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 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
On breaking a piece from her mother Nana’s heirloom Chinese tea set, 5-year-old Mariam is called a harami, a word meaning bastard, that describes her illegitimacy (3): “She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami is “an unwanted thing […] an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance” (4).
Her father, Jalil, on the other hand, who visits her on Thursdays, calls her “his little flower,” makes her feel wanted and tells her stories about the Queen Gauhar Shad and the poet Jami. Mariam listens with “enchantment,” admiring Jalil for his worldly knowledge (5). Nana is scornful, saying that Mariam is not to believe a word Jalil says because he cast them both out of his “‘big fancy house like [they] were nothing to him’” (5). Mariam, however, likes being around Jalil, who makes her feel deserving, even if she has to share him with his three wives and ten legitimate children.
Mariam lives near Herat, her father’s town, but has never been to visit the place where he owns a cinema, three carpet stores and a clothing shop. Nana had been one of his housekeepers, but following her affair with Jalil, was thrown out. Her own father, a lowly stone carver, disowned her, fleeing to Iran. Jalil struck up a quiet deal whereby he sent pregnant Nana off to the kolba, claiming that she forced herself on him. Embittered, Nana warns Mariam that “‘[l]ike a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman” (7).
Chapter 2 Summary
Mariam and Nana live somewhere detached from Herat, in a clearing on the outskirts of Gul Daman, near Nana’s father’s village. Nana calls the kolba Jalil built, in order to atone for his crimes, a “‘rathole’” (9).
Nana tells a story to Mariam of being 15 and betrothed to a young parakeet seller. However, a week before the wedding, a jinn entered Nana’s body. The jinn, a possessive evil spirit in Islamic cultures,took the form of a fit, whereby Nana collapsed suddenly and her body tightened and became rigid as she frothed at the mouth. The suitor’s superstitious family were spooked and called off the wedding. Nana had no more suitors.
There are rival narratives of Mariam’s birth and Mariam prefers Jalil’s version to Nana’s. Nana claims that she gave birth to Mariam alone on the kitchen floor and had to use a knife to cut the cord, while Jalil says that he made sure Nana gave birth in hospital. Even the choice of her name, Mariam, has two narratives. Mariam is the name of Nana’s mother and a tuberose, a flower Jalil pronounces lovely. When Mariam asks if the tuberose is Jalil’s favorite flower, his reply is revealing of his conflicted loyalties: “‘Well, one of’” (12).
Chapter 3 Summary
When once a month two of Mariam’s half-brothers arrive with a wheelbarrow of provisions, Nana greets them with rocks and insults. Mariam’s loyalty is to her mother, though she feels sorry for the boys and offers them water.
Generally, Nana and Mariam lead a solitary life, but the former tolerates a select few visitors, including Habib Khan, Gul Daman’s leader and Bibi jo, a wife of a stone carver who had been friends with Nana’s father. Then there is Mariam’s favorite, Mullah Faizullah, an elderly village Koran tutor, who comes to teach Mariam to pray and read from the Koran. He also tells her religious stories with an element of the fantastical, such as finding the words Allah and Akbar when he carved open a watermelon outside the Blue Mosque.
Mariam learns to trust Mullah Faizullah and tells him about her wish to go to school and be taught like Jalil’s legitimate daughters, who go to the Mehri School for Girls in Herat. Mullah says he will have a word with her mother, but Nana’s response is that Mariam will be set up for disappointment because the only skill a woman needs in life is “tahamul. Endure” (18). Moreover, Nana is concerned that Mariam will be teased at school for being illegitimate.
Chapter 4 Summary
Mariam looks forward to Jalil’s visits so much that she is beset by some terrible anxiety that something will prevent him stopping by on Thursday. When Jalil does arrive, knowing she is being watched by Nana, Mariam has to moderate her delight, but she cannot resist running into his arms and being thrown up into the air by him.
Despite Nana’s rants against him behind his back, she is well-presented, “subdued and mannerly” for the occasions of his visits (22) . Then Mariam and Jamil go fishing and he reads her Herat’s newspaper, where she gets a glimpse of “museums and soccer, and rockets that orbited the earth” (23). It is as though “every Thursday, Jalil brought a piece of the world with him to the kolba” (23).
After the visits, Mariam misses Jalil terribly and fantasizes about living with him in his house as his legitimate daughter. She entertains the thought of telling him one day.
Chapter 5 Summary
In spring of 1974, when Mariam is about to turn 15, her wish for a birthday present is that her father will take her to see a cartoon at his cinema. He tries to get out of it, offering her another gift, but reluctantly agrees.
Nana is besides herself, worrying that her daughter will abandon her. But though she stays quiet, Mariam is by this stage resentful that Nana keeps trying to keep her sheltered, as though, by some spite, her mother is “afraid I might find the happiness you never had” (28).
Mariam waits by the stream at their agreed meeting point, but Jalil does not turn up. Thinking something has come up, Mariam heads down into Herat and finds that she is “unexpectedly, marvelously an ordinary person here” (30).
However, when she finds Jalil’s house, the chauffeur greets her and replies that Jalil has been called up on urgent business. He offers to take her home, but she refuses and spends the night outside the house, watching what goes on inside. Someone brings her rice and bread and in the morning she is shaken awake by the chauffeur, who says that she has “made a scene” and that she should go (33). Mariam insists she is going to wait for Jalil, and the chauffeur says that it is Jalil’s order that she should be taken home. Mariam escapes and goes through the front gates, and into Jalil’s garden. Kicking and screaming, the chauffeur loads her into the car. She thinks about how she will tell Nana that she was right all along. But Nana has hung herself from the drooping branches of a weeping willow tree.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
From the outset, using third-person, past-tense, the novel introduces its protagonist, Mariam, through the lens of illegitimacy. The child of a wealthy man, Jamil, and his housekeeper, Nana, Mariam is obscured from the world in a remote kolba her father builds out of penance. While Mariam receives the Nana’s tough love alongside Jamil’s weekly attentions and Mullah Faizullah’s teachings, she learns that she is a social pariah.
An example of Mariam’s ostracization is the way that she is kept outside the gates of her father’s house and never allowed entrance; she is fed like a vagrant, with a plate of bread and rice outside. This treatment is a sign that Mariam is not recognized as a member of Jamil’s family.
Both Mariam’s parents bear responsibility for the sin of conceiving her. Thus, Jamil enacts penance in providing for his illegitimate issue and her mother. Nana, meanwhile, entertains the morbid idea that if her father had been the old-fashioned patriarch with enough dil, or heart, he would have performed an honor killing for the shame she brought on his family. However, despite the fact that “her only sin is being born,” Mariam is also burdened with the shame for her parents’ transgression(4). Her illegitimacy is a curse that brings suffering by its very fact, everything from causing her mother pain in an arduous, two-day labor, to her “treacherous” abandonment of her mother when she is intent on her pilgrimage to Herat (27).
While it is clear that Nana loves Mariam deeply, she seeks to protect her by continually reminding her of her lowly, illegitimate status. Nana believes that it is treacherous and dangerous for Mullah Faizullah and Jamil to encourage Mariam’s imagination, dreams and sense of entitlement to a wider world through their stories. Still, Nana’s dire warnings do not penetrate into Mariam’s spirit. For a while, she has solidarity with her mother, doing things such as telling her half-brother he has a “mouth shaped like a lizard’s ass,” as he is bringing them their rations, when she would prefer to be offering him water (14). However, eventually, on the eve of her 15th birthday, Mariam turns on Nana, believing that she has an envious “wretched heart” (28). It is only when she experiences first-hand rejection from her father that Mariam takes Nana’s teachings to heart.
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