Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Of demons, kebabs and nightmares...

Khaled Hosseini is a name that makes you think of Afghanistan—o f orchards, of guns and kebabs and most certainly of pain, separation and violence.  We’ve loved his work, but there is a certain cautiousness with which you approach this one, a sense of expected predictability. So here’s another account of war-ravaged Afghanistan and what the Taliban did to it. True, for those who are part of a disaster, the pain can never end. But such is the human mind that too many of another person’s perils fatigue us.  
However, the apprehensions are put to rest soon enough. Time and again, Hosseini reminds us why we have loved him. No doubt, this is a tale of Afghanistan. And true enough, it has grief, suffering, strife. But this is a complex and delicately interwoven tale of nine different lives connected to each other in some strange twist of fate. And no, there is no Taliban. It is, primarily, a story of a brother and sister—twin souls with an inexplicable connection—who are brutally separated in childhood. The book opens with their father narrating a story to the siblings—a story of a man whose little boy is taken away by a  ‘div’ or demon who descends upon their village, and the man’s journey to bring his child back.   It is the story whose echo we hear throughout the book, the story that is to become the tale of the lives of the two main characters, Pari and Abdullah.  Woven intricately into the book are the stories of all those whose lives are in some way, affected or just touched in passing, by the lives of these two.  There is Nabi, their uncle who takes them to Kabul, Nila Wahdati the poet and the rebel,   Markos, the Greek social worker, Parwana, the children’s step mother, Adel who has to confront the truth about his father and Idris and Timur, two brothers who have escaped the terror s that descended upon Afghanistan and made a life for themselves in the US.  
Most of the connections are not immediately apparent.  Though each story is a tale of love and loss, of the myriad ways in which pain works— physical, mental and emotional—every pain is different and unique. While one is a broken skull with the brain tissue protruding from it, another is knowing that what you loved as a clear, beautiful lake was actually a farce, a cover for a bottomless pit of  lives swallowed up. There are unrequited loves, unexpected and surprising—like that of Suleiman Wahdati—and there are connections that take too long to manifest themselves, such as the one between Markos and his mother, and when they do, they break your heart for all the years that have been lost and can never be compensated.
At every point, Hosseini takes you inside the minds of their characters, but there is only so much that is said. What makes its presence felt is mostly what is not said. What you have to see and feel once you are inside those minds. There is an unearthly beauty in the tales spinned by Hosseini. A beauty that reflects

itself in father-daughter rituals of plucking nightmares out of the mind, replacing them with happy dreams, a beauty that seeps through in haunting memories and fading images, a beauty that moves you to tears through an old tin box full of feathers.  A beauty that completes itself in an incomplete reunion, one that leaves a throbbing in your heart and a tear in your eye.