The Hindu Business Line : A thousand heartbreaks

In seven months since its publication, millions of women, particularly in Islamic countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Arab world, who would have chanced upon these words immortalised in Khaled Hosseini’s second brilliant novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (Bloomsbury Publishing), would have been captivated by their import. The words are spoken by Nana, to her little daughter Mariam, who barely understands their impact then.

Like his first novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini’s second novel too is set in Afghanistan and traverses a 45-year period, beginning in the pre-Soviet era. The story is so powerful, its characters Mariam and Laila so real, that you feel their anguish and pain, smile with them during their lighter moments and fear for their future.

Hosseini writes in an engaging and evocative style that makes it impossible to put down the book. Easily one of the best reads of 2007.

His first novel established the author’s credentials as a gripping storyteller; like a thriller his plot takes strange twists and turns that drastically alter the lives of his central characters and remind you of the strong undercurrent of irony that runs through the world of Thomas Hardy’s protagonists.

In A Thousand Splendid Suns too, which is essentially the story of Mariam and Laila, the two women come so tantalisingly close to attaining their hopes and dramatically altering their lives. But as you wait with bated breath, a little quirk of fate or a roadblock sends them packing back to their miserable lives.

Mariam and Laila come together as adversaries, after all which woman would embrace another who enters her house as the second wife? But the beautiful teenaged Laila has her own compulsions to marry Rasheed. Fifteen years earlier, Mariam, barely 15 then, is compelled to marry the 45-year-old Rasheed, who subjects her to untold misery and physical torture.

Mariam is a harami, a bastard child, and discovers this harsh fact about her life at the age of five from her own mother. Her father Jalil is a rich businessman and she dotes on him. On her 15th birthday she tries to force her way into his house with several wives and their legitimate children. Her penalty for this sin is that her mother Nana hangs herself and Jalil’s wives quickly get rid of the unwanted girl by marrying her to the much older Rasheed.

Mariam settles into a loveless existence with Rasheed, and slowly comes to terms with the barren truth of her life after several miscarriages, a good enough handle for her cruel husband to torture her for the flimsiest of reasons. Like when Rasheed is unhappy with the softness of the rice and forces into her mouth pebbles and grit and makes her chew them. As her tears flow and a couple of teeth break, he says: “Good. Now you know what your rice tastes like. Now you know what you’ve given me in this marriage. Bad food and nothing else.”

Into this troubled world walks the hapless Laila after a stray rocket kills her parents, just as they had decided to leave the war and violence-torn Afghanistan and cross over to Pakistan, from where American shores beckon. Her house is turned into rubble and the girl buried underneath is dug out by her neighbour Rasheed. After she is nursed back to health, he tricks the young girl into marrying him.

Beginning as adversaries, the two women soon come closer, particularly after Laila delivers a girl child, Aziza, and Mariam’s hopeless existence gets a reason to live and love. Towards the latter half, Mariam and Laila become soulmates, and Aziza becomes the daughter Mariam never had. The story of Afghanistan’s devastation, the people’s initial celebrations when the Taliban arrive and the horror story that unfolds, particularly for Afghani women, is related through their eyes.

As things get tougher and the family of four gets an addition in the form of Zalmai, the son Rasheed always wanted and dotes on, he suggests that Aziza be converted into a street beggar. After being beaten to pulp for resisting, Laila ultimately decides to take Aziza to an orphanage. The description of what transpires at such orphanages, where several parents are forced to leave their kids, is heartrending.

The Afghan-American Hosseini’s fierce love for his country and his anguish and anger at the battering and destruction of Afghanistan by the various forces that fished in its troubled waters over the years comes through forcefully.

Mariam and Laila are at the receiving end of injustice and brutal violence most of the time, and things get worse for Afghan women during the Taliban era, when girls are forcibly pulled out of schools, women from jobs, and many of them end up begging on the streets. But the author tells us, through Laila’s father Babi, that there was an era when Afghan women enjoyed privileges and equality.

The strong gender theme in A Thousand Splendid Suns and the manner in which the characters of Laila and Mariam were evolved is best explained through the author’s words. In an interview posted on the Bloomsbury Web site Hosseini admits that writing from a female perspective had daunted him at first. He had grappled consciously with the notion that a woman inhabits a different social and emotional arena, and her experiences and emotions of the world around her is different to that of a man. But he soon realised that man or woman, the author has to know “the core” of his characters. Once he was sure of this, the rest followed to create “truthful and authentic” sketches of the two principal female characters.

So were these real women, was the obvious question. “Largely they are drawn from my imagination and from the women I saw and met in Kabul back in 2003 (which he visited after 27 years). I remember seeing these burqa-clad women sitting at street corners, with four, five, six children, begging for change. I remember seeing them walking in pairs up the street, trailed by their children in ragged clothes, and wondering how life had brought them to that point. Did they have dreams, hopes, longings? Had they been in love? Who were their husbands? What had they lost, whom had they lost, in the wars that plagued Afghanistan for two decades?”

These questions haunted him everytime he saw these burqa-clad women, and he thought probably each of these women had a real story that was worthy of a novel.

And surely in real life, many of these stories ended in tragedy as the Taliban stoned to death women who had broken their laws and were guilty in their judgement. Women who had dared to hope and aspire in a male-dominated society. Just as Mariam had done.

Mariam wishes for much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into the world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings.

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A thousand heartbreaks