A Thousand Splendid Suns

Mariam is summoned downstairs to her father and his three wives, who give her “thin, tolerant smiles” (46). They announce that she has a betrothed, a 45-year-old widowed shoemaker from Kabul named Rasheed. Mariam begs Jalil not to do this to her, but it is the will of his wives, who have been disgraced by Mariam’s birth and feel that marrying her off would “erase the last trace of their husband’s scandalous mistake” (48). Rasheed, it is announced, is already on his way. Mariam is disgusted by the thought of being married to a man she doesn’t know, performing household “chores” for him as well as the “painful acts of perversity” Nana has warned her of (49). As she pleads with Jalil again, he becomes defensive and says “‘Goddamn it, Mariam, don’t do this to me” (49). She is then escorted to her room and the door is locked behind her. 

The following day, Mariam is forced to greet Rasheed, who is tall, “broad-bellied and broad-shouldered, stooping in the doorway” (50). She can barely look at him and a mullah she does not recognize explains that the rituals of the nikka, the marriage ceremony, have been sped up, in order to accommodate Rasheed’s bus tickets. The mullah asks her three times whether she wishes to be married to Rasheed. Only on the third time, after a glance at her father, does she say she wants to be married. Mariam finds Rasheed repulsive; he reeks of tobacco, with yellow-brown nails “like the inside of a rotting apple” (50).

The next day, while Rasheed is waiting in a bus bound for Kabul, Jalil accompanies Mariam, telling her of all the wonders to be experienced in Kabul. Mariam is furious, simply imagining how he would walk alongside the bus “unscathed, spared” and voices her disillusionment with him (54). When, racked with guilt, Jalil says that he will visit Mariam in Kabul, she implores him not to bother, feeling fully how she has been sacrificed in order to save her father’s honor. 

It is early evening before Mariam arrives at Rasheed’s fading blue house on a narrow, unpaved road. She has to pay attention to understand him because she is unaccustomed to the Kabuli dialect of his Farsi. Entering the house, she is overwhelmed with a sense of unfamiliarity: “Pangs of longing bore into her, for Nana, for Mullah Faizullah, for her old life” (58). Rasheed says that he prefers to sleep alone and offers Mariam the guest room, where he says he has planted some tuberoses for her on the windowsill. He asks Mariam if she fears him, asking in a “slyly playful” way (59). She says no. He leaves her in her room and closes the door behind her, leaving her with her suitcase and tuberoses.

Mariam hardly leaves her room the first few days, waiting until Rasheed has left home to look about the utensils of her new life. She reminisces about her old life with rose-tinted glasses, thinking of how she and Nana would sleep on the kolba’s roof on hot summer nights and her lessons with Mullah Faizullah. “But it was with the sun’s westward crawl that Mariam’s anxiety really ratcheted up” because she contemplates that Rasheed might finally make sexual advances on her (62). He comes home, tells her about his day and leaves. One night, he notices that she still has not unpacked her suitcase and announces that by the next day he expects her to begin behaving like a wife and not imagine that he is a hotel-keeper. He chastises her about her crying.

The next morning, Mariam unpacks and, drawing water from the well, cleans the house and makes bread the way Nana showed her. Then she sets out for the communal tandoor, following a host of women, many of whom are complaining about their husbands.

Soon, a woman named Fariba recognizes Mariam as Rasheed’s young bride and invites her to take tea. She is overwhelmed by the attention and, turning the wrong way, gets lost on her own street. She retches against a wall, but later makes daal for her husband, which he likes.

However, he is carrying a brown paper bag from which he removes a sky-blue burqa. He complains about the way “soft” husbands allow their wives to be exposed, caring nothing for their family’s honor (69). He mentions Fariba and her schoolteacher husband, Hakim, as objects of disapproval. He announces that he is a much harder man, that for him, “a woman’s face is her husband’s business only,” and threatens that he will spill blood with “one wrong word, one improper look” (69).