I began reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns" early one evening after work...Reading an e-book was more difficult than I'd imagined...Paperbacks could always be turned, twisted and even wrung in every way conceivable to sync with the position I sat, walked or lay in...However, an e-book gave me the limited comfort of lying down on my stomach or typically placing the PC on my lap...Also, flicking the pages over was veritably painless as compared to scrolling down the PDF with my fingers...
However, once I started, I spent an earnest 3-5 hours a day pursuing the drudgery of Mariam, the irony of Laila and their subsequent companionship...Sometimes, I'd start my day with a few pages, early in the morning when I reached Britannia Gardens...I'd catch up at lunchtime when I ate at my workstation...Late into the night, when my eyelids battled to close down, I'd reluctantly sum the day up at an eventful twist in either's life...Eventually, it took me three days and nights to complete the 264 pages of Khaled Hosseini's epic...
Being an ardent fan of "The Kite Runner", I found "A Thousand Splendid Suns" similar in many aspects...Beginning in the Kabul of 1974, the story trails the life of an illegitimate offspring, Mariam with her wretched existence and ever illusive happiness and the beautiful Laila whose aspirations fall flat in the face of her obligations...There were several instances where I could allude the tale to Sharbat Gula, the Afgan girl who made headlines with her piercing, steely eyes on the cover of National Geographic...
The tale spoke of polygamy, hypocrisy, bias, strife, pain and relentless sacrifice...Ofcourse, what it also conveyed was the unending dilemma that hope puts us in, all through our lives...Mariam suffers the insults of Nana (her mother) for fifteen years with the hope that the rich Jalil who begot her would eventually take her in at his house in Herat...She hopes for an education at the University of Kabul like her half sisters Saideh and Naheed...Even when she is hastily married off to the middle aged Rasheed, she undergoes seven miscarriages in the hope that she could please her husband by having his son...Laila lives her life with the hope of acknowledgement from her mother who grieves for her sons Ahmad and Noor but is oblivious to her intelligent and beautiful daughter...Laila watches her education taken away from her, her friends bombed to death and yet she is sprightly with hope that one day she shall be united with her Tariq...And when Mammy and Babi die and Tariq has left Kabul, Laila lives with the sole hope of bearing Tariq's child...
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" traverses across Afganistan and in the words I found the harmony that once prevailed in the now forsaken country...There are friends who are Tajik, Pashtun or Hazara...There are instances describing the resplendent beauty of the snow capped Hindukush...What touched me the most was Hakim Babi's trip to Bamiyan with Laila and Tariq, describing the Buddhas which were torn down early on in this decade...The author perhaps strives to show us the Afganistan he was born in before the troubled times of innumerous coups and staunch Islamic rule...
To conclude, I feel smugly satisfied and enriched after having read this wonderful story...A book I would suggest any avid reader to try...I end my post with these words from Saib-e-Tabrizi, from his poem, "Kabul"...
"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..."
No comments:
Post a Comment