My Reflection of the book : A Thousand Splendid Suns'

 I once read something along the lines of: “Life is never fair. It was never meant to be fair. If you expect your good deeds to be rewarded and others’ wrongdoings to be punished, you are a fool. Life favours the audacious.”

I was reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini at the time, and I believe that thought became the lens through which I understood the story. Sometimes, the ideas and moments that appear before you at a particular point in life feel like notes on the same thread, quietly connecting themselves to one another.

A friend of mine, with whom I was discussing the novel, believed that Laila had everything, while the writer seemed almost cruel to Mariam. My response was this: Laila possessed audacity. She was daring enough to demand what she deserved and to fight for it, whereas Mariam accepted whatever life threw at her.

Part of the reason, perhaps, lies in their upbringing. Mariam had nothing hopeful to look up to. The only other man in her life before Rasheed was just as flawed and disappointing. The absence of love and respect made her believe that she was undeserving of both. Laila, on the other hand, was raised differently. She loved unapologetically in a society that often treated love like a sin. She lived fully and felt deeply. Her father raised her to think, to dream, and to hope for more. She knew what she wanted, and more importantly, she believed she deserved it.

During our discussion, my friend pointed out something else — that Mariam eventually received the one thing she had longed for since childhood: love. And she did. But perhaps the tragedy is that she had never seen enough of life to desire more from it.

Maybe that is what life often does. It gives people what they desire most, but rarely in the way they imagined. Over time, people stop feeling grateful for it, or begin taking it for granted.

As a child, Mariam desperately wished to be a part of Jalil’s everyday life — to sit beside him, to witness his routine, to belong in his world. In a cruel way, that wish did come true. But she stayed near Jalil not because she was wanted there, but because she had nowhere else to go.

Perhaps that is the saddest thing about desires: sometimes the most beautiful wishes become unbearable once they are realised.

Oscar Wild rightly said -

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”