A Thousand Splendid Suns

Had not read something intriguing for a long time, life can be really really busy if you know how to make every moment worthwhile ( a new lesson that I learned recently, while I was organizing a tech-fest for my college) . And a few days ago sheer boredom forced me to borrow something form a friend. And I am so glad I took the time to read this one, and I am going to buy myself a copy as soon as possible.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini is the beautiful and yet heart-wrenchingly tragic story of two women from Afghanistan. Reading this book really made me wonder why I sob and mourn about my own problems. Recently Ive come to realize that the words my problems are very relative and really hard to explain. Just like pain and pleasure cannot be measured and set up against a  standard scale, problems is something you cant really measure. You never really know whether others face the same situations, go through the same emotions, or react to reality in the same way as you do. You never really know whether the grass is greener on the other side or not. But this book changed that notion of mine just a tad bit. Some problems and circumstances are beyond comparison with anything on the earth.

I don’t want to waste time explaining the plot here. The beauty with which the scenes unfold cannot be recreated, you have to actually read the book and marvel at it. But as usually happens in my case, the plot and story are not so important. What I really liked (and always do like about books like these) are the words; certain phrases and observations that you read again and again and they show a new meaning everytime. This book is full of such words.

So here are a few of them:

——

You are afraid, Nana, that i might find the happiness you never had. And you don’t want me to be happy. You don’t want a good life for me. You are the one with the wretched heart. If she could articulate this she would have said these words to Nana. That she was tired of being an instrument, of being lied to, laid claim to, used. That she was sick of Nana twisting the truths of their lives and making her another of her grievances against the world.

——

It was a dark maroon silk shawl with beaded fringes, and edges embroidered with gold thread.
“Do you like it?”
Mariam looked up. Rasheed did a touching thing then. He blinked and averted his gaze.
Mariam thought of Jalil. His empathic, jovial way with which he had pushed his jewelery at her, the overpowering cheerfulness that left no room for response but meek gratitude. Nana had been right about Jalils gifts. They had been half hearted tokens of penance, insincere, corrupt gestures, meant more for his appeasement than for hers. This shawl, Mariam saw, was a true gift.
“It is beautiful”,she said.

——-

Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions. She would never leave a mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammys heart was like a pallid beach where Lailas footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

——-

Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in mid air, un-chewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflections of their half-lit faces on the pitch black windows, their shadows unmoving on the walls. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by the expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now, and somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a bare-handed frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, or  a grandchild.

But the flip-side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn’t. After every rocket balst, Laila raced to the street, stammering a prayer that this time, surely this time, it was Tariq, they would find buried beneath the rubble and smoke.

———

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