Tori’s Comments (group member since Jan 30, 2010)

Tori’s comments from the MHSHS Reading Group group.

I think that Baba began to atone for his sins after letting Hassan go. Hassan is his son, not Ali’s, for he slept with Ali’s at-the-time wife Sanaubar to give him a child. By doing so, he performed a sin that Baba couldn’t accept: robbing a man of the truth. By not telling Hassan and Amir that they were half-brothers, he was hiding the truth from them and felt guilty. He made strong attempts to be redeemed afterwards. He built an orphanage and gave money to homeless people. Other instances where he had more openly shown the desire to redeem himself), is how he treated Hassan and Amir differently. Amir, who struggled to be the man Baba wanted him to be, noticed this. Amir told of how Baba never forgot Hassan’s birthday and paid for surgery to fix Hassan’s cleft lip.

After Ali and Hassan left the safety of Baba’s house from “not feeling safe”, his road to redemption seemed to pick up speed. When crossing borders out of Kabul to America, Baba stands up for a woman who is commanded out of the truck by Russian soldiers. Then and there, staring down a soldier’s gun, he felt he was ready to be redeemed. In America, the powerful man got a job at a 24-hour gas station and missed not one day until his smoking days(back in Kabul, “fattening his pipe”) catch up with him and he gets cancer.

Although he spent a good part of his life, if not all of it, trying to redeem himself, I don’t think he fully accomplished his goal. He, unfortunately, died before telling Hassan that he was his biological father. In my opinion, to be redeemed, you must receive forgiveness. Or at least make it known to the person, the sin they’ve committed to them.