What a difference a few hundred years can make. Writing in the seventeenth century, Afghan poet Saib-e-Tabrizi wrote the following lines as part of a poem about his beloved Kabul:
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
The Kabul that we see in this modern tale of Afghani life seems to have slipped a bit. A pervasive drought produces relentless dust that even gets into one’s molars. The Kabul River dries so that the riverbed is used as a bazaar. And heat? Welcome to life in a sauna.
Against this backdrop, which would in itself drive most of us to madness, is layered an ongoing civil unrest that rains rockets on its buildings killing its people at random. Adding a third layer of misery is a domestic arrangement whereby nasty Rasheed, the misogynist shoemaker (custom loafers for the upper crust) terrifies his two wives with overbearing, but innovative, cruelty punctuated by regular beatings, and we are not talking the occasional love tap here. Old Rasheed evokes the image of Rocky using a side of beef as a heavy bag. At one point he sticks his gun (even the cobbler is packing) in his younger wife’s mouth.
Amid this hellish existence, the two wives overcome their initial antagonism and develop a deep bond. Mariam, the elder wife, whose life was marginal even before she was sent off, at 15, to marry Rasheed, missed her one chance at a sliver of appreciation by virtue of her inability to bear him a son. Laila, the backup wife, does come through on this point, but Mariam soon learns that she didn’t miss much. From this morass, a happy ending of sorts is actually attained after Mariam makes the ultimate sacrifice, courtesy of a sentence levied by a Taliban tribunal and carried out in a soccer stadium, freeing Laila and her children to hook up with her childhood sweetheart, Tariq. (Cue the sappy music)
The story is a good read and I kept turning pages to find out what happens to these poor wretches. But of equal interest was the description of daily life under a succession of repressive regimes, not the least of which was the Taliban. Americans got to know of this gang of Islamic crazies during the military actions against Al Quida, post 9/11. But the portrayal of daily life under these maniacs as they cruised through Kabul in their Toyota trucks checking the male citizenry for proper beard length and other infractions necessitating on-the-spot punishment, begins to shed some life on the bizarre philosophy of the Islamo- fascists It’s easy to see why Osama bin Laden seems to be thriving in Tora Bora.
The View recommends A Thousand Splendid Suns, the second novel by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, who was born in Kabul in 1965, but has lived in California since 1980. In his spare time, Hosseini is an MD active in refugee affairs with the UN.
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
The Kabul that we see in this modern tale of Afghani life seems to have slipped a bit. A pervasive drought produces relentless dust that even gets into one’s molars. The Kabul River dries so that the riverbed is used as a bazaar. And heat? Welcome to life in a sauna.
Against this backdrop, which would in itself drive most of us to madness, is layered an ongoing civil unrest that rains rockets on its buildings killing its people at random. Adding a third layer of misery is a domestic arrangement whereby nasty Rasheed, the misogynist shoemaker (custom loafers for the upper crust) terrifies his two wives with overbearing, but innovative, cruelty punctuated by regular beatings, and we are not talking the occasional love tap here. Old Rasheed evokes the image of Rocky using a side of beef as a heavy bag. At one point he sticks his gun (even the cobbler is packing) in his younger wife’s mouth.
Amid this hellish existence, the two wives overcome their initial antagonism and develop a deep bond. Mariam, the elder wife, whose life was marginal even before she was sent off, at 15, to marry Rasheed, missed her one chance at a sliver of appreciation by virtue of her inability to bear him a son. Laila, the backup wife, does come through on this point, but Mariam soon learns that she didn’t miss much. From this morass, a happy ending of sorts is actually attained after Mariam makes the ultimate sacrifice, courtesy of a sentence levied by a Taliban tribunal and carried out in a soccer stadium, freeing Laila and her children to hook up with her childhood sweetheart, Tariq. (Cue the sappy music)
The story is a good read and I kept turning pages to find out what happens to these poor wretches. But of equal interest was the description of daily life under a succession of repressive regimes, not the least of which was the Taliban. Americans got to know of this gang of Islamic crazies during the military actions against Al Quida, post 9/11. But the portrayal of daily life under these maniacs as they cruised through Kabul in their Toyota trucks checking the male citizenry for proper beard length and other infractions necessitating on-the-spot punishment, begins to shed some life on the bizarre philosophy of the Islamo- fascists It’s easy to see why Osama bin Laden seems to be thriving in Tora Bora.
The View recommends A Thousand Splendid Suns, the second novel by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, who was born in Kabul in 1965, but has lived in California since 1980. In his spare time, Hosseini is an MD active in refugee affairs with the UN.
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