Street children in Philippines and World.

I liked this book because it made me realize that I’m one lucky sonofabitch.

Khaled Hosseini’s follow-up to The Kite Runner did not break new grounds. He stuck close to home and delivered what is close to his heart. And that is probably why page after page, I found myself eager to find out what fate befalls Mariam, Laila, and Tariq. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini weaves the tale of the main protagonists as they struggle through war-infested Afghanistan. And in the background, playing as much an important role as these characters, is the country itself.

Spanning almost half a century, the book starts off with Mariam’s early years. Born a bastard, her childhood was filled with longing for her father’s irregular visits. Inspite of her mother’s incessant warning about how her father would one day betray her, Mariam still held her father in high esteem, an idolization she would one day pay a high price for. Forced into an arranged marriage with an elderly man, Mariam found herself immersed in a new world where she was stripped of everything familiar.

Laila and Tariq are a part of this new world. Mere children when Mariam was already experiencing the vagaries of married life, Laila and Tariq’s innocence will one they play traitor and force them to make decisions without the benefit of a foresight. For they are all embroiled in a place that would qualify an undisturbed five-hour sleep as peace. Where the sons are sent off to fight even before the first sprout of facial hair. Where the Soviets lay claim to countless lives and the Americans are arming a faction to fight another.

And in this chaos lives are born, lived, and taken with no permission. Sitting down for a family dinner as rockets whistle across the open skies, fetching water outside the house while dodging bullets, throwing a party while in the next neighborhood, mothers and daughters are raped while the fathers and sons are forced to watch… these are everyday situations that some beings we also happen to call humans have to endure.

Taliban. Kabul. Herat. NGO. Images of chaos and confusion. Riffle-slinging American soldiers. Rocket-launching fourteen year old pashtuns. These are some words and images I catch on big screen tv’s as I pursue my lifelong practice of hedonism across the world. While I was contemplating how small the Mona Lisa at the Louvre is, the Mariam’s on the opposite side of my fate are losing their teeth to the calloused knuckles of their husbands. As I complain about the tight elevators of Hotel Carlton along the Grand Canal in Venice, the Tariq’s are planning a deathly escape route to neighboring Pakistan and Iran. When I jog along the eucalyptus-scented trail of Twin Peaks Boulevard in San Francisco, the Laila’s of Kabul are locked in darkness by their captors, suffering intense heat and suffocation with their two-year old babies for days without food and water.

I enjoyed reading this book not because I’m a sucker for melodramatic beginnings and cinematographic endings. But because for a few fleeting moments after I finished the book, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who I thought had made my life miserable. I wanted to say thank you to the street children who had smudged my car window with their dirty palms while begging for change. I wanted to thank the corrupt traffic cop who pulled me over for running a red light and thereby costing me $6USD. I wanted to hug all the jeepney and tricycle drivers who ply the streets of Marikina every morning and cause ulcer-inducing traffic. I wanted to thank my mom and dad, who conceived me at the right time, who sent me off for western education, and left me with a comfortable legacy.

I will still continue to incite hedonism and focus on my own pleasures and comforts. But now, in doing so, I will pause to think about certain people who’ve had a string of bad feng shui ever since their god knows when.


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Cybele Arnaud