A Thousand Splendid Suns

In the fall of 1974, Mariam watches Ramadan transform Kabul, as the whole city fasts. When Mariam, like the rest of the city, nightly breaks her fast “with bread and a date” she tastes “the sweetness of sharing in a communal experience” (77).

When Eid-ul-Fitr comes about, there is festivity. She and Rasheed take to the streets and walk amidst the liveliness. They see Fariba, her sons and her husband, “a small-boned, shy-looking man with eyeglasses,” and Rasheed once again voices his disapproval of them and warns Mariam to stay away (79). Watching the fireworks at Chaman, Mariam wishes she could see Nana, to show her that “containment and beauty were not unattainable things. Even for the likes of them” (80).

When they go home and Rasheed has visitors in the house, Mariam goes upstairs to her room, flattered that he is protective of her namoos, orhonor.

On the third day of Eid, Rasheed goes out and as Mariam is cleaning, she goes into his room. She opens a drawer and finds a gun and, beneath that, a pornographic magazine, something she has never seen before. As she replaces the magazine, she wonders who these women are and what they have to do with her husband’s talk of “honor and propriety” (81).

But slowly she comes up with the explanation that he is a man and that she cannot fault him “for being the way God had made him” (82). In the bottom drawer of the dresser, she finds a picture of Rasheed’s former wife and son. His former wife is beautiful, but “there was something vaguely unsettling about the way Rasheed seemed to loom over” her and “her body tilted forward subtly, as though she were trying to wriggle free of his hands” (83). Later, as she is doing laundry, Mariam regrets sneaking around. She feels compassion for Rasheed, sorry that he lost his son, who drowned in a lake. She feels “kinship” with her husband because they have both lost someone (84). 

Mariam is pregnant and Rasheed has high expectations of the baby being a boy, to the extent that he buys his new son a suede winter coat. Scarred by losing his first son, Yunus, Rasheed worries about potential accidents in the house.

Mariam is thrilled to be pregnant, to finally have a home and family of her own: “her love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being” (87). However, at the hamam, the bathhouse, she miscarries. Mariam mourns her child deeply and as she looks out onto the snow, she remembers Nana’s theory that “each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world […] as a reminder of how women like us suffer […] how quietly we endure all that falls upon us” (90).

Mariam is beset with grief, “dumbfounded that she could miss in such a crippling manner a being she had never seen” (91). She dreads going outside and feeling envious of all the neighborhood women with “their wealth of children” (91).

Mariam re-experiences the guilt that followed Nana’s death and wonders whether she is being punished for neglecting her mother: “she might as well have slipped the noose around her mother’s neck herself. Treacherous daughters did not deserve to be mothers” (92). She also thinks of blaming Rasheed, with his premature hope, and God, for “taunting her as He had” with the premise of happiness (92). 

Rasheed is also depressed and bad-tempered: “he hardly talked anymore” (93). Mariam holds a private funeral for the baby, burying the suede coat Rasheed bought for it. 

On the day of the murder of a communist, Mir Akbar Khyber, in April 1978, Mariam and Raheem are indoors listening to the radio as some 10,000 people pour into the streets and march up and down Kabul’s government district. Rasheed treats Mariam with contempt, calling her empty-brained and barely looking her in the eyes. While it is trying to put up with ridicule and insults, Mariam tolerates them because she lives in fear of “his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path” that he resolves with violence (98). Rasheed is frustrated with Mariam, because since the bathhouse incident there had been six more miscarriages, “cycles of hopes raised then dashed” (98).

When Rasheed comes home at night, Mariam wonders what excuse he will use to “pounce on her” because no matter what she does, she cannot make amends, cannot “give him his son back,” and so becomes a burden to him (98). 

On the night of April 27th, a sadistic Rasheed finds fault with Mariam’s rice and punishes her by shoving pebbles in her mouth and making her chew them until two molars break: “‘Now you know what you’ve given me in this marriage. Bad food, and nothing else’” (103).

That night, there are military planes zooming past in the sky and a change in political regime. Daoud Khan is executed and the Communist Party, which has strong associations with the Soviet Union, will be ruling.

Meanwhile, down the street, Fariba gives birth to a baby girl, Laila, whose name means “‘Night Beauty’” (101).