A Thousand Splendid Suns

Written by Khaled Hosseini and spanning over a period of thirty years, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is about two women, whose lives begin to entwine in the most unrelenting circumstances.

Mariam, an illegitimate child of a wealthy man, lives with her rather bitter mother near the city of Herat, Afghanistan. Despite her mother's repeated warnings and insistence that her father, Jalil, will never accept her as his daughter, as he does the children of his three wives, Mariam grows up believing in him. He visits every week, tells her stories, talks to her about the city and the country. He is Mariam's only connection to the rest of the world. But her faith in him is misplaced as he proves to be everything her mother said he was. The simple act of not showing up on her birthday to take her to watch Pinnochio and then refusing to see her when she goes to his house destroys Mariam's life. Essentially. She is married off to a much older shoe maker who takes her away to Kabul where Mariam gives up all of her hopes and dreams and begins life as young girl resigned to the will and fancy of her husband. Mariam miscarries eight times and Rasheed, her husband, becomes more aggressive and loathsome.

On the same street that Mariam lives, a young girl, Laila. This fair headed beauty is the daughter of former school teacher who believes that giving his daughter an education is the most important gift he can give her. She grows up an intelligent child with high aspirations. She falls in love with her closest childhood friend, Tariq. But as fate would have it, and as we know from the history of Afghanistan (through the 70's to the early 2000's), war comes to Kabul and tears them and their families apart. It is at this point that Laila's life inadvertently crosses into Mariam's.

The two women are thrown together unwillingly. One, trying to make the best of the given situation, and the other, resentful of her whole life from the moment she refused to trust her mother. Mariam is always the 'hag' and Laila, the 'flower'. But their personalities rise and come to each other's aid and defense when the need calls. Mariam finally finds herself being cared for. She begins to love and be loved. She earns the respect she once longed for and knows, for once, what true happiness is supposed to feel like.

Laila, on the other hand, sees suffering and finds the courage to stand up for her own and for someone else. She fights for life.

We've all known what life must've been for the simple men and women of Afghanistan through all the battles and wars that raged in the country over the course of several decades, with just a few breaths of respite. Families torn apart, uprooted... fleeing their homeland because it was no longer safe to even step out of their houses. Rules imposed upon them by near tyrannical political conditions of the time. It's just so starkly startling through Hosseini's words.

The stories are heart-wrenching and pitiable. You wonder how people even lived in such conditions. Robbed of their own free will and forced to live their lives as dictated by others. Beaten up and punished for the smallest of issues, which free nations take for granted - because it is a thing we are entitled to.

This novel gets to you. Told from the perspective of women, it is feminist. But it is also honest. It doesn't blaspheme men. Not all of them. Just those that mindlessly follow. There are the stronger ones that play vital roles in shaping the women and help them. But it is still so very terrible to imagine that all of this is reality for someone in some part of the world.

I thought it might take me longer than three days to finish this novel, but it was so captivating. The voices of the two women in this novel. It speaks of the love of one's country and the necessity to feel the connection with it. It speaks of closure and forgiveness in the simplest of terms. Of love, of companionship and of desperation to be free. To do something good. To provide for and be cared about. It talks of hope. That everything that happens happens because of some larger plan. It talks of never losing faith, because that is what, in the end, sustains you and keeps the fire burning.

I was already drawn by the title of the book (taken from a line in Saib Tabrizi's poem Kabul) before I even began reading it.

Every street of Kabul is enthralling to the eye

Through the bazaars, caravans of Egypt pass

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs

And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls