A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaleed Hosseini, a known writer for his book “The Kite Runner” which eventually turned into a successful movie, has given another book “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. The book is very well written keeping the common man in mind. The flow of each individual’s life and incidences in their lives does not make you realize that you are reading a story. There is no logorrhea anywhere in the book. You are so much into the book to let yourself stop reading. It was hard for me at times to close it and get back to my other important work.

There were events in the book, so descriptive and so narrative that they made me close my eyes and imagine the scene and feel it as if I am standing right when it is happening. I can see the characters but they cannot see me, as if my invisible mode is ON.

The story has revolved around many characters who are somehow related to each other, if not directly then indirectly. The young girl longing to meet her father and sitting on his doorsteps who does not know what is coming her way. What comes to her becomes an integral part of her. The story flows sinuously to keep the interest of the reader. You do feel the feeling of every character as it progresses in the story.

The eldritch behavior of a husband, the alacrity of group of young girls, the bucolic existing surprisingly in the city of Kabul still not a part of it; the confabulations (plausible but imagined memory) of a wife longing for her husband’s approval of everything, of a girl waiting for her beloved to come back, of a man and woman to do something in spite of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the assiduous love of two young souls; all of it but one thing that left me thinking, in one story. What happened to the characters that were left at the end? What did they do with the box that was left and the money in it?

It left me scripting my own story about what could possibly happen to them, how they ameliorate their lives in future, how the writer imagines the war to come to an end. All these thoughts and imaginations, I wanted the writer to write more. I wish he comes up with another book that continues this story and gives it an unquestionable ending.