A Thousand Splendid Suns

It’s the end of a typical college day. I can almost see myself and my best friend sitting on the steps outside our classroom before we leave for the day. All around us we see the campus emptying out – a few souls lingering back like us. It’s one of those days when you want to talk philosophy – even when your age at the last birthday was 20. We somehow get into talking about what it means to be a woman in a patriarchial society.

There are childish comments about being able to choose between multi-colored and designed dresses. Then of course there is jewellery (I see that these days women have lost their sole right over this!). But then there were some profound statements (for that age!) like privilege to mould the next generation and a chance to fight for your place in the society instead of being handed out everything on a platter. We both agreed that given a chance we both would like to come back as women in all our future lifetimes.

But as we made our way out of the campus in the gathering twilight we both had forgotten one vital thing when we reached that conclusion – the privilege of being born in a family that makes no distinction between a male child and a female child.

I had more than one occasion to reflect back on that day last week when I read Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. I had a general idea about what I would find in its pages when I checked it out of the library. Afterall, I have read “Not without my daughter”. But I didn’t know I would find things that would simultaneously infuriate and nauseate me.

The story begins in a Kolba or hut outside the city of Herat in Afghanistan. The story is of Mariam who comes into the world with a stamp of being an illegitimate child of a wealthy man from Herat. Mariam suffers from the malady that many of us also suffer from – we don’t appreciate what we have till we lose it and by then it’s too late. She is always resenting her life in the Kolba with her mother and forever dreams of staying with her father along with his family of 3 lawful wives and 10 legitimate children. Then one cruel twist of fate takes it all away from her and she finds herself, at the age of about 15-16, in an unfamiliar city – married to a man almost thrice her age.

I am ashamed of myself because I was naïve enough to believe, not unlike Mariam, that maybe her troubles will now reduce, if not downright vanish. But Mariam finds out that a woman’s worth is always determined by the number of male children she bears – or not. By the time she reaches her 30s she is almost reconciled to her fate when life deals her another blow. A war raging in Afghanistan brings a girl of 15-16 into her home and her life – Laila. And it was at this point that I felt sickened by the story – so much that I didn’t have the heart to open the book for 2 whole days. What kind of a 60+ man marries a child of 15-16 – a child who would be the same age as his grandchild? It’s a miracle that I didn’t throw up on reading that Laila bears his child. And the arrogance and rudeness just because he was born a man is enough to boil blood of any self-respecting woman. Mariam and Laila start the journey as enemies and end up being friends. There is a final twist to Mariam’s tale which completes her transformation from someone who came to this world unwanted but ended up as someone who was loved and cherished.

I have always believed that women carry within themselves an unlimited source of strength and resilience. They don’t need to seek any external assurances because they know within their hearts what they are capable of. That gives them the ability to come up trumps in situations that demand their best. But I was amazed at the courage and nerve that these women display in making the best of every situation and finally in fighting for their lives. If I was surprised at the calmness with which they share cups of tea in the backyard of their home in war-torn Afghanistan, it also tore up my heart that someone should consider even such a simple act a luxury.

The lot of the women hasn’t been better in India as well. Maybe things are not as bad for them as they were for Mariam and Laila. But who knows? There could be remote villages where India could be having its own versions of Mariam and Laila. It’s not even about one particular faith treating their women in an inferior manner. It’s the mentality in many cases which tries to find a justification of its actions in the scriptures and holy books. My sadness was for all such women whom fate probably never gave a chance to fight for themselves.

It’s not the following lines that gave the book its title that will always stay with me:

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

but what Mariam’s mother tells her to always remember:

“Like a compass needle that always finds the North, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman”.