A thousand Splendid Suns

Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not,




Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not.
If a flood should arrive, to drown all that’s alive,
Noah is your guide in the typhoon’s eye, grieve not.
Laila passes beneath the sign and enters the classroom. The children are taking their seats, flipping notebooks open, chattering. Aziza is talking to a girl in the adjacent row. A paper airplane floats across the room in a high arc. Someone tosses it back.
“Open your Farsi books, children,” Laila says, dropping her own books on her desk.
To a chorus of flipping pages, Laila makes her way to the curtainless window. Through the glass, she can see the boys in the playground lining up to practice their free throws. Above them, over the mountains, the morning sun is rising. It catches the metallic rim of the basketball hoop, the chain link of the tire swings, the whistle hanging around Zaman’s neck, his new, unchipped spectacles. Laila flattens her palms against the warm glass panes. Closes her eyes. She lets the sunlight fall on her cheeks, her eyelids, her brow.
When they first came back to Kabul, it distressed Laila that she didn’t know where the Taliban had buried Mariam. She wished she could visit Mariam’s grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But Laila sees now that it doesn’t matter. 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.
Someone has been calling her name, Laila realizes. She turns around, instinctively tilts her head, lifting her good ear just a tad. It’s Aziza.
“Mammy? Are you all right?”
The room has become quiet. The children are watching her.
Laila is about to answer when her breath suddenly catches. Her hands shoot down. They pat the spot where, a moment before, she’d felt a wave go through her. She waits. But there is no more movement.
“Mammy?”
“Yes, my love.” Laila smiles. “I’m all right. Yes. Very much.”
As she walks to her desk at the front of the class, Laila thinks of the naming game they’d played again over dinner the night before. It has become a nightly ritual ever since Laila gave Tariq and the children the news. Back and forth they go, making a case for their own choice. Tariq likes Mohammad. Zalmai, who has recently watched Superman on tape, is puzzled as to why an Afghan boy cannot be named Clark. Aziza is campaigning hard for Aman. Laila likes Omar.
But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.

AFTERWORD

F or almost three decades now, the Afghan refugee crisis has been one of the most severe around the globe. War, hunger, anarchy, and oppression forced millions of people—like Tariq and his family in this tale—to abandon their homes and flee Afghanistan to settle in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. At the height of the exodus, as many as eight million Afghans were living abroad as refugees. Today, more than two million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of working as a U.S. envoy for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, one of the world’s foremost humanitarian agencies. UNHCR’s mandate is to protect the basic human rights of refugees, provide emergency relief, and to help refugees restart their lives in a safe environment. UNHCR provides assistance to more than twenty million displaced people around the world, not only in Afghanistan but also in places such as Colombia, Burundi, the Congo, Chad, and the Darfur region of Sudan. Working with UNHCR to help refugees has been one of the most rewarding and meaningful experiences of my life.
To help, or simply to learn more about UNHCR, its work, or the plight of refugees in general, please visit: www.UNrefugees.org.
Thank you.


