This Above all
Splendid sons of Afghanistan
Khushwant Singh

Harami — that seems to be the key word of the most absorbing work of fiction I have read in recent years. The word means bastard. The novel of which it is the key word is A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury). It encapsules the story of Afghanistan over the last 25 years. It is built round two women. The first one is Mariam, the illegitimate child of a maidservant through her master, who has already three wives and nine children. That part of the story is set in Herat. She is married off to Rashid, a cobbler-cum-shoe-shop owner in Kabul. The second one is Leila, who becomes Mariam’s co-wife. She has a sex escapade with her lover Khalid a few days before she is married off to become the cobbler’s second wife.

Nine months later she bears a daughter, Aziza, also a harami (bastard). Before I conclude the story, let me say a few words of my own impression of the country and its people. I went to Afghanistan over 50 years ago on an assignment for UNICEF to write on its medical services in the country. I started with Kabul. The airport was no better than a shed. I had to share the hotel room with my photographer. There were ramshackle bazaars and not a single building was worth seeing. Chaikhanas served lamb or chicken cooked in animal fat (roghan). There was one cinema hall, which showed Hindi films. You couldn’t sit in it without being suffocated by the smell of roghan. Every Friday vehicular traffic like donkey-carts, tongas and taxis came to a halt as roads were taken over by the spillover from mosques from the afternoon namaaz. Fruits like sarda, garma, pomegranates and grapes were the sweetest I had ever tasted. Men — tall and handsome — walked ramrod straight. Women were draped in burqas head to feet.

Everyone was over-courteous in speech. Words like ‘please, thank you (tashakkur) and Ba-maan-e-Khuda’ were used in ample measure. Much embracing and kissing but little warmth. It was the same across the country to Mazhar-e- Sharif, Kunduz, Ghazni, Bamiyan and Herat. What I resented most was being addressed as Lala. Most Afghan Sikhs were money-lenders. Although Kabul nestles in hollow low-lying hills, there was little about the over-sized town which deserved the praise showered on it by Saib-e-Tabriz, which inspired Hosseini to entitle his beautiful novel. One could not count the ‘moons that shimmer on her roof ‘ or the ‘thousand splendid suns that hide behind the walls’.

I returned to Afghanistan three years later and found a swanky new airport, a five star hotel, lots of beautiful women without hijab working in offices, more cars on roads, new schools, colleges and hospitals. I was impressed with the rapid pace of development. I wrote a booklet Aryana to Afghanistan. Aryana was the old name of the country; Afghanistan was what it was shaping up to be — a modern Islamic repubic.

My hopes are belied. Hosseini’s novel tells you why Afghans are split into several ethnic groups — Pakhtoons, Hazaras, Tadjiks, Uzbegs and many others. They speak two languages — Pashto and Farsi. Their clan loyalties are stronger than their nationalism. They come together when foreigners occupy their country. After expelling them, they resume their clan warfares. They drove out the Soviets. They drove out the Americans and Pakistani-armed Mujahideens and the Talibans. Having done that, they resumed going for each other’s throats. Kabul was fair game for all of them in turn. They fired rockets into crowded parts of the city, killing hundreds of innocent men, women and children.

Entrenched on mountainsides, they took potshots at any moving object as target practice. They came into the city, raped women and slaughtered men. The Taliban enforced their medieval codes — every woman was to wear a burqa, no woman could go out alone, girls’ schools were closed down, women forbidden to work outside their hones. Anyone caught for adultery was sentenced to death.

Hosseini tells the grim story through the cobbler Rashid and his two wives—Mariam and Leila. Both girls were in their teens when Rashid, in his forties, acquired them. Mariam was rejected by her own father, saw her mother’s body dangling from a branch of a tree before she was forced into nikah and put in a bus bound for Kabul. She had several miscarriages. So Rashid married Leila without knowing she was pregnant. He ill-treated both of them. They decided to flee to Pakistan with Leila’s children.

They were turned back and handed over to Rashid. He tried to throttle Leila to death. Mariam saved her by clobbering Rashid on the head with a shovel and killing him. Mariam was tried by a Taliban court and
sentenced to death.

She was taken to a football stadium with stands crammed with spectators. Her executioner addressed her courteously:’’ Hamshireh (sister), lower your head." When he hacked it off, the crowd roared Allah-hu-Akbar.

It is as spine-chilling a tale that I have ever read, some of it reminiscent of his first novel, The Kite Runner, about a country that could be great but is not. Mostly, it is about cruelty towards women. The author puts it succinctly: "Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman."

It is hard to believe that Afghanistan also produced the likes of Romi Jamaluddin Afghani, the principal ideologue of Pan-Islamism, its present head — the suave, urbane Hamid Karzai — and an author of the calibre of Khaled Hosseini.

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