It's a book by Khaled Hosseini, whose first book The Kite Runner is hugely famous, one of the books I decide not to read for fear that it will swell up a sad vein inside me.
But I found a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns in my parents' room, and was so drawn by the title that I decided to read it anyway. In the inside page I found my father's signature, and below it he wrote a date: 29/11/'07. I also found a bookmark he put inside it, and knew right away that again, he had bought a book with all the good intentions to finish it, only to fail once again.
From the start, it seemed that I couldn't put the book down. It surprised me that a man could write so intimately from a woman's point of view, no, not just a woman, but two women. I always thought it was difficult for one to write from the point of view of the opposite sex: hence Tom Clancy's main characters are always males, the way Amy Tan's are always females.
Nowadays I don't fancy myself as a fiction writer anymore, but whatever wretched little pieces of unfinished stories I write, always have a female main character.
Anyways. This book is simply beautiful. I lay down reading it and finding with a startle that I drew strength from those fictional characters, that I took a journey inside my own heart as I wept through half of the book. Oh yes yours truly lay on the sofa weeping, and believe-you-me, I am one who can manage to cry at the sight of everything: everything, like a stray leaf or a cup of piping hot coffee or a tv commercial featuring kittens (God help us), so it was just normal that I cried over this book. This book tells of women beaten by men, of women washing men's undershirts under the scorching sun, of women cleaning after men, of women put in unimaginable misery. One of the women ended up as a teacher, a profession so dear to my heart, and I was reminded of a much younger version of myself, telling my mom that I would be teaching one day. These last few months I have been pondering about quitting my job and find a "more decent" one. Yet, here I am lying on the couch reading about a fictional woman being a teacher at long last, and getting reminded of how I ended up as a sort of a teacher myself.
The book tells a story of how love actually exists, too. And it tells how the Quran, somewhere among its lines of violence, also contains words of consolation. I don't know what to believe anymore, actually. Real love, I have so far learned, means endless cleaning of the house. The Quran, I have so far learned, says a husband has a right to strike his wife if she "doesn't obey" him. I cannot summon the strength to believe that there are real people, real women, who pray five times a day and recite the Quran, knowing full well that the holy book grants their men the rights to degrade them.
I think the book revived some memories of my childhood too, my teenage years even, when I was eager to look for God. My endless chanting of the surah and the verses of the Quran, and later, my endless questions of why, why, why does God forbid women to pray during their periods. Why so many holy texts refer to a woman's menstruation as a "dirty business" after which she has to wash herself from head to toe. Why a lovemaking is also something dirty we have to wash up after. So dirty we are not allowed to communicate to God after a lovemaking.
Yes, I realize with a sore, I miss being able to kneel on my praying rug without thinking too much. Reading some Quran verses in the book saddened me in a complicated way. Whether I weeped for the main characters, for their pain that I recognise so acutely as mine too, or for the longing of the God I once worshipped without question, I don't know anymore.
But of these, I am sure: the book is a good thirst-quencher, and I am grateful for Khaled Hosseini for having written it. One day perhaps, I can tell you in a more logical way, why exactly I am grateful, on the day I can finally make sense of these tears.