Khaled Hosseini
January 31, 2007




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Afew clarifications before I give thanks. The village of Gul Daman is a fictional place— as far as I know. Those who are familiar with the city of Herat will notice that I have taken minor liberties describing the geography around it. Last, the title of this novel comes from a poem composed by Saeb-e-Tabrizi, a seventeenth-century Persian poet. Those who know the original Farsi poem will doubtless note that the English translation of the line containing the title of this novel is not a literal one. But it is the generally accepted translation, by Dr. Josephine Davis, and I found it lovely. I am grateful to her.
I would like to thank Qayoum Sarwar, Hekmat Sadat, Elyse Hathaway, Rosemary Stasek, Lawrence Quill, and Haleema Jazmin Quill for their assistance and support.
Very special thanks to my father, Baba, for reading this manuscript, for his feedback, and, as ever, for his love and support. And to my mother, whose selfless, gentle spirit permeates this tale. You are my reason, Mother jo. My thanks go to my in-laws for their generosity and many kindnesses. To the rest of my wonderful family, I remain indebted and grateful to each and every one of you.
I wish to thank my agent, Elaine Koster, for always, always believing, Jody Hotchkiss (Onward!), David Grossman, Helen Heller, and the tireless Chandler Crawford. I am grateful and indebted to every single person at Riverhead Books. In particular, I want to thank Susan Petersen Kennedy and Geoffrey Kloske for their faith in this story. My heartfelt thanks also go to Marilyn Ducksworth, Mih-Ho Cha, Catharine Lynch, Craig D. Burke, Leslie Schwartz, Honi Werner, and Wendy Pearl. Special thanks to my sharp-eyed copy editor, Tony Davis, who misses nothing, and, lastly, to my talented editor, Sarah McGrath, for her patience, foresight, and guidance.
Finally, thank you, Roya. For reading this story, again and again, for weathering my minor crises of confidence (and a couple of major ones), for never doubting. This book would not be without you. I love you.

POSTSCRIPT

BY KHALED HOSSEINI


This extract is taken from a speech given at Book Expo America on 2 June, 2007.


Ibegan writing like the boy in The Kite Runner, Amir. I grew up in Kabul in the 1970s,


and I wrote poems and little plays that I would coax my siblings and cousins into staging for our parents at parties. I also wrote short stories, which I recall were dark, intense, even unabashedly, proudly melodramatic and, in their own childish way, dealt with issues of loyalty, friendship and class struggle. They made up for what they lacked in subtlety and style with a big, winning, expansive heart, which are words that some people have used, maybe with some justification, to describe The Kite Runner.


The language in which I’ve written has changed. I began writing in Farsi, then I wrote in French and now I mostly write in English, but one thing remains constant: I’ve always written for an audience of one. For me, writing has always been the selfish, self-serving act of telling myself a story. You know, something grabs my interest and compels me to sit down and see it through. This is how The Kite Runner was written. I had two boys in mind, one who was conflicted and on very unsure moral ground, the other pure and loyal and rooted in integrity. I knew that their friendship was doomed, that there would be a falling out and that this would impact the lives of those around them in a profound way. The how and why that would happen was the compulsion that led me to sit down and write that novel in March 2001.


I never intended to get the novel published. Even when I was as far as two-thirds of the way through writing, it never crossed my mind that anybody would actually read it although I thought my wife probably would because she loves me. So you can imagine my astonishment at the reception that The Kite Runner has received worldwide since its publication. I received letters from India, London, Sydney, Paris, Arkansas, all over the world from readers who expressed a passion to me. Many of them wanted to know how to send money to Afghanistan. Some told me they wanted to adopt an Afghan orphan. In those letters I saw the unique ability that fiction has to connect people who dress differently or practice different religions, and I saw how universal some human experiences are, like friendship, guilt, forgiveness, loss and atonement.
In those letters, I also saw how I had unwittingly placed myself in a daunting position— that of following up The Kite Runner, and writing a book that, through no fault of its own, would bear the burden of comparison to The Kite Runner, while the ink was still wet on its pages. The reading of every fan letter I received was punctuated by a loud and anxious gulp and a feeling of pity for this as-yet-unwritten novel. I feared for the sanity of my family who would have to bear with me as I set about writing this new book.
I had further complicated matters by deciding on a narrative that demanded not one but two central characters, both of them women. This was a decision that I’d made when I was putting the final edits on The Kite Runner—a father and son story set exclusively in the world of men. I wanted to write another love story set in Afghanistan but this time a mother/daughter tale and about the inner lives of two struggling Afghan women. I suppose




