with their own twiggy flying paper toy. The last kite standing wins and after ensues a race to retrieve the last kite shot down.

As with all coming-of-age-stories, it wouldn’t be complete without bullies. During the grand kite fight, Amir wins. His innocent friend Hassan says, “For you, a thousand time over” on cue and runs after the kite. Then, he runs into Assef, the local misfit and his gang who hang Hitler posters on their bedroom doors. So you know what happens ain’t going to be good. Assef does more than pummel Hassan with his brass knuckles; he proceeds to rape his victim. Amir arrives to see everything in fashionably late telenovela timing, freezes and runs back home with the Beatles song With A Little Help From My Friends playing in the background until it screeches to a halt.

Then, you realize this is not your typical Hallmark Channel movie of the week. Gay rape does make the difference.

With A Little Help From My Friends

This is the part where I ridiculously curse at a fictional character with a rainbow of expletives just like when your favorite contrabida slaps the underdog and you have to shout “Sampalin mo!” After the “Hassan incident,” I was surprisingly hooked on The Kite Runner despite staying away for months because I do judge books by their covers. All I can say is that a book cover showing two boys and their kites does not smell like gripping fiction. Also, I always thought the book rode on the coattails of the post-9/11 political background. I eventually bit into it because of my recent cravings for hummus and shawarma.

So, unto more important matters: Can we forgive Amir for not rescuing his friend even if he was obscenely nice? After much nerdy introspection, the answer is yes. We can lay it easily on this imaginary protagonist and his fictional sin of omission because The Kite Runner’s atmosphere is lamb kebab-thick with both the cast’s micro and macro back stories. Both histories run deep with religious racism and secrets swept under the Jai-namaz prayer rug. Hence, this is one of those tricky novels that cannot be judged by its contents or merely by its words but by its brilliant handling of both. You can’t just read The Kite Runner without reading other books about Afghanistan or at least thanking Allah for Wikipedia.

Based on historical fact, Amir’s reaction is a natural product of his Pashtun blood and Sunni Muslim belief that Hazaras like Hassan are kofr, infidels for being Shia Muslim even as much as he loves his dear rafiq (friend). As early as the 17th century, Sunnis were massacring thousands of Hazaras or turning them into slaves. The height of this hate crime was in 1998 when the Taliban ethnically cleansed 8,000 Shia Muslims. Amir and the Hassan incident can be seen, then, as a reflection of the author Khaled Hosseini’s guilt feelings over being a Generation X Pashtun who simply could not stop the massive killings of the Hazaras during his time. The novel then becomes  Hosseini’s key to redemption as he places the life and times of his people under a global spotlight to prevent another Hazara wipeout from recurring.

The Hassan Incident

Even without this historical baggage, Amir is easy to forgive because we all have our own Hassan incidents: sins of omission that need to be absolved. It is easier to admit that we are more Amir than Hassan. We can forget to take a bath. We can forget to pay the bills and realize that the electricity has been cut. We can forget to text people happy birthday or pick up our kids. We can forget to be grateful. We can forget to say “I love you” or, even worse, say “I am sorry.”

In the realm of redemption, whether or not you believe in a Supreme Being, this idea has always been part of the human experience. We Catholics observe the season of Lent and confession. The Muslims have Ramadan and atheists at least believe in laws of compensation.

As such, after any Hassan incident, nothing is more intoxicating than the words “there is a way to be good again,” as spoken to Amir by his dying uncle Rahim Khan after the young man asks how to make it up to his best friend, even 20 years after the actual event. Our ears tune out everything in the 100-mile radius just to hear the answer. Guilt and redemption is one of the unexplainable dualities of our human psyche. It simply has to be satisfied. It is a matter of finding out how and finding the words to say “For you, a thousand times over.”

Although The Kite Runner won’t concretely solve or satiate our Hassan incidents, it is still a significant novel because it inspires us to start again in doing what is right — that is, to look at the man in the mirror and brutally face up to one’s faults. Then, it proceeds to give us the hope that no matter how much we have wronged, there is always a way to be good again.

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The author loves the fact that his first name means “love” in Pashto. You can be good again at http://readnow.i.ph or readnow@supreme.ph.

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The Kite Runner is available at National Book Store and the film is out in theaters.

Visit the author’s website: http://www.khaledhosseini.com/