74 pages • 2 hours read
Khaled HosseiniA Thousand Splendid Suns
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Laila, daughter of Fariba and Hakim, is now 9 years old. Her two elder brothers have gone to fight in Mujahideen’s army and by this stage, her parents’ once-happy marriage has become fractious. Laila is very pretty, with blonde curls and turquoise eyes, and is a promising student. Her university-educated father, a former high-school teacher before the Communists fired him, hopes that she will pursue an education and, unlike the fathers of her friends, believes marriage can wait. Her school-teacher, Shanzai, is also progressive, and forbids the girls to cover in her classroom. She calls Laila “Inquilabi girl” because she was born on the night of the Communist Revolution.
Laila is close friends with Tariq, a neighborhood boy with one leg, whose other leg was blown off by a land mine. At this stage in the novel, Tariq is going away with his parents to visit a sick uncle. She misses him deeply, feeling that “time stretched or contracted depending on Tariq’s absence or presence” (108). She notices that a Benz with a Herat number plate is parked opposite the house Rasheed shares with his reclusive wife, Mariam. She wonders about it, but remembers her father’s reprimand that their neighbors’ business is not their own. The chapter finishes with her walking home from school with some girlfriends and then alone, because Fariba did not pick her up from school. She is suddenly facing the barrel of a gun.
Chapter 17 Summary
The gun Laila is facing is a water gun and behind it is Khadim, another neighborhood boy who taunts and leers at her, calling her “Yellow Hair” and saying he wants to marry her (116). They exchange a volley of insults about each other’s’ families. Laila is charged with having a “‘loony’” mother and a “‘sissy’” father (117). Khadim fires a jet of warm liquid at her, which turns out to be urine (116). Disgusted, Laila washes her hair and is resentful of her mother, who is having one of her bad days.
On Fariba’s good days, the neighborhood women come to her house to enjoy her baking and hear her talk endlessly about her beloved sons, who are away in conflict.
On bad days, like this one, Fariba hibernates in her room.
Chapter 18 Summary
When Tariq finally returns, Laila is welcomed over to his family’s home for lunch. She enjoys the convivial atmosphere, so unlike her own family these days. Laila and Tariq go upstairs to play cards. She recalls when Tariq first showed her his amputation stump and she cried and he chastised her, not being able to tolerate her sentimentality. Now, and in a similar manner, when Laila tells Tariq she missed him, he is embarrassed by her “show of friendship” but also secretly pleased: “the sunburn on his cheeks deepened momentarily” (130).
When Laila tells Tariq what Khalid did to her, he charges after him, in a way none of her family members would be capable of. Laila goes home and eats dinner with her father, who tells her that under the Communists and their present egalitarian ideal, women like her have a good opportunity for a university education.
We learn that the bulk of the resistance against the Communists is taking place mainly in the provinces, from the tribal areas in the south, on the border with Pakistan. This is a different fighting force from Mujahideen’s army, which Laila’s brothers are involved in. In the provinces, people are fighting to keep their chauvinist traditions alive, which are against the Communist egalitarian ideal and include repressing women: “‘The only enemy an Afghan cannot defeat is himself,’” Laila’s father, Hakim, tells her prophetically (134). When there is a knock on the door and Laila answers it, a stranger asks to speak with her parents.
Chapter 19 Summary
The stranger is from Panjir and is there to announce the death of Laila’s two brothers. Both of her parents are distraught, but her mother expresses her grief more demonstratively. Laila, who longs to be close to her mother, tries to help her, but at the funeral, the neighborhood women shoo her away, as though it is their responsibility to help Fariba. Mariam attends the funeral dressed in a hijab.
Given that her brothers are much older and Laila does not fully remember them, she finds it difficult “to really feel Mammy’s loss” because it is “hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never really thought of as alive in the first place. Ahmad and Noor had always been like lore to her” (138). This is in sharp contrast to how she feels about Tariq, who is vibrantly present for her and so as she sits beside her mother and “dutifully” mourns her brothers, in her “heart, her true brother was alive and well” (138).
Chapter 20 Summary
During her bereavement, Fariba is increasingly absent-minded, and Laila has to shoulder the bulk of the chores. All of Fariba’s conversation is a eulogy towards her lost boys and Laila has the devastating sensation “that her future was no match for her brothers’ past” (140).
Fariba expresses yearning for a death-like relief; at which point Laila empties a bottle of aspirin into the sink, to minimize risk. However, Fariba says that she will stay alive because she wants to experience the time when the Soviets go home and the Mujahideen return to Kabul in triumph. When that happens, her sons’ deaths will be vindicated.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
As the daughter of city-dwelling, progressive parentswho are supportive of her education, Laila is born into greater opportunities and expectations than Mariam. Laila’s father, Hakim, humbly points out that the current, more egalitarian Soviet Communist regime, which fired him for being part of the old system, will be a place in which his clever daughter can thrive. Symbolically, Laila is born on the night of the Communist Revolution in Afghanistan and so is associated with a new climate of freedom and opportunity: “Women have always had it hard in this country, Laila, but they’re probably more free now, under the communists, and have more rights than they’ve ever had before” (133). This freedom is expressed in the way her schoolteacher, Shanzai, is proud of her lowly peasant origins and says that “women and men were equal in every way,”therefore women should not cover (111). This new movement towards equality has further-reaching consequences in how two-thirds of students at Kabul University were women, studying medicine, law or engineering.
However, there is a strong backlash against gender equality for women and it comes from the tribal Pashtun regions, near the Pakistani border, “where women were rarely seen on the streets and only then in burqa and accompanied by men” (133). There, their identity relies on fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran and the idea that they would take arms against the “godless” forces who were insulting their traditions (133).
Laila’s friendship with a neighborhood boy, Tariq, who treats her as an equal, is another example of a difference in upbringing from Mariam. Intimacy between two children of different genders is another symbol of the tide turning towards egalitarianism. Tariq and Laila are able to share jokes, teasing, and even their vulnerabilities. For example, Tariq shows Laila his amputation stump and answers her questions about it. However, there is also the sense that Tariq, as the male, is able to protect Laila from the harm of neighborhood boys and the sense that Laila, as the female, is more sentimental and able to express her feelings. She notices that “boys treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly” (131). There is also the sense that Laila is already infatuated with Tariq. He is always on her mind and she is aware of his physicality, down to the “light pink birthmark just beneath his left collarbone shaped like an upside-down mandolin” (138).
There is also backlash in Laila’s own neighborhood. She is objectified for her beauty, especially her “yellow hair,” which is a rarity in Afghanistan and thus even at Laila’s age of 9 is subjected to sexually-charged taunting by Khaled and his gang (116). Worse for her, she feels that while her mother takes pride in Laila’s beauty, which is an heirloom from her side of the family, she will never have the value of the two beloved sons who have gone off to fight and die in action. “They had overshadowed her in life. They would now obliterate her in death,” Laila feels, as Fariba becomes the “curator of their lives’ museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor” (140). In the metaphor of Laila as a visitor to the museum of her deceased brothers, Hosseini indicates how little Laila feels that she matters to her mother. All of her fathers’ love and attention cannot obliterate the feelings of lack.
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