Chapter+10+-+The+Kite+Runner

Chapter Ten of The Kite Runner  __** Baba and Amir escape Kabul on the back of a truck. Amir was feeling carsick. **I knew he saw my car sickness as yet another of my array of weakness- I saw it on his embarrassed face ... Baba was apologising to the other passengers. As if car sickness was a crime.”** Amir is still feeling guilty about what he did to Hassan. On the way out of Afghanistan a Russian soldier demands to be able to rape one of the women as the “price for letting them pass.” **Amir is brave and tries to stop Baba from standing up for this young woman. “It was my turn to clamp a hand on his thigh, but Baba pried it loose, …when he stood, he eclipsed the moonlight.” Baba told the soldier that “war did not negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.’** ** this tells us what a brave man Baba was. ** Amir wanted him to let it go. “**Do you have to always be the hero…Can’t you just let it go for once? But I knew he couldn’t – it wasn’t in his nature. The problem was, his nature was going to get us all killed.’** ** Baba said: “Tell him I’ll take a thousand of his bullets before I let this indecency take place.” ** This makes Amir feel very guilty as he remembers seeing Assef rape his friend, Hassan. **“Some hero I had been, fretting about the kite. Sometimes, I too wondered if I was really Baba’s son.”** Baba insists that the soldier shoot him first before he rapes the woman. The soldier is stopped by another more senior Russian soldier and the truck moves off. The husband kissed Baba’s hand. They spend a week waiting in a basement for another truck to take them further. One of the other refugees was Kamal who was with his father. Kamal was one of the boys who held down Hassan to be raped. It turned out that he had himself been raped by a gang of boys in Kabul. He no longer talked to anyone – just stared. They are carried the rest of the way in the darkness and fumes of the inside of a fuel tanker. **Again Amir is very brave. “My eyes stung from the fumes, like someone had peeled my lids back and rubbed a lemon on them.”** Baba told him to think of something nice to take his mind of it. **“Hassan and I stand ankle-deep in untamed grass, I am tugging on the line, the spool spinning in Hassan’s calloused hands, our eyes turned up to the kite in the sky. Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don’t have to say anything – that’s how it is between people who are each other’s first memories, people who have fed from the same breast…Our twin shadowns dance on the rippling grass.”** They make it to Pakistan. **Again Amir feels worthless and guilty. ‘My eyes returned to our suitcases. They made me sad for Baba. After everything he’d built, planned, fought for, fretted over, dreamed of, this was the summation of his life: one disappointing sone and two suitcases.”** Kamal dies during the trip and his father shoots himself.
 * __  The Kite Runner
 * I wondered where Hassan was. Then the inevitable. I vomited.”  **