Homayoun

Homayoun, whom Amir addresses as Kaka Homayoun, is Baba's second cousin and a fixture of the extended family gatherings that punctuated Amir's childhood in Kabul. A man who studied engineering in France, Homayoun returned to Afghanistan with a projector and a house in Jalalabad, and he appears in the narrative primarily as a host and a link to the dense web of relatives that defined Afghan social life before the war. His presence in the story serves as a marker of the communal, obligation-bound world that Amir and Baba fled, and his eventual absence from Amir's American life underscores the loss of that world.

Identity and Background

Homayoun is introduced as Baba's second cousin, a man who studied engineering in France and later owned a white, two-story house in Jalalabad with a balcony overlooking a large, walled garden filled with apple and persimmon trees. The garden featured hedges that the gardener shaped like animals in the summer, and a swimming pool with emerald-colored tiles. Homayoun had two wives—the pinch-faced older one with warts on her hands and the younger one who always smelled of perfume and danced with her eyes closed—and twin daughters, Fazila and Karima, whom Amir could never tell apart. He also had two sons, who dined with Amir and Baba during the Jalalabad trip. Ten years after returning from Paris, Homayoun was still showing slides of France to anyone who would watch, a detail that suggests both his pride in his European education and his inability to fully reintegrate into Afghan life.

Role in the Narrative

Homayoun's most significant appearance occurs during a family trip to Jalalabad that Baba organized shortly after the 1975 kite tournament. What Amir had hoped would be a private outing with his father quickly ballooned into a caravan of three vans filled with relatives, including Homayoun, his two wives, his twin daughters, and, through a chain of invitations, cousins Shafiqa, Nader, and Faruq, along with their families. The trip, which should have been a chance for Amir to bask in his victory and his newfound closeness with Baba, instead became a suffocating exercise in social performance. Homayoun's wives clapped and praised Amir for winning the tournament, and Baba, who had had a few scotches, dominated the room with his booming voice, recounting the story of the kite fight again and again. Amir, sick with guilt over what he had allowed to happen to Hassan, felt like sticking a knife in his eye. Later that night, unable to sleep, Amir sat by the pool and whispered to no one, "I watched Hassan get raped," hoping someone would wake up and hear, but no one did. The Jalalabad trip thus becomes a crucible of Amir's guilt, and Homayoun's house—with its pool, its projector, and its crowded rooms—is the stage on which that guilt festers.

Thematic Significance

Homayoun represents the extended family structure that was central to Afghan identity in the pre-war era, a structure built on obligation, gossip, and the constant presence of relatives. When Amir and Baba flee to America, that structure collapses. In Fremont, Baba mourns the loss of the communal life he once had—the people who knew him and his father, who shared ancestors with him, whose pasts intertwined with his. Homayoun, like the house in Wazir Akbar Khan and the pomegranate tree on the hill, becomes a symbol of a world that no longer exists. The last time Amir thinks of Homayoun's house is when he visits Baba's old home in Kabul in 2001 and sees an old hand-pump water well in the yard, which reminds him of the well at Homayoun's Jalalabad house where he and the twin girls used to drop pebbles and listen for the plink. That memory, fleeting and bittersweet, is all that remains of a man who once filled three vans with relatives and showed slides of France to anyone who would watch.