Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner offered me something I hadn’t experienced before. I cried. I had cried before not of sorrow nor of happiness but due to pain and the last time my tears rolled down was in my 8th grade when my father slapped me flat out across the face. But I cried now because I read a book.
Khaled has written a simple story, probably that could have featured in a good tamil(Autograph -II?) or malayalam movie. But it’s his style that tells more stories that the streamlined one. He plucks every string in the art of story telling and just makes our heart cry out in pain.
The author shows us a small town in Afganistan with amazing detail. I had always thought Afghanistan would be one of the last places I want to visit on earth. It still holds true given its present condition, but the situation might have been different 30 years ago. There were only a couple of instances that showed the Taliban’s atrocities, but trust me, they were more than enough to explain the plight of the Afghans.
You will enjoy this book better if you hail from any of the South asian countries as most of the things that the author alludes are the ones that you come across in your daily life. The fact that I cried after reading it for the first time in 10 years, itself stands as a strong testimony to this book. And I did, because I felt happier and lighter when I finished with the last two words of the book’I ran’.