A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

photo by Invitation To Inspiration

Laila would remember the muted ceremony in bits and fragments. The cream- colored stripes of Rasheed`s suit. The sharp smell of his hair spray. The small shaving nick just above his Adam`s apple. The rough pads of his tobacco- stained fingers when he slid the ring on her. The pen. Its not working. The search for a new pen. The contract. The signing, his sure- handed, hers quavering. The prayers. Noticing, in the mirror, that Rasheed had trimmed his eyebrows. And, somewhere in the room, Mariam watching. The air choking with her disapproval. Laila could not bring herself to meet the older woman`s gaze. 

photo by Invitation To Inspiration

 

She walked, dragging a fingernail along the wall, down the hallway, then back, down the steps, then up, her face unwashed, hair uncombed. She walked until she ran into Mariam, who shot her a cheerless glance and went back to slicing the stem off a bell pepper and trimming strips of fat from meat. A hurtful silence would fill the room, and Laila could almost see the wordless hostility radiating from Mariam like waves of heat rising from asphalt. She would retreat back to her room, sit on the bed, and watch the snow falling. 

photo by Invitation To Inspiration

Laila examined Mariam`s drooping cheeks, the eyelids that sagged in tired folds, the deep lines that framed her mouth- she saw these things as though she too were looking at someone for the first time. And, for the first time, it was not an adversary`s face Laila saw but a face of grievances unspoken, burdens gone unprotested, a destiny submitted to and endured. If she stayed, would this be her own face, Laila wondered, twenty years from now?

photo by Invitation To Inspiration 

Mariam did not sleep that night. She sat in bed, watched the snow falling soundlessly. Seasons had come and gone; presidents in Kabul had been inaugurated and murdered; an empire had been defeated; old wars had ended and new ones had broken out. But Mariam had hardly noticed, hardly cared. She had passed these years in a distant corner of her mind. A dry, barren field, out beyond wish and lament, beyond dream and disillusionment. There, the future did not matter. And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them. She uprooted them and ditched them before they took hold.

But somehow, over these last months, Laila and Aziza- a harami like herself, as it turned out- had become extensions of her, and now, without them, the life Mariam had tolerated for so long suddenly seemed intolerable.

photo by Invitation To Inspiration

 
  Mariam is never very far. She is here, in these walls they`ve repainted, in the trees they`ve planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children`s laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westward. But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila`s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns. 

photo by Invitation To Inspiration

What do we look for in the stories of other people`s lives?

An escape from our own stories? A paper soulmate who shares a common destiny with us?

It is probably a little bit of both…

A Thousand Splendid Suns is the story of two Afghani women, Mariam and Laila, recounted by a man`s pen. Moving words of Khaled Hosseini give you the insight into the woman`s perspective of the  polygamous marriage amidst the Taliban terror. The reader becomes a witness of a moving transformation from hostility to a lifetime bond between two women enslaved by the tradition and the laws of the patriarchy.

A Thousand Splendid Suns makes you painfully aware of the fact that reality goes far beyond your own  personal experience.