BEAUTY lies in the eyes of the beholder, goes the famous saying. All literature attempts to capture beauty and define it in its own style. The one thing that a good book does to its readers is to transport them to a parallel universe, a different land altogether. Almost always, however, the `visual beauty' is just a background to the story, just a `setting' for the events to unfold.

There are a few exceptions to this, though. I can think of a couple of books where beauty is a pronounced entity in itself, weaving in and out of the story, adding to the emotions it elicits. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner -- debut novels both -seem perfect examples of this to me.

Roy's book is an obvious visual delight, brimming over with details of Ayemenem, the Meenachal river, the History House, and "Paradise pickles and preserves". All of them have their roles to play, not as mute backgrounds, but as active participants: the river, which pretended to be "a little old church-going amooma, quiet and calm", but was really "a wild thing" that "drank brandy and whiskey", about which no one knew "what it may snatch or suddenly yield".

It overturned and swallowed the delicate Sophie Mol, sealing the fates of all the others in the process. The beauty in Hosseini's work is much less defined, but equally pronounced nonetheless. The pomegranate tree of "Amir and Hassan: The sultans of Kabul", the Kite-studded skies of an Afghanistan in happier times, the forgotten smell of lamb-kabob in the streets. For a generation to which Afghanistan represented visions of gun-toting Taliban, blown-up housed and one-legged children, the novel brings a surprising awareness of the everyday beauty that flourished there, once upon a not-sodistant time.

The striking thing in both these works is that beauty is linked to pain. In The God of Small Things, pain is a thrashing, shrieking creature. Like Ammu, the divorced mother-of-twins, and Velutha, the untouchable-turned-comrade, who pay the price of breaking the love laws, pain here has a rebellious quality. It is not just the agony of the characters, but the agony inflicted by history on generations through caste-codes and love laws. It is accentuated by the beauty in the surroundings -Chappu Thamburan, the little spider that Ammu and Velutha fretted over, but which outlived Velutha and "died of natural causes".

Unlike this solid, imposing pain, in The Kite Runner it flows silently, unobtrusively from end to end. Like its principal characters -- Amir and Hassan, one who can't muster up courage to speak out and the other a stoic who would never cry aloud -- pain doesn't stand out but quietly pervades the story. In the drops of blood falling on the snow as Hassan walks away from his molesters; in the lost sweetness that Amir tries to find on his return to Jalalabad; in the beggar on the streets who taught Sufi poetry at the University before the advent of the Taliban; in the colourful kites that become Amir's nemesis, pain is all-pervasive and furthered by descriptions of beauty.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever, they say. What these stories make you realise is that beauty can also hold pain forever.