When Fiction Haunts

I read “The Prince of Tides” a long, long time ago.

I read “The God of Small Things” a long time ago.

I read “The Kite Runner” not so long ago.

And now my thoughts are again haunting me. Nothing significant to attach the novels in my personal life… but for some reason, I am deeply disturbed by the one event common to these three novels.

The boys in these novels were sexually abused when they were kids. The boys of “The Prince of Tides” and “The God of Small Things” expectedly grew up haunted by their past. The raped boy in “The Kite Runner” didn’t. Well, the reader was not privy to the emotions of Hassan, the boy who was raped but he ended up having a wife and a son so I, as the reader, could only assume he led a normal, happy life of a slave (he belongs to the Hazara tribe of Afghanistan). Instead, the reader was drawn to the guilt of Amir who witnessed the rape with cowardice.

How could these novels affect me this much the thought gives me creeps? Yes, even in the middle of the night, no kidding. Superior writing by Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides), Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) and Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), the novels will definitely be in my memory longer than I would want them to be.