“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls”, a line from Khaled Hosseini’s Thousand Splendid Suns came across one of the posts while I was surfing Pinterest. And today at this point when I contemplate on my journey with the book and the line it’s all different.
I’m a woman, who loved to read. I loved it when I read Miriam’s and Laila’s tales. But all I wanted was to evade the reality when I read the news reports lately. The world has been wild lately and at one point we all might have had fits of sympathy and pain for the women of Afghanistan.
But I’m not here to add on another article to the scores out there pouring sympathy, calling out the patriarchal bigwigs, or even a reinterpreted take on the book. It is all about my story, a literature student, who fell in love with a book, a line, but how, now it is having a grappling hold on my mere existence as a being when the same story turned into an actual reality. I’m here to decode the dismantled definitions and politics, I assumed to be of a reader, a writer, a woman.
At the time I saw the Pinterest post, I was someone at the initial steps of falling in love with reading. Having had a huge ocean of books and writers to be read and explored, Hosseini got into the list. Kite Runner was the first book of his I read. That was because the book store didn’t have a copy of Thousand Splendid Suns. Amir and Hassan, their peaceful kite fighting days through Kabul, all took me to an emotionally overwhelming state.
I loved the book, I cried over it. The book scintillated the many emotions and feelings that constituted the emotional being I was. Like any normal reader, I went for the next book, Thousand Splendid Suns. Up until that point, I read all books by being a person, but then Miriam and Laila, changed it all. For the first time, I flipped through the pages, read through it, cried through it, all by being a woman. The book slithered in deep and wide, all because in spite of being a privileged woman out there, somewhere in the farther corner of the world, it all felt painful.
This isn’t a cheesy line, but the book for sure broke my heart and I fell in love with the writer Hosseini was, for conveying human emotions in the most intricate manner.
But then it was all a story for me, a story which touched me deeply, a story that left a mark. It for sure, instilled pain. But never in my wildest imaginations, I could think it through the perspective of a Laila or a Miriam, whose lives were so dark that one could never even count the moons that shimmered on their roofs or the thousand splendid suns that hid behind their walls.
To be honest more than the pain in those deeply poetic lines, I was wooed by the aesthetic beauty and deeper conglomeration of the words and the arrangement of the sentence. Probably it might have been the safe cocoon of my reading chair, and all the unrecognized privileges, I experienced as a human being, as a woman, a student, a reader, that made me do it.
We all yearn for the many stories out there, but oftentimes we are ignorant of the screeching reality that actually exists for the people who have lived through such tales. We would never probably feel it all in its essence unless we swap ourselves with those realities. Leaving the book there, tagging it as one of my favorites, and Khaled Hosseini as one of my most dear writers, I stepped onto many other stories and tales.
But it changed a few weeks back when the news from Afghanistan, flooded the newspapers and my phone notifications tingled. The many news reports and posts crying out for the women out there shattered my perception of being a human, a woman, a reader, a lover of books.
The first thing that hit me hard was my hypocrisy as a reader, my hypocrisy towards books, my hypocritical perception of reality. I realized the privilege I have been given and that further pained my conscience. The very feeling of anger, helplessness, and pain entrapped me, when the very tale I cried for, was unfolding into a true reality in the same world I too was existing.
Yet, I read the news reports, saw the video clips, and read the tweets, from the very same comfortable reading chair of mine. I scrolled through the screens, but this time with bewilderment. All I wanted was to keep myself away from the news reports and posts. I couldn’t bear the pain it brought in. The fact that women out there were living a reality that turned nightmarish all of a sudden was a hard one to bear. A reality where they were wondering if it would soon be a darker one with the changing moons and suns turning into a passive, ignored reality.
Past all these things, perceptions changed for me. I have entered into a realm, where I’m still questioning the politics of myself as a responsible reader, my existence as a woman, my freedom, and my privileges. It was wrong on my part for admiring the aestheticism of the novel than contemplating the actualities of its realities. But now at this point when I have corrected myself, I’m still a helpless reader.
Neither do I have answers nor do I have solutions, for all happening out there. All I know is my definition of a writer and reader has changed and now I’m left with a chasm for the right definitions. I would never probably decode the politics of being a reader or the politics of who a writer is.
Because at this point, we all are mere helpless beings. But then I do have a definition for a woman, they are also beings who have equal rights like any being out there to count the moons, shimmering on the roofs and feel the splendid suns by standing in front of the walls, bereft of any barriers, as the title of Hosseini’s books says.