A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini) - Do you have the guts to read this?

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

There is a genre of books that traces the ravages of history and events on ordinary people's lives. We read of the event in history or follow it in the news cycles, but it is through these stories, that we understand how ordinary lives change and get suck into the vortex of history. A Thousand Splendid Suns brings to us the lives of people who live through a nation's becoming and unbecoming. It is painful and glorious, disturbing and satisfying, terrifying and hopeful all at once.

The book, with a poetic title (A Thousand Splendid Suns - I cant say it enough times!) traces the lives of two women - Mariam and Laila through the bloody and painful history of Afghanistan in the decades from 1959 to early 2000. Mariam is the illegitimate child of a rich man in Herat. She is brought up by her mother in a small kolba in the outskirts of the city, that her father provides for her mother and she. He meets her every week and brings trinkets to assuage his guilt, which the child mistakes for real fatherly affection. After her mother dies by suicide when Mariam is 15, her father and is three wives conspire to get her married to a middle aged widower from Kabul. From here, Mariam's life goes through some meagre happy moments to largely abusive, neglected, traumatic years. As a backdrop to her life, Afghanistan goes through political turmoil, Russian backed communism, the mujahideen and then the Talibani take over. 

Laila is a happy teenager with a loving but troubled family and a best friend in Tariq. Her father wants her to study and believes she has the ability to change the world. Sadly, one day, a rocket attack kills her family and makes her an orphan. Mariam's husband Jalil, brings the barely teenaged Laila home and then marries her, hoping she would give him a son, something Mariam has not been able to do all these years. Slowly the women who are about 20 years apart in age, overcome their distaste for each other and come together as only women can, sharing their burdens and being each other's pillars of support in an otherwise miserable existence. Till politics, religious fanaticism, occupying forces and the return of a childhood friend puts everything in a churn again. It is a gripping story, one in which, at every page, one hopes that the two women get a respite, find an escape, catch a break.

This book deals with a difficult subject of women's lives in a religious fanatic society that treats them as chattel. The physical domestic violence is extremely disturbing and keeps a pall of gloom in the book throughout. Hosseini deals with it sensitively, showing us the horror without getting into gory detail and description. All the characters, the major ones as well as the minor ones are fleshed out thoroughly and brought into the story with a purpose. The camaraderie, friendship and finally the love between Mariam and Laila, is beautifully portrayed. For Mariam, Laila is the daughter she was never able to have. For Laila, Mariam is the mother she always yearned for. Each of them had difficult relationships with their own mothers, and their love for each other and the ultimate sacrifice at the end, is a reflection of their struggles from when they were little girls.

Hosseini writes as a woman would write and that is the biggest compliment I can think of for him. He can put into beautiful words a woman's helplessness, a mother's pain and desperation. Many lines in the book had me shook and some made me tear up. Here are a few.

Let me tell you something. A man's heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn't like a mother's womb. It won't bleed, it won't stretch to make room for you. 

Like a compass needle that points North, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman.

And the past held only this wisdom : that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion

When it came to fathers, Mariam had no assurances to give.

Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person had to face none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that is she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her. 

People, she believed, shouldn't be allowed to have new children if they'd already given away all their love to their older ones. It wasn't fair.

She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all sighs drifted up, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. 

Though Hosseini ends the book with a glimmer of hope, the events after 2001 in Afghanistan (where the book ends), tell us that the Mariams and Lailas in the country continue their struggle for respect, freedom, education, basic rights and there has been no respite for them.       

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