(Front row) Danish Farooqui, Amir Arison, Joe Joseph, (back row) Faran Tahir, Evan Zes, Houshang Touzie and Dariush KashaniĪmir and Hassan are leaders in Kabul’s intense kite flying contests, which require flyers to use their kite strings to cut those of their rivals. Ali’s son, Hassan (Erik Sirakian, effective), has been brought up alongside Amir, so closely they might as well be brothers.

His widowed father, Baba (Faran Tahir, commanding), is a wealthy, strong-willed Pashtun merchant with a faithful Hazara servant of forty years, Ali (Evan Zes, satisfactory). The Kite Runner is an incident-packed story of what happens in the life a boy from Kabul named Amir (Amir Arison, fine) who, as an adult, narrates the events, shifting between his childhood and grown-up personas. It has been produced numerous times both in the USA and abroad, and is now making its Broadway debut at the Helen Hayes Theater. The same year that the movie appeared, Matthew Spangler’s stage version was born at San Jose State University. The 2007 movie was equally controversial, and the young Afghan actors who appeared in the rape scene had to be spirited out of the country. Salar Naderīut the book was highly controversial among Afghans, largely because of disputes about the nature of the inter-ethnic relationships it depicted between Pashtun and Hazara peoples, and a scene in which a young Hazara boy is raped by a Pashtun. Even I, despite my minimal time for popular novels, fell under its spell. However, the story’s authentic introduction of Afghan lives and culture was so magnetic in the wake of the country’s alleged implication in 9/11, that nearly every sentient adult I knew immediately began to read it. The heart of the book is essentially about the relationship of a father and his son, and an act of redemption carried out by that guilt-burdened son.

The publication in 2003 of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a hugely successful novel dealing with contemporary Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban, couldn’t have been better timed.

The kite flyer book