A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini

It was 6:30 am when I finished the last page. I haven't read a book in one setting for a long time, yet I kept flipping the pages, kept thinking to myself, "when does the suffering end?" The book centers on the lives of two women, Mariam and Laila, brought together by the raging civil war during early 1990s and in the iron-fisted reign of Taliban throughout the 90s. Mariam and Laila couldn't be more different in every aspect of their upbringing, and they would have never cross paths in any normal circumstances. Yet war made everyone equal, just as insignificant, trapping them both in loveless marriages with a shared vile husband.

Hosseini is a master story teller, and I was gripped from chapter one about Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a rich and powerful man Jalil and his former housekeeper Nana. She and her mother were cast out of Jalil's rich house and lived in a hut at the edge of the town Herat built by Jalil and his sons. Mariam's half-brothers delivered supplies to the hut on a weekly basis. Once a week, Mariam's father visited her. Three straight facts yet skewed in two polarized opinions by Mariam and Nana. Mariam loved her father deeply and unreservedly. Everyday of her life was either a prelude or a postmortem to Jalil's visits. In her eyes, Jalil was cheerful, encouraging, loving, neat, appreciative, resourceful, educated, magnanimous; to sum it up, everything her mother was not. Nana loved Mariam in her own crude way, impudently dispensing facts that behind all his visits, cheap gifts, made-up stories, Jalil was ashamed of them both. Mariam grew to doubt everything Nana said about Jalil, trying desperately to see things from Jalil's perspective, and dreaming one day she would return to the big house with all of her half-siblings. Hosseini painted Mariam's hopes so intensely yet delicately and tinged with traces of sadness; one cannot help but pray that Mariam's wish would one day come true.

The truth came crashing down on Mariam's 15th birthday when she came face-to-face with her father's cowardice and her mother's ultimate revenge for her betrayal, suicide. Mariam's rosy-colored dreams were popped one by one, and the bleak reality set in. Mariam, at 15 years of age, was abandoned by both her birth parents. As if things couldn't get any worse, fifteen was considered a solid age to get married, and Jalil and his three wives couldn't act faster shipping her off with a 45-year-old custom shoe maker Rasheed to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan 600 kilometers from Hera. I will steer clear of the main plot but suffice it to say, Mariam ended up in nightmare of a marriage, stretching over 27 years, filled with endless chores, contempt, violence, ridicule, hopes raised and pulverized. As life can always play the master of Irony, what sustained Mariam for all those years was endurance, the most important lesson her mother taught her.

Laila came into Mariam's life after her parents were killed in a bomb attack on the eve of their departing Kabul. From the privileged daughter of a university professor to an orphan dug out of rubbles and ruins, pregnant with her lover's child, Laila found herself a new addition to the oppressed Rasheed household and the enemy of the silent Mariam. Their relationship started out hostile, gradually turned into mutual understanding, then to a deep mother-daughter companionship. Laila and her daughter Aziza may well be the reward for all Mariam's years of suffering and endurance. Mariam finally found friendship, trust and love in the most unexpected corners of her world.

The book is divided into four parts, first on Mariam, second on Laila, third on their lives together with Rasheed, and the last on Laila again. Clearly Mariam and Laila are facets of the old and present day Afghanistan. While Laila lost everyone in her own family, survived years of war and a murderous former husband to return to Kabul, she was young, headstrong and idealistic. In her one can see a renewed Afghanistan.

Mariam was executed by the Taliban for her selfless act of defense. However I believe Hosseini has instilled much more hope and respect in the character of Mariam. Her uncompromising dignity and fortitude were far beyond her years of endurance and unspoken grievance. She was "a woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her." Life had not been fair to her, but she was always fair to her adversaries. She stared them square in the eye and meant every one of her words. When she was fifteen years old, Jalil was seeing her off with her husband, biding his time and masking his shame and cowardice behind trite and insincere pleasantries. She stopped him mid-sentence and told him her deep love for him before, and the disappointment she felt. Jalil, one of the richest and most powerful men in Herat, startled by her forthrightness, stammered like a child caught red handed, couldn't look up to her fearless face. Her determined farewell, as he would realize thirteen years later, was for life. When Rasheed turned into a maniacal monster, devoured by rage, at the verge of taking Laila's life, she said his name, giving Rasheed a fair chance to see what hit him, quite literally. She had been cast under the spell of misery from birth, mistreated by her mother, betrayed by her father, deprived of the privilege of education, victimized by her husband, and robbed of the ability to produce children. Jalil's last letter to Mariam before his death brought me to tears. He asked for her forgiveness and prayed for her,

"May God grant you a long and prosperous life, my daughter. May God give you many healthy and beautiful children. May you find the happiness, peace and acceptance that I did not give you. Be well. I leave you in the loving hands of God."

Jalil was not a bad man, only weak, and his weakness almost destroyed Mariam. At exact opposite sides of her father's wishes, Mariam did not have a long and prosperous life, no children of her own, only misery, fear and resentment for most part of her life, but she did find happiness, peace and acceptance in the end. When she was walking to meet her executioners, she lingered briefly the thought of a little more time in this world, she was overwhelmed by the abundant peace she felt.

"She thought of her entry into this 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."

Mariam's indomitable, incorruptible spirit are in the core of Afghanistan, a country, a culture that cannot and will not be forced into silence and deterioration after more than thirty years of destruction of wars. That is Hosseini's intention clearly. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, he dutifully chronicled the last thirty years of Afghanistan's tumultuous history, precise to the dates sometimes. One might wonder if this might be too much for a fiction. After the success of the Kite Runner, Hosseini was named a U.S. envoy to UNHCR, The United Nations Refugee Agency in 2006. The significance of his books does not stop at bestselling works of fiction; it is meant also to illuminate and broaden the views on millions of people of Afghanistan and other war ravaged countries. Prior to the Kite Runner, Afghanistan was a vague geographic reference in my mind, beleaguered by the mention of the Taliban and Bin Laden. However in Hosseini's books, in his punctilious documentation of the political events, his detailed depictions of daily lives, rituals, and traditions, his heart wrenching account of ordinary people's sufferings and losses, Afghanistan and its people have come to live, and we, sitting at safe corners of the world, would be temporarily transported to a witness ordinary people's triumph over violence and oppression as history unfolds itself.