The Kite Runner

The Kite runner

Khaled Hosseini

In the end the world always wins.

The last time someone said that to me, I had tears running down my face. Literally. I was a naïve child. I thought that as long as people fought for themselves, believed in their morals and principles fiercely and were simply kind, then they could beat anything and absolutely anyone in the whole wide world. That there would be nothing strong enough to put them under a rock or rid them of what was theirs, what they deserved. But I guess we all did our fair share of growing up, didn’t we?

Welcome to the big, bad ‘Real World’

Brief Description:

Here in the Real World things work in extremes. Everything is either black or white. You either agree with the crowd or you’re an anti-national. Give or take a few decades, and it will be treason, and you are dead. We will either massacre because of what went down in history or create our own history without having an ounce of regard for what came before. We will have heathens walking free because of a piece of paper and we will also ask the same piece of paper to shove it because things in the ‘Real World’ can never work if we follow what a single piece of paper says.

The Kite runner is a book about an infant, who grows into a boy and further into a man. It is a story about how any number of choices he makes in his life, without fail, manage to come back to him. It is a sad story. It is a very melancholic story.

I have been studying about the caste system for as long as I can remember. Words like ‘Untouchables’, ‘Dalits’, ‘Shudras’, ‘Human Scavengers’, ‘Discrimination’; They have a place in mind. I’ve been reading them for a long time now. But, that’s all they were to me, Words. Their reality and depth hadn’t hit me, not until recently.

When I saw that some customs were so rigidly imbibed in the cultures that people would go to unimaginable lengths to keep them alive, up and going. That zero regard would be given to how low, filthy, disgusted and humiliated the victim feels. I realised that all of this exists. It is not just textbooks and words. I saw it when a little Hazara Afghan Boy was raped in the alley, I saw it when he stayed back home to do laundry while his best friend went off to get education. I saw it when that girl was asked to step out of the room because she was menstruating. I saw it. I saw it and it made me realise that, yes, the world does, indeed, always win at the end.

The Kite Runner is a beautiful book. It talks of guilt, immense guilt, pain, loss, suffering, but most of all, it talks of redemption. Hosseini has done a beautiful job in showing that anything can be forgiven if redeemed well enough. He has done a brilliant job. I remember laughing as I read the book, and I know I cried when I saw Sohrab holding the slingshot. I remember reading and rereading some words over and over again, marvelling at the resemblance they held with my mother tongue.

To whomsoever is reading this, read the book. Also remember, it really is just blood money, the book. All of it. After all, we’re living in the real world, aren’t we? 

And it is run by a single piece of paper.

The Kite Runner- a book set in another country.