KOCHI: Sounds of shots firing and lashes meeting flesh; bodies hanging for even minute crimes! Women under the feet of men and an extremist regime that is founding itself on the destruction of cities and structures. There is horror and pain everywhere. This is the Afghanistan where Mariam and Laila lived and found rare friendship and later escaped from.
‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ by Khaled Hosseini, his second novel, gut-wrenchingly opens up the hitherto unknown lives of Afghani people, especially women, to the world. A country reeling under the horrors of Taliban and two women who found themselves “lower than house cats”. Set in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan the book follows Mariam and Laila as they suffer through war, bullets, death, Taliban extremists, poverty and domestic abuse.
The book starts from nine-year-old Mariam’s perspective, a child out of wedlock. At 15, she was wedded to a much older man, Rasheed, who at first appearance seems kind until her many miscarriages. Mariam was afraid. “She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not.”
Her life from Herat to Kabul was described without glossing over any details, without unnecessary descriptions in the fast-paced narration.Then appears Laila, Rasheed’s second wife, who is orphaned and alone after years living with a loving family, a progressive father who educated her, brothers who later joined Mujahideen fearing the defeat of the Soviet. The two characters are vastly different, though from the same country, from different worlds. However, under the domestic horrors, they find an unlikely friendship and become allies.
After Hosseini’s famous debut, ‘The Kite Runner’, where two boys escape a war-torn Afghanistan to the US, here we see the lives of women from two women’s perspectives. Hosseini’s Afghanistan is not mere news or statistics or nameless women in blue burqa. It’s filled with people with dreams. With Mariam and Laila, we long for their escape. With each breath, each sob, the readers plot along with them, walk with them, and see the pain in each word.
As the people of Afghanistan once again fight for their freedom against the Talibanthat has taken over this once growing, cosmopolitan country, Hosseini’s stories paint a picture of the days ahead.