1 Splendid Friendship

So far in A Thousand Splendid Suns we have met two women Mariam and Laila. Mariam is a timid and weak women in her thirty’s. She married her husband, Rasheed, after the death of her mother and has been unable to have any children in the past 20 years. When Rasheed’s second wife Laila is a strong minded, smart women who was the daughter of a professor and also married young after tragedy struck. Both women have lived lives of tragedy and triumph. After Rasheed married Laila the women hated each other and refused to work together or be friends. Laila then became pregnant with her teenage love, who has died, Tariq’s baby, and Rasheed thought it was his. After weeks of avoiding each other Mariam made Laila baby clothes for Laila’s child. Then the two women had tea together and began what will become an incredible friendship. Laila gives birth to a little girl she names Aziza, and Rasheed is disappointed of the child who is a girl. As the days go on the women become closer and begin to hate their lives with Rasheed more and more. Laila slowly begins stealing money from Rasheed and saving it to run away. As she saves enough money to travel out of Afghanistan, she tells Mariam of her plan. In 1994 the two women make the plan to go Pakistan and start a new life. This is very dangerous because traveling alone as women looked suspicious. After failing to leave and getting caught by the police, the two women are returned home. Rasheed beats the two women and locks them in rooms not feeding Mariam, Laila, or the young child Aziza. The women are released, and then two years pass by.  During this period the government in the country is shifting also, in 1994 Dostum, an Afghan general, switched sides in the war and joined Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, together they took over the country. This caused mass violence around the country. Two years later the Taliban entered the country and took over, making new rules primary based around the lives of women.

            This book is fiction and really pretty different from my life. I don’t experience gun fire in the streets, bombings of my house, or the tragic death of my family members. But this book is more than just the struggles that these women go through in their environment, it’s about their friendship. Brought together by tragedy this friendship is creates a bond that is stronger than death. This somehow relates to my life because it reminds me so much of the friendship between by grandmother Lena and her best friend Emma. Emma married Lena’s brother and the two were kind of forced to be friends, just like Laila and Mariam. But as the years went on the two became inseparable. They raised children together, then became empty nesters, played with grandchildren and great grandchildren. The two women lived long lives, but Emma died leaving Lena alone. Lena a widow, who had lost her husband long ago, now had lost her best friend. Lena told everyone of Emma her best friend, and even death could not break this friendship. Which is very similar to Mariam and Laila’s friendship which can survive the beatings of Rasheed, the bombings, and the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.