A Thousand Splendid Suns is a novel written by Afghani writer Khalid Hosseini, who later took political asylum in California, United States, after the emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was born in Kabul and then moved to the United States in 1980. His first novel, The Kite Runner, was an international bestseller, published in thirty-four countries. In 2006 he was named a US goodwill envoy to the United Nations Refugee Agency.

           A Thousand Splendid Suns is a depiction of a wounded country, Afghanistan, and an unbearable sad story of family and friendship. It’s also an amazing example of everlasting love and a heart-wrenching story of an unforgiving time.

The book has three parts. In the first part, Hosseini portraits the life of a premarital girl, Mariam. Mariam is a five years old girl living with her mother in a deserted and hilly area of Herat, Afghanistan in a small hut type one-room house called Kolba. She is an uneducated village girl who spends most of her time waiting for her father to come to visit them. Nana, her mother appears to be a very strict, ungentle, and merciless woman. She always tries to convince Mariam to bury the love that she had for her father Jalil. Jalil is an educated, gentle, and financially stable man, who owns a cinema and lives with his other two wives in the city. Jalil visits his premarital daughter Mariam and wife Nana once a week. Time goes on and Mariam becomes fifteen when she decides to leave the hut and to travel to the city to live with her father Jalil. After asking the address of Jalil’s house from many wayfarers, she finally reaches Jalil’s. Bells the door and waits impatiently at the gate. A servant appears from the inside of the house and asks Mariam about her identity and then goes inside to confirm something. The servant comes back and refuses Mariam to enter the house, arguing that Jalil is not at home. She sits alongside the gate, folds her legs, gives her back to the wall, and waits for Jalil’s return. One night passes and she still waits for Jalil to return and to allow her to enter the house. But in the morning, a servant comes out and forces Mariam to return back to the hut. When she refuses, the servant drags her to a jeep to ride her back to the hut. It is when she notices Jalil standing on the second floor and staring at her from a glass wall. She screams and calls her father to rescue her, but, he pulls the curtain down and disappears. When Mariam returns back to the hut she becomes paralyzed. Nana had committed suicide by hanging herself against a rope in a tree. The news reaches Jalil and he rushes to hut. After completing the formal customs of the funeral, they bury Nana, and Jalil takes Mariam with himself to his house in the city. Soon after spending a few days in Jalil’s house, Mariam forcibly gets married to a guy twice of her age and leaves for Kabul with her husband, Rasheed. In the starting days of marriage, Rasheed seems to be a very nice, gentle, loving, and caring husband. But later on, he reappears as a harsh and rigorous husband.

           In the second and third parts of the book, Hosseini starts the story from a new angle. He introduces readers to a new character of Laila. Laila is a young, educated, and modern girl. She lives nearby Rasheed’s house. Initially, she is in love with a boy, Tariq. But later on, the worsening situation of Kabul compels Tariq and his parents to leave Kabul. But before the final goodbyes, they get a chance to spent a few moments of love with each other, and in those moments they discover each one’s body-unconsciously they make love. A few days later, Laila loses her mother and father in a rocket attack on their house, and she herself faces severe wounds. Fortunately, Rasheed notices her under the wreckage of the destroyed house and rescues her to his house where she survives wounds. Later on, a man carries the death news of Tariq in a rocket attack on their bus to Pakistan, and Rasheed proposes Laila for marriage. This time the Taliban completely takes over Kabul and imposes Islamic Sharia in the whole city, where they strictly ban the outgoing of women and girls from their houses. Meanwhile, as the result of love moments spent with Tariq, Laila notices a life in her womb. Seeing no other option to hide her pregnancy, Laila reluctantly accepts the marriage proposal of Rasheed and marries a man years older than her, and the three, Laila, Rasheed, and Mariam start their new lives in Rasheed’s house. After the pregnancy time, the delivery day comes, and Laila being the wife of Rasheed, gives birth to Tariq’s daughter, Aziza. In the start, Mariam feels very much hatred towards Laila, and never accepts her as the second wife of Rasheed. But later on, they both join hands against the torture and brutality of Rasheed. 

           After years, Tariq comes back to Kabul to meet Laila, and by this time Laila had a daughter and a son. He explains to Laila all the things that he lost his parents in the bus incident but he himself survived and the man who carried his death news was an agent of Rasheed and that the death news was fake. They meet for a few days in Laila’s house. And one day, Mariam, after getting weary of Rasheed’s torture, kills him and buries him in the garden. With it, finally two lovers, Laila and Tariq, again meet with the coalition and marry. Mariam stays alone at Rasheed’s house and Laila and Tariq with children leave for Pakistan, where they spent many of the years of their life living in Murree. Meanwhile, upon the death charges of Rasheed, Mariam gets hanged by the Taliban in Kabul. 

           After the normalization of the situations in Kabul, Laila and Tariq returns back to Kabul, where they receive the final gift from Jalil for his daughter Mariam that he had handed to someone before his death. The gift was nothing but dollars. And then they both, Tariq and Laila spend the rest of their life in Kabul doing welfare works. And the novel ends.

           The novel just not only reveals the story of life’s sorrows and friendship, but it also discloses the history of Afghanistan, the fall of The Soviet Union, the fall of many governments, and the rise and fall of the Taliban. If readers want to enjoy a quality novel and also to have look at the history of Afghanistan, then they must grab this book.


|By: Jahan Zaib Brohi|
The writer is a blogger and student at the University of Engineering & Technology. He can be reached at jahanzaib.writer@gmail.com