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Sanaubar, Ali’s wife and Hassan’s estranged mother, is incredibly beautiful and spoken of widely by the men in the village. She is described as an unscrupulous temptress, and she’s rumored to live up to her dishonorable reputation. Despite her outward beauty, she is cruel, cold, and selfish when the reader first meets her. She joined the neighborhood kids in tormenting Ali when they were growing up together, a cruelty that she bestows upon Hassan at his birth, referring to him as an idiot and refusing even to hold him. Her character is minor in appearance, but she serves to further establish the social, cultural, and economic gulf that separates Amir and Hassan. She and Amir’s mother also begin as foil characters of sorts. Where Amir’s mother is painted as the picture of virtue and class, Sanaubar is disgrace, dishonor, and shame–characteristics that she diverges from as the novel progresses.
Though she is a minor character, she is integral to the story, and one of the most poignant representations of an important theme in the novel: redemption. Perhaps most notably, she is representative of the very clear thread of redemption sewn by Hosseini through the pages of this book. While she leaves Hassan motherless for the majority of his life, she returns to him in his adulthood. Having been severely mauled and disfigured, her outward beauty is just a shadow of what it once was. Her inward beauty, however, is radiant and lovely–she has been utterly transformed by the harshness of life, the evils of war, and the weight and pain of a life lived in regret. Because of Hassan’s beautiful heart and willingness to forgive the years of abandonment, they enjoy four happy years together as mother and son. She is even responsible for delivering Sohrab into the world. The cruel and uncaring siren of the past has been transformed into a loving, devoted, attentive, and selfless woman– she is redemption personified.
