Hassan's Onion: Writing Emotion with Khaled Hosseini
This essay discusses The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns in detail, including the ending of The Kite Runner.
In The Kite Runner, Amir writes his first short story with a practical problem. Its protagonist discovers that his tears turn into pearls, begins manufacturing reasons to weep, and eventually kills his wife. The boy has arranged an impressive catastrophe. Hassan, listening to the story, wonders why the man could not have produced the tears by smelling an onion.
Hosseini entrusts the objection to a child who cannot read. Equipped with literacy, social authority, and a pleasingly tragic invention, Amir has overlooked an action his listener finds obvious. An onion would spare the wife and still produce the pearls. The catastrophe gratifies the storyteller more than the story requires it.
Hassan is judging Amir's invention; we need not enlist him as the spokesman for all of Hosseini's fiction. His objection does, however, give us a precise question to carry into novels whose characters endure so much: what keeps us reading when a further injury would only repeat the demand to grieve?
Amir has already condemned himself
The first chapter of The Kite Runner opens with self-accusation. Amir calls his past one of “unatoned sins”; an invitation from his family's friend Rahim Khan carries the promise, “There is a way to be good again.” Responsibility precedes our knowledge of the offense. We read to discover what Amir did, and what an answer to it might now demand.
Under that advance judgment, a childhood prank acquires an ominous precision. In chapter 4, Amir deliberately gives Hassan a false definition of a word, passing off an insult as a compliment. Hassan cannot consult the text for himself. Later, a cast-off shirt or broken toy eases Amir's guilt: the boy who inflicted the humiliation also decides how little it should cost to make amends.
The onion objection follows in the same chapter. Stung by a listener whose judgment surpasses his own, Amir inwardly retreats into the hierarchy that favors him. Reading aloud, which had furnished both boys with pleasure, has also furnished Amir with an instrument of humiliation and Hassan with an opportunity to question him. Their affection and their inequality are being exercised within the same activity.
By the kite tournament in chapter 7, Amir wants a victory that will secure his father's approval. The competition generates its own suspense, while the opening's confession makes us wary of that desire: who else might pay for its fulfillment? When Hassan runs after the defeated kite, winning it has already become entangled with winning Baba.
In the alley, the withheld offense takes the form of a decision. Amir witnesses the assault on Hassan and runs away. His account passes through fear into a more shameful calculation: Hassan can be the price of Baba's affection. The little privileges of childhood have prepared a way of valuing another boy's life.
Advance judgment can thus burden an ordinary exchange with a consequence the reader cannot yet name. For this to sustain a novel, the intervening chapters must remain absorbing in themselves: the pleasures of friendship, a child's embarrassment before his father, a storyteller's injured pride. An ominous opening supplies none of those experiences on its own.
It also restricts our freedom. Amir's childhood is being recalled under a sentence already passed; we cannot quite inhabit it as an open future. A novel uncertain about responsibility would need another arrangement. Here, the confession secures our expectation of guilt while the undisclosed particulars of that guilt keep us reading.
Running for Sohrab
Amir's attempt to bring Hassan's son, Sohrab, to safety leads to a confrontation with Assef, Hassan's childhood assailant. Being beaten brings Amir a feeling of release, which the narration names as “healed.” His injured body seems to receive the punishment he once tried to provoke from Hassan.
The relief is intelligible, and perilously convenient. If Amir's pain could pay for Hassan's suffering, the novel would have found a penalty to balance the wrong. Sohrab's intervention with his slingshot unsettles that apparent settlement: the adult who came to save the boy must rely on the boy to help him escape.
Nor does escape settle what follows. While trying to bring Sohrab to America, Amir raises the possibility of another stay in an orphanage and breaches the boy's trust. Sohrab's ensuing crisis and withdrawal make a reassuring conclusion more remote. The novel continues to escalate suffering here; its ending cannot be cited as proof that Hosseini has dispensed with catastrophe.
Yet much of the final chapter is spent on attempts at contact that yield almost nothing. A room is prepared, books bought, questions asked. The adults imagine a future in which the child cannot yet participate. After so much urgent action, Hosseini prolongs the time in which Amir has to live without a consoling answer.
The kite gives that waiting a shared occupation. Sohrab watches, approaches, takes the string, then exchanges it for the spool. With each adjustment he has something to do alongside Amir; the activity sustains their contact through the boy's near-silence.
When Amir offers to run the fallen kite, he repeats Hassan's “For you, a thousand times over.” The words have changed speakers and direction. The boy who once expected another child to bring him the prize is now offering the service himself.
