The Kite Runner Read Free

he came smiling.

    As confided to a neighbor’s servant by the garrulous midwife, who had then in turn told anyone who would listen, Sanaubar had taken one glance at the baby in Ali’s arms, seen the cleft lip, and barked a bitter laughter.

    “There,” she had said. “Now you have your own idiot child to do all your smiling for you!”
    She had refused to even hold Hassan, and just five days later, she was gone.

    Baba hired the same nursing woman who had fed me to nurse Hassan. Ali told us she was a blue-eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan, the city of the giant Buddha statues.
    “What a sweet singing voice she had,” he used to say to us.

    What did she sing, Hassan and I always asked, though we already knew--Ali had told us countless times. We just wanted to hear Ali sing.

    He’d clear his throat and begin:

    _On a high mountain I stood,
    And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.
    O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men,
    Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts._

    Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break.

    Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.

    Mine was _Baba_.

    His was _Amir_. My name.

    8
    “The Kite Runner” By Khaled Hosseini
    Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975--and all that followed--was already laid in those first words.

    THREE

    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 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