I don’t even know where to start from. What can I say? Really? The sound effects? The characters? The feelings and the emotions? I was imprisoned, or to be specific, I was taken away. Yes, I was taken to a world I have never been to. But was it one world?(I am thinking as I am writing) I don’t really think so. They were three: a world of beautiful and normal life, a world with brutality and inhumanity and a world of peace after mayhem, a real mayhem not like the one I see here when people consider a snow storm mayhem.
I flew like the kite. I ran like the runner. I was like the kite runner, jumping and running on the hills and snow-covered buildings in Kabul. I felt the heartbeats of every child competing in the game. I jumped and cheered when the Ameer and Hassan’s kite won the competition. And I watered my eyes too with compassion, not only because of the horrible scenes in a fictious story, but because they were so real. They were so damn right. They were so horrifying and magnifying. I felt the stone the filthy bearded-man throwing at the woman coming out of the screen hitting my head, running blood allover my clothes. The sounds of the shootings and the fear of looking at the terrorizing rulers of Kabul reminded me with those I encountered. Same clothes, same religion, same filth and same power: those running Iraq with power of religious AK-47s, those whose beards hide a devil in every hair, those who have no mercy even for God Himself. Those who practice the vice and claim doing the virtue.
It has been months since I read the book before the movie came out, yet never forgot the details. Now the movie came out with more vividness of the brutality of life and its fake promises. One scene hit me the most. I didn’t remember reading it in the book. I might have, but not sure. The scene of running away from the Soviets who invaded Kabul. A terrible reminder, a stab, a stone, a beast tearing my healing chest. They ran away from the invaders like we did when my neighborhood fell. They took their bags and documents and left and so we did in reality. The look, the tears, the heartbeats of going to the unknown. The horror of the idea of the possibility of not being able to see home again. It all came in one image reminding me of that day: the sound of the roaring tanks, the image of the camouflage helmets and brown boots.
Ameer’s father didn’t forget the most important thing. He was not as stupid as I was. He was not as naive as I was. He knew it, all the way out of his country. He felt it. As he was leaving, he bent down quickly before the darkness of the oil tanker he was hiding in deprived him from his country’s light, and took a handful of his country's soil, hiding it in his small pocket watch after he kissed it. How lucky he was to do so. How smart he was.