Even then, Amir only thinks he has seen a nod. The smile is brief, and he explicitly refuses to treat it as making everything right. His willingness to run is definite; Sohrab's response is slight enough to elude certainty.
Where the opening made us await a disclosure, the ending has us attend to the faintness of a response. The remembered phrase brings Amir's guilt into the present without making Sohrab pronounce on it. What follows the phrase—a grown man running for a child—gives the old promise a new bodily obligation.
A writer working with a refrain can trace whose labor the words promise at each recurrence. Here the second speaker takes up a task he formerly left to someone else, so repetition advances the story through a reversal of service. Sohrab's tentative participation keeps the scene from certifying the adult's redemption. The emotional movement is small, but it has the whole earlier relationship behind it.
The evening that lasts three cups
In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mariam and Laila's rapprochement takes several chapters to become possible. Their eventual tea together would lose much of its force if we detached it from the failed approaches and reluctant concessions that precede it.
Chapter 31 establishes the household hierarchy. Rasheed, the women's husband, flatters Laila and assigns Mariam a subordinate role; suspicion has practical grounds before their first sustained conversation. When Laila approaches her, Mariam refuses: “I won't be your servant.” She apportions the chores and dismisses the prospect of company. Work and solitude are the terms on which she means to endure this marriage.
Shared suffering does not immediately make allies of them. They quarrel, and Laila discovers the satisfaction of having somewhere to direct her grief. After Laila's daughter, Aziza, is born, Mariam initially enjoys Rasheed's complaints. By chapter 33, pity for the younger woman and admiration for her devotion to the baby coexist with that resentment.
When Rasheed threatens Mariam, Laila intervenes on behalf of the woman who has rejected her. This act defies the rank he has assigned them. Later that night, the change is prolonged through contact with Aziza: the baby clasps Mariam's finger, and Mariam stays despite her thirst and aching feet. The narrative passes from the abruptness of intervention to the time someone is willing to give.
We see the next gesture through Laila's eyes. Small clothes have been left outside her bedroom; their history is still unknown to her. In the kitchen, she thanks Mariam, who continues cleaning fish and answers obliquely: “It was either your daughter or the moths.” Busy hands accommodate a generosity their owner is reluctant to avow.
Mariam had sewn the clothes during a pregnancy, nearly two decades earlier. Their usefulness to Aziza carries that earlier hope into a relationship she has scarcely begun to accept. Only after the gift has been given does Laila learn how long it has waited for a child.
Laila's invitation to tea meets objections: beans await preparation, the kitchen needs cleaning. To each, she offers to share the work. Earlier, Mariam had divided the chores while repudiating her company; now an alteration to those chores gives Mariam a reason to stay. An invitation alone might have been rebuffed. The offer answers the conditions of her evening.
“One cup” becomes a second, then a third. A limit on the visit is extended by agreement, and the reader follows that extension while gunfire continues outside and Rasheed eventually interrupts. The same threatening household now contains an evening both women wish to prolong.
Chapter 35 carries the evening into habit. They work together, anticipate their tea, and begin confiding what they had kept private. As Mariam grows attached to Laila and Aziza, life without them becomes intolerable. Companionship has given her something to lose and, with it, a reason to question the endurance that had governed her days.
For a scene of reconciliation to acquire this density, the shared activity needs a history. Chores have already enforced separation; approaches have failed; a gift has conveyed something its giver struggles to say. By the time the women sit down, the reader can measure how far staying together exceeds what either could once have expected. The cups count out a freedom they are beginning to exercise.
Hosseini also interprets the exchange for us. At the close of chapter 34, Laila knows that “they were not enemies any longer.” After the shared cups and the look exchanged during Rasheed's interruption, the sentence settles an inference we could have drawn ourselves. It conveys Laila's confidence in Mariam's response, yet that very assurance may close the exchange more firmly than its tentative gestures warrant.
The explanation in the next chapter (35) earns its space on other grounds. Mariam's attachment has made her former endurance untenable: tenderness has altered what she can bear.
Hassan's onion remains an apt question at the draft stage.
Were the next catastrophe removed, what would still make us want to continue?
An acknowledged responsibility awaits action; a promised service changes hands; a woman stays for a third cup. None requires a fresh injury to hold our attention, because each develops a possibility the preceding pages have made quite uncertain.
Sources
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner, Riverhead Books digital edition, copyright 2003, with the 2005 reader's guide; chapters 1, 4, 7, 22, 24, and 25.
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Riverhead Books, 2007; chapters 31–35. The novel was written in English.
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