In Khaled Hosseini's novel, "And the Mountains Echoed," there is a strong sense of family themes and true good-heartedness placed in several relationships throughout the book. The relations of strong family ties in this book form a celebration of family and affirms the absolute best in humanity.
The first relationship that Hosseini puts forward is a brother and sister named Abdullah and Pari. This relationship is first introduced in chapter two of the novel. Pari has a strong admiration of her brother Abdullah. Within their relationship, a very important symbol appears within their actions. Abdullah had given Pari an old tin box for her to store feathers of birds that they had found or collected over the years together. Abdullah knew how much the feathers meant to Pari, so at one point he even traded a pair of shoes just to get Pari a peacock feather. The relationship between Abdullah and Pari somewhat goes dormant when Pari is sold to the Wahdati family. It is not until the end of the novel that we see the true emotional attachment that Pari truly has for that metal tin. After years of not seeing Abdullah, they finally meet back up. Nothing seemed to be going as well as planned, as at one point, Abdullah actually accuses Pari of a thief, and doubts the fact of her being his true sister.
When Pari, the younger one, presents Abdullah's sister Pari with the old metal tin, she is in disbelief and begins going through the tin looking at all of the feathers. In the last couple pages of the book, Pari comes to realize how much she really meant to Abdullah, making several quotes about him, such as "when we lost each other, Abdullah and I, it hurt him much more than it hurt me" (419). This quote shows that she truly did not know that he cared for her so much, especially since she was still young when she was sold away, so the memories were pretty vague, but for Abdullah, he had to go through all of the grief.