there were some easier roads I could have gone down, but I chose this one because, both as a writer and as an Afghan, I couldn’t think of a more riveting or important or compelling story than the struggle of women in my country. Dramatically speaking, every other topic paled in comparison.
Unfortunately the image of the burqa-wearing woman walking past the stern, glaring face of the Taliban official has become familiar around the world, perhaps even iconic. When I was in Kabul in 2003, I met a man who worked as a bodyguard for a government official. He told me, kind of casually, a story about a woman he had seen beaten by a Taliban official on the street. In telling that story, he used a rather grisly if colorful expression. He said he beat her until her mother’s milk leaked out of her bones. In listening to that story it seemed unreal to me that this happened in Kabul. Not long ago, women in Afghanistan were professors at universities, they were doctors and lawyers, worked in hospitals, taught at schools and played an important role in society. They were women like my mother, who was university educated and a teacher of Farsi and history, eventually becoming the vice principal of a very large high school for girls. But that was in Kabul, and Afghanistan is not a nation of urbanized middle-class people. There has always been an ideological gap between liberal reformist Kabul and rural Afghanistan. The sad truth is that the Taliban-style oppression of women in certain regions of Afghanistan existed long before the Taliban was even a twinkle in the loving eye of the Pakistani secret intelligence. Whereas Kabul has been, relatively speaking, a hub for female autonomy, rural Afghanistan, especially south and east along the border with Pakistan, has been traditionally a patriarchal tribal region where men have decided the fates of women.
There, women have always lived in confinement. They have always worn the burqa on the street and rarely gone to school beyond the age of twelve so there was rampant illiteracy in those areas. For centuries, women there have been told when they will marry, who they will marry, and, incidentally, for how much. For the most part, rural Afghan women have led quiet, subterranean lives of obedience and service.
This may surprise you but throughout the last century there were multiple attempts to liberate, as it were, the women of Afghanistan, originating in Kabul. There was a king named Amanullah in the 1920s who actually banned the wearing of the burqa in public. He built the first hospital for women and the first school for girls. He brought teachers over from Europe and sent women to Europe to get an education. Amanullah tried to ban forced marriage, raise the minimum marrying age for girls to sixteen and ban the practice of bride price. Unfortunately, largely as a result of these attempts, there was a rebellion and he was run out of town. He ended up dying an old man in exile.
There were other attempts in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, some of which had fruition. In 1964, Afghan women gained the right to vote. But Kabul’s reforms have always been met by the patriarchal tribal leaders with mockery, contempt or in some cases mutiny, as in the case of poor King Amanullah.
So, as you can see, life was a struggle for some women in Afghanistan well before the Taliban. But it became all but unbearable with the outbreak of factional war, anarchy and extremism. In many ways, that’s when disaster really struck.




Women suffered not only through the bombings and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas like everyone else, not only were beaten and tortured and humiliated and imprisoned, not only had their fundamental human rights violated over and over again, but in large numbers also suffered from gender-based abuse. They were abducted and sold as slaves, forced into marriage to militia commanders, forced into prostitution, and raped, a crime particularly heinous and unforgivable that was used to intimidate families who were opposed to one faction or another.
Today in post-Taliban, post-9/11 Afghanistan there is talk again of liberating women, as there should be. The gender apartheid that has been forced on Afghan women has been one of the great unresolved injustices of the modern world. In addition, Afghanistan needs its women.
The whole project of rebuilding Afghanistan is doomed if the fundamental human rights of its women are not respected and its women are not allowed to participate.
Queen Soraya, wife of King Amanullah, said: “Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should also take their part, as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout history. And from their examples, we learn that we must all contribute toward a development of our nation.” The Queen said those words back in 1926 and it seems to me that her words are as relevant eighty years later, and perhaps even more so than they were back then.
I returned to Kabul in 2003 and met people from all walks of life, and I remember standing at street corners and seeing fully covered women walking along, trailed by four, five, six, seven children. I remember thinking, who is that person inside? What has she seen? What has she endured? What makes her happy? What gives her sorrow? What are her hopes, her longings, her disappointments? A Thousand Splendid Suns is in some ways my attempt at imagining answers to those questions. It’s my attempt to explore the inner lives of these two fictional women and look for the very ordinary humanity beneath their veils.