Boy Overboard

Jamal’s younger sister and the central character aside from himself, Bibi is decidedly less accommodating and more combative than her brother. Nine years old at the novel’s start, Bibi shows herself to be a prodigy at soccer, even though she has rarely been able to practice due to the Taliban’s laws against girls or women engaging in sports or other outdoor activities. Determined to play soccer nonetheless, she disguises herself as a boy and easily outperforms Jamal and the others. Bibi also shows a fearless boisterousness that would get her in serious trouble with the Taliban were she not in a male disguise, as when she throws rocks at trucks and tanks, kicks adults who annoy her, and makes colorful invectives, e.g., “You squishy lumps of camel snot!” (10). Her combative behavior is never mean-spirited but is always in the cause of justice, as she sees it. However, her recklessness is a constant source of danger to herself and stress for her brother, as when she runs into a danger zone near the children’s soccer pitch and steps on a mine. Impulsive and highly emotional, she often leaps before she looks or thinks: After Jamal has taken her place on the mine, which could explode at any sudden motion, she refuses to leave him, instead jumping on him in a violent embrace. (Luckily, the mine is a dud.)

Though less trusting of strangers than Jamal, she shares much of his optimism, including his grandiose ambitions of soccer stardom, which, for her, has the additional incentive of proving that girls can be great athletes as well. She also seems more studious than her brother, who notes that she often gets caught up in “debate” in the classroom, while his own mind strays to sports. Much of her bold behavior, which is more aggressive than her brother’s, seems driven by her anger over the injustice of the Taliban government’s subjugation of women and girls. Her own athletic prowess, which surpasses that of the boys in her neighborhood, is the clearest proof to her that girls can do whatever boys can. Impulsively, she demonstrates this prowess whenever she feels slighted, often by giving her brother’s soccer ball a prodigious kick, which sometimes leads to trouble, as when she kicks the ball toward an army tank or into the sea. As such, Bibi helps drive the narrative through the crises that she causes because of her high-spiritedness and passion for justice.

The habitually “gloomy-looking” Omar is a boy whom Jamal first meets at the crowded refugee camp where his family is awaiting transport to Australia. He attaches himself to Jamal while scrounging for money and other valuables: First, he asks for money for a bottle of water; then, he tries to steal Jamal’s soccer ball; and finally, he demands a dollar to show Jamal the way back to his family. His acquisitiveness and gloom are later somewhat explained by the revelation that his parents died when he was two years old. Jamal notes that Omar is strong for his size and naïvely attributes his glum manner to the possibility that he’s a goalkeeper. Omar, having had a harder life than Jamal, lacks much of his optimism and always expects things to go badly. For instance, when pirates invade their boat en route to Australia, he claims, “I knew this would happen” (141). His ill temper also takes the form of spiteful remarks to others, as when he tells Rashida that her parents are “horrible” for giving her a male name. As an orphan, he might resent the fact that others have parents and assume the worst about them out of “sour grapes.”

Despite his initial self-centeredness and brusque, morose personality, Omar eventually befriends Jamal, Bibi, and Rashida. When the pirates come onto the boat, he saves Bibi by restraining her when she tries to attack them. Moreover, Omar’s down-to-earth (if disenchanted) perspective allows him to grasp certain things before Jamal and Bibi do; for instance, he sees at once that an approaching craft is not the missing refugee boat but a storage tank. He also absorbs that the camp where they are being held is not in Australia but on a distant island. As such, he helps to ground Jamal, serving as a sobering corrective to his rosy worldview. In turn, Jamal’s family and Rashida, through their kindness and optimism, help soften Omar’s cynicism and self-contempt. Eventually, Omar tells Jamal that his own ancestors were neither warriors nor bakers but “thieves,” which could partly explain his poor self-image. However, Omar, Jamal reflects, has shown himself to be heroic, too: “Omar might think he’s a thief, but it’s never that simple” (172).