The Kite Runner Read Online Free

skimming stones and Hassan made his
     stone skip eight times. The most I managed was five. Baba was there, watching, and he patted Hassan on the back. Even put
     his arm around his shoulder.
    We sat at a picnic table on the banks of the lake, just Baba and me, eating boiled eggs with kofta sandwiches—meatballs and pickles wrapped in naan. The water was a deep blue and sunlight glittered on its looking glass–clear surface. On Fridays, the lake was bustling with
     families out for a day in the sun. But it was midweek and there was only Baba and me, us and a couple of longhaired, bearded
     tourists—“hippies,” I’d heard them called. They were sitting on the dock, feet dangling in the water, fishing poles in hand.
     I asked Baba why they grew their hair long, but Baba grunted, didn’t answer. He was preparing his speech for the next day,
     flipping through a havoc of handwritten pages, making notes here and there with a pencil. I bit into my egg and asked Baba
     if it was true what a boy in school had told me, that if you ate a piece of eggshell, you’d have to pee it out. Baba grunted
     again.
    I took a bite of my sandwich. One of the yellow-haired tourists laughed and slapped the other one on the back. In the distance,
     across the lake, a truck lumbered around a corner on the hill. Sunlight twinkled in its side-view mirror.
    “I think I have saratan, ” I said. Cancer. Baba lifted his head from the pages flapping in the breeze. Told me I could get the soda myself, all I had
     to do was look in the trunk of the car.
    Outside the orphanage, the next day, they ran out of chairs. A lot of people had to stand to watch the opening ceremony. It
     was a windy day, and I sat behind Baba on the little podium just outside the main entrance of the new building. Baba was wearing
     a green suit and a caracul hat. Midway through the speech, the wind knocked his hat off and everyone laughed. He motioned
     to me to hold his hat for him and I was glad to, because then everyone would see that he was my father, my Baba. He turned back to the microphone and said he hoped the building was sturdier than his hat, and everyone laughed again.
     When Baba ended his speech, people stood up and cheered. They clapped for a long time. Afterward, people shook his hand. Some
     of them tousled my hair and shook my hand too. I was so proud of Baba, of us.
    But despite Baba’s successes, people were always doubting him. They told Baba that running a business wasn’t in his blood
     and he should study law like his father. So Baba proved them all wrong by not only running his own business but becoming one
     of the richest merchants in Kabul. Baba and Rahim Khan built a wildly successful carpet-exporting business, two pharmacies,
     and a restaurant.
    When people scoffed that Baba would never marry well—after all, he was not of royal blood—he wedded my mother, Sofia Akrami,
     a highly educated woman universally regarded as one of Kabul’s most respected, beautiful, and virtuous ladies. And not only
     did she teach classic Farsi literature at the university, she was a descendant of the royal family, a fact that my father
     playfully rubbed in the skeptics’ faces by referring to her as “my princess.”
    With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba
     saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives
     that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.
    When I was in fifth grade, we had a mullah who taught us about Islam. His name was Mullah Fatiullah Khan, a short, stubby
     man with a face full of acne scars and a gruff voice. He lectured us about the virtues of zakat and the duty of hadj; he taught us the intricacies of performing the five daily namaz prayers, and made us memorize verses from the Koran—and though he never translated the words for us, he did stress,