Long after you’ve turned, reluctantly, the last page of Khaled Hosseini’s latest offering, a thousand echoes ring in your heart, and mind. Just like Amir and Hassan of The Kite Runner and Marriam of A Thousand Splendid Suns , little Abdullah and his baby sister, Pari, in And the Mountains Echoed (Bloomsbury), will carve out a niche in your heart. And compel you to seek out a little corner and clear the lump in your throat, let the tears flow, or hold a loved one’s hand and howl. I did all three…
That is the power, the magic of Hosseini’s writing… the words from his pen flow… like mist in the mountains, water down a deceptively calm river, a sparkling, dancing stream, a swollen mountain brook that ends up as a destructive torrent, or foamy waves of the ocean on the shore.
Just a few pages into the world of Pari, the little fairy with a gap-toothed smile and her ‘Abollah’, and you know this book is going to break your heart. The children have lost their mother but the brother, barely 10, knows that something of hers… her “cheerful devotion, guilelessness, unabashed hopefulness had passed to his little sister. Pari was the only person in the world who would never, could never, hurt him.” For his precious sister, who loves collecting feathers, the little boy walks to another village and trades his shoes for a peacock feather. He returns home with thorns and splinters in his bleeding soles, but the immense joy it gives Pari makes it all worthwhile.
The book begins with Saboor, their father, telling them a gripping story about a
Just like Saboor, Hosseini is a master storyteller and each chapter in this book, which is like a multi-act drama, is related by different players.
full-bodied characters
Nabi, Parwana’s brother, who works in Suleiman Wahadati’s opulent house in Kabul as a cook-cum-chauffer relates one chapter. He is besotted by his cigarette-smoking, stunningly beautiful Mem Sahib Nila, who is trapped in a loveless marriage. While Nabi aches for her, Abdullah, the child, can see through the woman, finding “something deeply splintered” beneath the “makeup and the perfumes and the appeals for sympathy.” Sister Parwana takes over the narrative from Nabi to tell us how she finally lands Saboor, her childhood love, through a dark deed.
By the time Suleiman, the master, passes on, some years after suffering a stroke that sees Nila escaping to Paris (leaving Nabi behind to care for his ill master), the troubled country has passed through savage bouts of violence, and aid workers have come in. Nabi, the new owner, gives the house free of rent to the Greek surgeon Markos, who is helping Afghanistan’s wounded and sick people.
Another foreign aid worker, Amra, manages to interest the visiting Afghan-American physician Idris in the case of little Roshi, whose skull has been broken open, leaving a part of her brain hanging out in a brutal attack on her family. But Idris, a good man, returns home to be engulfed in his day-to-day problems and forgets his promise of getting Roshi’s surgery done in America. Ultimately it is his cousin, the braggard, loud-mouthed Timur — who horrifies Idris by videographing every act of charity in Kabul, flirting with women, and cheating on his wife — who helps the child’s surgery.
Next we get a peek into the life and the world of Markos, and what compels him to leave his thriving practice in plastic surgery to go work in devastated regions like Afghanistan. Hosseini has mastered the art of giving his readers full-bodied characters with a few deft strokes of his pen. Abdullah and Pari’s deceased mother was a “wispy, slim-waisted woman with a puff of hair always spilling from under her scarf”, leaving Abdullah wondering “how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn’t. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes.” But his father’s world was different, unsparing. “Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.”
Captivating, poetic prose
The book grips you with the author’s captivating, poetic prose… Mrs Wahadati hugs her purse “the way a pregnant woman might hold her swollen baby”. The plain Parwana realises that her beautiful twin sister Masooma’s “beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head… she (Masooma) relished the power to derail a man’s thoughts with a single fleeting but strategic smile to make tongues falter for words.”
And then this incisive, searing observation: “It blistered the eyes, beauty like hers.” Walking by her side Parwana sees every day what she has been denied… “every stranger’s eye was a mirror. There was no escape.” What she does to “escape” this oppressive knowledge is nothing short of chilling. Then there is this heart-rending passage after Nila’s death, when Pari suspects she was not her biological child. Ruminates the tortured woman: “What was I supposed to be, growing in your womb — assuming it was even in your womb that I was conceived? A seed of hope? A ticket purchased to ferry you from the dark? A patch for that hole you carried in your heart? If so, then I wasn’t enough. I was no balm to your pain, only another dead end, another burden. But what could you do? You couldn’t go to the pawnshop and sell me.”
Snapshot of Kabul
The narrative is filled with vivid images of a traumatised nation. Idris’s wife is full of questions about Kabul… What is it like? Did he take pictures, video clips? He describes for her the “shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it is like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. Kabul’s vivid, arresting details — the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window. His descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.”
Hosseini’s narrative is full of searing honesty. His writing, his characters and their ruminations, the onset of old age and the different kinds of cruelties it brings… all hold out mirrors to us, his readers. Mirrors that show the tenderness, warmth and generosity of human beings, even while revealing the selfish and cruel streaks, and raising dark and gloomy questions in our heads of what tomorrow may hold. He tells us of aging bodies, disfigured limbs, faces mutilated by man and beast and — worst of all — minds lost in the cloudy mist of uncertainty and lost memory at the most crucial moments of life.
And yet the account, though deeply poignant, is not a deliberate or conscious attempt to wrench out your tears — and that is the most beautiful part of this book. The story is told in such a way that you can see in it glimpses of real-life people and events… joys and triumphs, sorrows and tragedies of people you know. Our world may not be Hosseini’s ravaged Kabul with “1,000 tragedies per square mile”, but in this immensely gifted writer’s protagonists, we can see reflections of our own dreams and nightmares.
Nila tries to explain why she took Pari away from Kabul… “I didn’t want her turned, against both her will and nature, into one of those diligent, sad women who are bent on a lifelong course of quiet servitude, forever in fear of showing, saying or doing the wrong thing. Women who are admired in the West — turned into heroines for their hard lives… women who see their desires doused and their dreams renounced.” And yet, life in Paris cannot make whole a broken Nila. A subtle message on how important our roots are is given in the story of the Shadbagh grape, told more than once. “It grows only in Shadbagh, it is very brittle, very fragile. If you try to grow it in any other place, even the next village, it will wither and die. It will perish. It dies of sadness, people in Shadbagh say, but of course, that is not true. It’s the matter of soil and water.”
I finish the book and mull over this story... would Pari have turned out differently had she not been taken out of her village? How would her story have turned out if she had met Abdullah in the end under different circumstances?
Read this book… it will leave you with a thousand echoes.