A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Housseini

A totally heartbreaking story! Make sure you have a box of tissue when you reach the final chapter of the story. A Thousand Splendid Suns tells the story of two women of different generation. They met, it was luck; they talked, it was by chance; they became friends, it was destiny; they became madu, it was fate; they’ll forever be like mother and daughter, it was a promise.

How hard it was (maybe is) to live in Afghanistan during the war. Not only the war that broke everyone’s hearts but the discrimination (again) towards women. There were many issues that evolve from women. Women had to be in a certain ways, cannot do this, cannot do that, must do this and must do that…even cannot say a word about whom she was to be married. Again, women had to accept any choices from parents and the saddest thing is men can marry whoever they wanted without the girls’ approval… they asked for a hand, parents approved, done! No word from the girl is allowed or necessary.

And that would be the beginning of a tragic life for women in Afghanistan. They became slaves for their husband, the punching bag for their husband and the ‘edible item’ for their husband.

War that happened worsened the situation. Enough that women had married to beasts, now they lost every important person in their life before – parents, siblings, relatives – till they had no one to turn to. And there was no hospital that treated women! New authority, new rules. Women cannot speak, cannot be in public without male relative, cannot work, cannot get any education and the list went on and on.

But amid all this, women can still create a bond with somebody who happened to be in the same circumstances. This way, they create hopes that everything would be back to normal again, where they can live peacefully. A thousand splendid suns symbolize the brightness of their hopes, how optimistic women in Afghanistan were during the war. They endured everything silently, without complain, like rocks in riverbed, silently washed away but never moved.