winter of 1964

The winter of 1964 marks the birth of Hassan, a moment that quietly determines the emotional and social architecture of the household in Wazir Akbar Khan. Hassan is born in the servants' mud hut, a modest structure in the shadow of a loquat tree, while Amir, the son of the master, is born in the same year in the sprawling mansion just a few yards away. The coincidence of their births—Amir's mother dying in childbirth, Hassan's mother abandoning him within a week—creates a parallel that the novel will return to again and again: two boys, born under the same roof, fed by the same wet nurse, yet separated by an unbridgeable gulf of class and legitimacy.

Birth and Immediate Abandonment

Hassan is born on a cold winter day in 1964 in the small shack that serves as his father Ali's home. The birth is a simple affair, attended only by Ali and a midwife; no obstetricians or anesthesiologists are present. Sanaubar, Hassan's mother, lies on a stained, naked mattress and delivers him with little difficulty. The midwife later reports that Hassan emerges smiling, a detail that becomes emblematic of his nature: he is incapable of hurting anyone. But Sanaubar takes one glance at the baby's cleft lip, barks a bitter laugh, and refuses to hold him. "There," she says, "now you have your own idiot child to do all your smiling for you!" Within five days, she elopes with a clan of traveling singers and dancers, a fate most Afghans consider far worse than death. Hassan never speaks of her, as if she never existed, though Amir wonders whether he dreams of her or longs to meet her.

The Parallel Birth of Amir

Amir is born just one year before Hassan, in 1963, in the same household. His mother, Sofia Akrami, a highly educated woman and a descendant of the royal family, dies from hemorrhaging during his birth. This loss haunts Amir throughout his childhood; he comes to believe that Baba secretly hates him for killing his beloved wife. The two boys, then, are both motherless from the start—Amir through death, Hassan through abandonment—yet their circumstances could not be more different. Amir grows up in the marble-floored mansion with a crystal chandelier and gold-stitched tapestries, while Hassan lives in the spare, dimly lit mud hut with only a worn Herati rug and a three-legged stool.

Shared Nurture and First Words

Baba hires the same nursing woman who had fed Amir to nurse Hassan. She is a blue-eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan, the city of the giant Buddha statues, with a sweet singing voice. Ali tells the boys that there is a brotherhood between people who have fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time can break. Hassan and Amir take their first steps on the same lawn in the same yard, and under the same roof they speak their first words. Amir's first word is "Baba"; Hassan's first word is "Amir"—his master's name. Looking back as an adult, Amir reflects that the foundation for everything that happened in the winter of 1975—and all that followed—was already laid in those first words.

Narrative Significance

The winter of 1964 establishes the central irony of the novel: two boys, bound by blood and shared nurture, are separated by the rigid hierarchies of ethnicity, religion, and class. Hassan's birth in the servants' quarters and his mother's flight prefigure his lifelong role as the loyal but ultimately expendable servant. Amir's birth, shadowed by his mother's death, creates the emotional void that drives his desperate need for Baba's approval. The season itself—winter—becomes the novel's dominant temporal motif, recurring at every major crisis: the kite tournament of 1975, the assault in the alley, and finally the redemptive kite flying in Fremont. The winter of 1964 is the first flake in that accumulating snow.