It is chronicled that Baaba is a cold, neglectful and generally disinterested father, who harbors some level of resentment toward his child for no other reason than Amir being the causation of his beloved wife’s death, as she simultaneously granted the gift of life to Amir, and opened the wormhole of sorrow to Baaba respectively.  Although Amir makes every effort to win Baba’s attention and love, other than short lived furtive moments of Baaba’s affection, sometimes shared with Hassan, begrudgingly to that of Amir, these efforts are constantly in vain, and he is furthermore plagued by the jealousy that he feels toward Hassan, who seems to win the affectionate gaze of his father loads more often, which seems undeserving to Amir, as he views him as merely a servant, of inferior ethnic makeup.  

Due to the fact that Hassan is granted this affection and Amir’s envy cannot be relieved by the success of his own efforts, he toys with Hassan, sometimes mischievously, sometimes quite vainly and malevolently, as can be seen by instances in which he is provoked to shoot their neighbor’s dogs with slingshots, or, more maliciously, when Amir reads literature to the illiterate Hassan, who is oblivious to the fact that Amir takes every chance he can to short him of the knowledge he seeks through questioning, instead leading him astray and desiring to make Hassan look foolish.  However, despite all the banter, ridicule, and bullying that Amir perpetuates upon Hassan, there is an additional gripe that Amir comes to realize, this being the fact that Hassan is vehemently loyal to that of Amir no matter the circumstance, as he’ll take the blame in a heartbeat for any pranks or misdeeds that Amir provokes Hassan to commit, no matter how big or small of a role Amir plays within it himself, as well as the case in which Hassan protects Amir from his turn to be the punching bag of the ever so cruel neighborhood bully, Assef.  

It deeply bothers Amir that Hassan is oblivious to the resentment that he very obviously harbors toward, and eventually boils over as Amir stones Hassan with pomegranates beneath a fruit tree, after going through a cold phase within their relationship, in which contact was sparse. Amir lures Hassan to the tree with promises of reading the boy stories, as they did in the times of old.  Hassan responds by submitting to the will of Amir, all the while questioning his character, marking the first flashpoint of genuine contention between the two boys. 

Hassan, being Hassan, opts for the latter, and, unbeknownst to him, accepts the consequences not explicitly outlined by Assef, that being a humiliating, painstakingly inhumane rape, as he is restrained by the other boys, subject to whatever Assef’s cruel heart desires.  Amir, during the entire endeavor, watches.  Not solely out of shock nor fear, he acknowledges that there was a certain selfishness about his inaction, as he watched simply to obtain the kite, with it, Baaba’s affection and appreciation, which since the beginning of the novel, has been Amir’s sole obsession and end goal; to please the unpleasable.  Amir solely uses Hasssan as an instrument to achieve his goal, no matter how inconsiderate or despicable it may be, and after the rape, he denies having seen anything out of the ordinary occur to Hassan as he grows cold, distant, and hopeless, as a product of the trauma inflicted upon him by such a gruesome event.  

Amir is unable to cope with the grief, and the final instance of malpractice is carried out against the Hazara servants as Amir plants an envelope of cash as well as a watch that Baaba had given him in the residence of Hassan and Ali, framing Hassan so as to make it seem as though he’d stolen the items.  Although Baaba is willing to forgive such a sin, Ali sees through the trickery and foul play orchestrated by Amir, and, similar to Hassan, says nothing in that regard, instead opting to leave the compound entirely, which thoroughly breaks Baaba’s heart, who is never the same especially after they flee Afghanistan entirely some months later as the Russian invasion leads the country into instability and turmoil.  In the United States, they move to San Francisco, and find their place among a variety of other Afghani immigrants that had fled the country under similar circumstances.  

They live a life of poverty and struggle, as Amir takes up schooling to become a writer, while Baaba takes minimum wage shifts at a gas station, all the while fighting off lung cancer, which he resists modern medicine to address.  Despite this, there are good times to be had, the highlight coming in the form of Soraya, an Afghani general’s daughter that Amir befriends and eventually receives the blessing to marry, as they live in a state of relative tranquility until it is that Baaba eventually succumbs to his ailments.  Some time after the funeral, Amir receives a call from Rahim Khan; a plea of sorts, as well as tragic news, as it is discovered that Hassan, who goes on to have a family and life of his own, is slaughtered by the taliban who now rule over Afghanistan, and additionally, requests for Amir to fly to Afghanistan to adopt his only living child, this being Sohrab, who is, according to Khan, technically Amir’s nephew.  

Within the exert presented, coming toward the end of the novel, after Amir has the epiphany regarding his mismanagement of grief, as well as his way forward.  He uses personification to describe the emotion of grief as a tangible being that one may attempt to bury alive, however it’s persevering and overcoming nature enables it to dig itself out of the pit it may have been placed in.  This is to say that, in terms of Amir’s headspace, no matter how hard he tries to distract himself from grief, it inevitably keeps returning to him, and some aspects of the past, the ones that matter, the ones that matter and you know matter due to the fact that no matter how you force yourself to forget, you can’t help but continue to materialize in your mind these recollections of anguish and suffering.  The memories that stick with you are those that have never been reconciled, replicated, nor resolved, and in the case of Amir and The Kite Runner, this hypothesis is proven to be true.

This quote comes immediately after Hassan describes a dream to Amir in which they’d heroically dived into a lake, foretold to be infested with horrific and terrifying creatures of the lagoon, only to come to the discovery that there had been none to begin with.  Hassan, in one sense, describes the duo as so called “riders on the storm,” two fearless compatriots who brave the excursions that others cannot, however Hosseini uses metaphor within the quote to describe that, even then, Amir had harbored intense feelings of guilt, going on to directly compare himself to the beast within the water, as Hassan had been under the false pretense that Amir had a sincere and genuine desire to serve and treasure Hassan as a friend, when, in reality, not only was this untrue, for the situation at hand was one that directly contradicted Hassan’s presumption. 

Within this simile, the main external antagonist of the novel, Assef, is described to seem as though he was a “Khan,” when on tour through the neighborhood, meaning that he maintained the aura and dominant presence of a chief, even early on into his youth.  The simile was implemented likely as a means of emphasizing the authoritative, somewhat malevolent presence that Assef held in high esteem over the other children, thus foreshadowing the character’s oppressive and antagonistic qualities.