The Kite Runner: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

As children in Afghanistan, Amir and Hassan would climb trees and reflect sunlight into their neighbors’ homes to annoy them, or else shoot walnuts at a neighbor’s dog with a slingshot. Hassan never wanted to do these things, but he would not deny Amir if Amir asked him, and if they were caught Hassan would always take the blame.

Amir lives in a mansion in the wealthy Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul with his father, Baba. The house is decorated lavishly and always filled with Baba’s friends and the smells of smoke and cinnamon. In the living room is a photo of Amir’s grandfather hunting deer with the old king King Nadir Shah.

Outside Amir’s house is a little mud hut where Hassan and his father Ali live. Though Amir and Hassan play together every day, Amir has only entered Hassan’s hut a few times. Amir explains that neither he nor Hassan grew up with a mother – Amir’s mother died giving birth to him, and Hassan’s mother ran away after he was born. Amir is one year older than Hassan.

One day Hassan and Amir were out walking when a soldier confronted them and claimed to have had sex with Hassan’s mother, whose name was Sanaubar. Sanaubar and Ali had been a strange couple – Sanaubar was nineteen years younger than Ali, beautiful, and had a bad reputation. Ali, on the other hand, was a devout Muslim whose face was partially paralyzed, and who walked with a bad limp because of polio. People thought that Sanaubar’s father arranged her marriage to Ali to restore her honor.

Some of the children mock Ali’s appearance and limp, and call him Babalu, or Boogeyman. Ali and Hassan are Hazaras, an ethnic minority in Afghanistan that is looked down on by the Pashtun majority (Amir and Baba are Pashtuns). The Hazaras have more Asian features, while the Pashtuns appear more Arabic. Another division between them is that the Hazaras are Shi’a Muslims, while the Pashtuns are Sunni. Amir once read a history book about a Hazara uprising in the nineteenth century, and how the Pashtuns put down the rebellion with “unspeakable violence.”

Amir returns to describing Sanaubar, and he says that she mocked Ali’s appearance just as much as the Pashtun children did, but that Ali never retaliated with anger against his tormentors. Amir says that Hassan was born smiling, and had a cleft lip. Sanaubar saw her son, mocked him, and then ran away with a group of traveling entertainers five days later. Baba hired the same nursing woman that fed Amir to feed Hassan, and Ali often says that there is a special kinship between people who “fed from the same breast.” Amir says his first word was “Baba,” and that Hassan’s first word was “Amir.” Amir muses that perhaps everything that would later happen was already foretold by those two words.