As most of the tales coming from
Afghanistan goes (of course I mean Khaled Hosseini), this too is a heart
wrenching story of two couples set in war-torn, Taliban governed Kabul,
Afghanistan. It paints a terrible and cruel life under the Taliban regime – it
investigates the effect of Islamic fundamentalism and unchecked violence in the
lives of ordinary people.
The book is unrelenting in its
depiction of human degradation; it begins with the execution of a woman by
stoning in public and it ends in the same way too. The story happens in between
these two public executions. It tells the tale of Mohsen and his beautiful wife
Zunaira, whose lives are destroyed systematically by the Taliban regime. Mohsen
had once dreamt of going into the diplomatic service and his wife, who was born
into a prominent household and had been a lawyer who advocated for women’s
rights before the Taliban regime brought an end to all of it. Since Zunaira
refuses to wear the burqa, which is essential for a woman to step outside under
the Shari’a law, she is mostly confined to her dilapidated house. Her diatribe
against wearing the burqa by force resonates across the pages:
“I refuse to wear a burqa. Of all
the burdens they’ve put on us, that’s the most degrading….it cancels my face
and takes away my identity and turns me into an object…If I put that damned
veil on, I’m neither a human being nor an animal, I ‘m just an affront, a
disgrace , a blemish that has to be hidden.”
Mohsen, her loving husband, also undergoes a lot of painful
and humiliating circumstances that leads him to question his identity, his
beliefs and his sanity. He finds it shocking that one day, taken by the crowd he participates
in stoning the ‘prostitute’ in the public execution. He is devastated as to
what has come over him and confides it to Zunaina, who finds herself in shock
to as what her husband had done. She understands that “they are not anything
anymore”, they had forfeited their humanity when they didn’t defend it against
the mullahs and Talibans who imposed a regressive regime.
Another
story runs parallel to theirs – that of Atiq, a jailer and his ailing wife,
Musarrat. Her illness has doomed her to certain death, even the doctors having
given up hope. This leads Atiq to question his duty, his obligations and his
God. His brooding silence and inner thoughts are revealed to the reader and
paints a picture of a cynical and tired man. It is a startling revelation when
one hears his friend’s advice when he reveals to him that his wife is beyond
cure. The advice of his thrice-married friend is cringe worthy, “it’s simple…divorce
her….you don’t owe her anything..she has little significance outside of what
you represent for her.” Though Atiq has no idea how to help her or himself, he
firmly knows he will do no such thing. Mussarat , his wife, is in constant
pain, and seems like to be in last stages of cancer , but even then realizes
the workings of her husband’s mind – she cooks and cleans so that he isn’t disgusted
by the untidy house.
The
story of these two couples intertwine at a devastating climax, with their
destinies becoming inexplicably
intertwined. I believe I will reveal too much of the story’s end if I continue
and hence will bring my review to a close. This book was difficult to read in
terms of the fact that all that happens is painful to accept to be the truth.
But yet, it is a world where the Taliban thugs roam the streets with whips and
the penalty for truth is death. In this unforgiving place it is in fact the men
who crumble fastest. It is the housebound women - Zunaira and Musarrat, Atiq's
fiery dying wife - who fight back.Hence the name of the book - the 'swallows' of Kabul. As Maureen Freely justly states, “they're
caught in a man-made plot: the end of the novel is not what should have
happened but what we ought to have known was inevitable.”
A note on the author: Yasmina Khadra (in Arabic it means ‘green
jasmine’) is the pseudonym of a former Algerian army officer named Mohamed
Mou-lessehoul. Yasmina also happens to be his wife’s name. He chose to write
under a false name since he was still in the army when he wrote his first
novel, so he used an assumed (and feminine) name to circumvent the military
censors. He writes his novels in French and this is his third novel in English
(translated by John Cullen). It was the first time I came across an author
choosing a feminine pseudonym to get published, and that itself speaks volumes
for what is happening in war-ravaged Afghanistan today.
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| "Don't ask me to become something less than a shadow, an anonymous thing rustling around in a hostile place." - The Swallows of Kabul |
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