Krishna
My God, what a book! Storytelling at its best. Khalid has a style that is unique and very lovely. He tends to draw you into the story and get completely absorbed. No melodramatic narrations, but still he brings out the emotions so beautifully that you feel for the characters as they feel for themselves. I have not read his other best seller ‘The Kite Runner’ but I already feel that it is a pity that he has written only two books in all. This gifted a writer should write more books.
Yes, as you have probably guessed, I loved this book. The storytelling takes you to the locale (Afghanistan, small villages and Herat, a comparatively bigger town) due to its realism but still you have the twists and turns that make you gasp when the author again packs a punch that suddenly confronts you, sometime making you reevaluate your estimation of a character in the book.
The story revolves around two women and is told in an alternating chapters covering each woman. Their lives intertwine somewhere along the line and the flood of events sweep them both along in its inexorable wake.
The first woman is Mariam, who is the illegitimate daughter of Jalil, a rich man, to Nana, a housekeeper in his life. Nana’s three wifes hate the fact that he had a relationship with another woman outside of marriage and also hate Mariam, a constant reminder of the infidelity. Fortunately, Mariam never comes into contact with them, and lives far away in a village. But Jalil comes along once in a while, and takes her out and makes her believe that he cares for her. She rebels against the mother, against the advice of her only friend, the aged Mullah Faizullah and her own mother that she will bring everlasting shame on her and tries to gatecrash her father’s house, believing that her father will welcome her with open arms. When she is made to wait outside all night and also realizes that the father was inside all the time and knew of her existence, her faith in her father shatters and she decides to return home. Nothing is the same after that for Mariam.
Without giving out too much, she is forced into a marriage with an old man as his second wife, when his first died. The man is shoemaker Rashid, who treats her nicely first but then turns into a horrible man who tortures her mercilessly in small and big ways.
The second woman is Laila, a Tajik, who is much younger than Mariam. We meet her as a kid, adored by her parents – Bibi, her father who is learned, gentle and progressive ideas of how women must be educated etc. Her mother is nice but convinced that the Taliban are a force of good and hates the fact that the Russian puppet Nasrullah is the ruler of Afghanistan. She is a close friend of Giti and Hasina, girls like herself and also is a childhood friend of Tariq, a boy with a prosthetic leg and who is of Pakistani origin. Slowly, she falls in love with him.
With Herat being bombed, Rashid leaves for Pakistan and Laila’s father also wants to move. But her mother would not hear of it, and wants to see Taliban come in victorious. However, a bomb puts paid to all their plans and orphaned Laila marries Rashid against her will since she discovers herself pregnant and fears scandal and also learns from a traveler from Pakistan that Rashid was killed in a refugee camp. What else does she have to live for?
Now Mariam hates Laila since she has taken away her husband’s affections, cruel as he may be and Rashid goes from bad to worse when his business collapses and he feels more and more threatened by life. Even plans of escape come to naught for the two girls.
The story goes on to describe in graphic detail what happens to the girls. The plight of both, their transformation from innocent young girls to disillusioned, exploited, suppressed women and their courage in the face of insurmountable odds is all told with the backdrop of the Afghan politics, the change from the Russian domination to the internecine warfare of the various Mujahideen factions to the domination of Taliban and what it does to the country are all brilliantly laid out.
I have not talked of the major twists in the interests of both telling you what the story is about, and not giving away the major suspense in the book and so I have stopped at only narrating less than half the story.
The book is well written, the conversation is scintillating, the surprises unexpected, and the story at times brings a lump to your throat. For a cynical reader like me, that is really an achievement of the writer.
Amazing book, and worth reading definitely.
I would give it a 9/10
— Krishna