The first two movies I ever saw that had a lasting impression on me were Babel (2006) and Crash (2004). Crash is an oft-debated Best Picture winner (often landing on blog lists of movies that should not have won), while Babel won only a minor Oscar for music. I was unaware of both films until they had come out on DVD, but I had heard that they were excellent and impactful. Thematically, both films are about "six degrees of separation," and how a whisper on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other. I can't claim to be a cinephile or anything, but that was the first time I had seen films that were so innovative. The way they told individual stories that told a bigger picture of tragedy and survival caused a shiver in my soul. There are entire religions and philosophical works devoted to interconnectedness. We don't often contemplate how our actions, however small, will affect those around us, yet each decision we make can change our lives or the lives of others.
That, in a nutshell, is the format of Khaled Hosseini's latest novel. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different individual, but they're all related either directly or obliquely to Saboor and his children, Abdullah and Pari, who are the main characters in the book. The first chapter is Abdullah's story. He brings us right to the night before his father took him and his sister to Kabul. Saboor is a fantastic storyteller who tells his son the tale of a malevolent div (cross between a bird a gargoyle) who once terrorized the Afghan countryside, offering an ultimatum to one family from each village: the family had to select a child to be given to the div or the div would kill all of the children in the house. The div had visited other villages before finally landing in Shadbagh. The man in the story, Baba Ayub, had five children, so when the div selected his family, he could not choose and instead left it up to chance. When it was revealed that the family would sacrifice his favorite son, Qais, Baba Ayub was devastated. Months after the div had departed, Baba Ayub was still depressed, till one day, he decided to seek out the mythical creature and exact revenge. After trudging through the desert for days, he came upon a magnificent mansion and called out to the div who answered the door. Amused, the div promised he would fight Baba Ayub if the old man would allow him to show him something. The div led Baba Ayub through the house till they stood before a gigantic window where, down below, all the kidnapped children could be seen running and playing in a gorgeous garden. Turning to Baya Ayub, the div offered him an ultimatum: take his son back to a life of poverty and hard labor, or allow him to stay, oblivious to the outside world. Baya Ayub was torn, but he ultimately decided to leave Qais with the div. Before he left, the div gave him a special potion. The potion made him forget what he had seen and discussed with the div and he lived out the rest of his days without the pain of remembering the loss of his favorite son.
The reason I took the time to summarize that story is because it's a reference point for the rest of the book, which consists of stories spanning time and physical divides. Everyone is connected and everyone's choices have consequences that eventually come full circle.
My favorite parts of the book came towards the end, when the focus is less on the frenetic drama of the post-9/11 Middle East, and the story returns to Abdullah and Pari in their old age. The back end of the book was all about reunions and reconciliation. It's not difficult to follow that the book, and all of it's characters, are a more elaborate true-life version of the tale that Saboor told his children. In a way, the father tells the story then, through the chance encounters of related and unrelated individuals, becomes the story. Throughout the book, you quickly realize that it is better to assume that nothing is permanent. We don't live as long or as fulfilling a life as we dream that we will, we can never assume that what we have or who we are today will stay constant. We are all born of flesh, we eventually turn to dust, and every second of our lives brings us closer to revelations, disappointments, triumphs and contentment. It's strangely calming to find
Favorite Quotes:
Chapter 8
"I think a lot about Thalia, sitting on the rock, looking out at the sea. I sense something deep inside me drawing me in, tugging at me like an undertow. I want to give in to it, be seized by it. I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who I am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin."
In this scene, Markos Varvaris is gazing at an old photograph from his childhood. Thalia was his childhood friend, a girl whose movie star mother abandoned her because her face was deformed. When they grew up, Markos became a plastic surgeon, while Thalia stayed in Tinos with Markos's mother. This quote is really beautiful. When I read it, I felt an instant connection to the idea of stripping off everything familiar, everything you've known, everything you've become in your life, everything you thought you were, for an ideal. Maybe the ideal is just a hope, or maybe it's a dream that could only come to fruition in an alternate reality. The ideal is powerful in the way that it provides the possibility of escape and rebirth as something new, yet there is an element of real life that keeps you grounded in resignation that the dream might never come true. For Markos, the ideal is Thalia and a life of comfort and familiarity on Tinos. After running successful practices around the world, Markos set off for Afghanistan where he developed a clinic for treating injured civilians. In the most challenging moments of his life, Markos would look at the photograph and he'd find a temporary oasis, the fantasy of a life of comfort.
"Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly."
This quote is Markos reflecting on the superfluous nature of beauty. As a plastic surgeon, Markos saw a stark and disturbing difference between the necessary surgical work of people injured in war and the cosmetic procedures demanded from the rich. Growing up with Thalia was the most influential experience of his childhood. It motivated him to become a doctor, but he also became jaded towards beauty. Some people are born with it, some people seek to manufacture it and some people could care less, yet it is an ideal sought universally by cultures around the world. Markos recognized that internal qualities did not seem to matter as much as external appearances and that realization disgusted him. The woman with the most beautiful soul and endless strength, Thalia, had a facial deformity which would forever limit her opportunities.
"It's a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But what really guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want."
In this scene, Markos is talking to his mother. He had come home to visit her and he wanted to discuss the possibility of staying with her while she fought her degenerative illness. His mother dismissed the sentiment because she knew why he left. She also wanted him to know that she saw him bound for bigger things, and that what he could accomplish through his work was more important than what he could do for her. He left partly because he wanted to escape the confines of small island life, but mostly he was trying to shake off the weight of his mother and Thalia. Both oppressed him unconsciously, in their own way: his mother was a domineering figure who he thought took up everyone else's cause but his, while Thalia was a depressing symbol of unfulfilled potential. This quote describes my current situation perfectly, and it's a good filter with which to sort through motivations. When I read the quote, I immediately thought about my own ambitions. Do I want to live in New York City because I truly love the city, or do I want to leave because I'm running away from something in Hawaii? Do I want to have a career in medicine because I want to help people/because I believe in natural healing, or because I don't want to disappoint my parents? As easy as it seems to answer those questions, it's much more complicated. The answer is concealed by years of buried and confusing direction and misdirection. One thing I find interesting retrospectively is that Markos's mother didn't say whether or not being motivated by what one doesn't want is better than being motivated by what one does want. You could argue either way about the power of intent, denial and external forces.
"I remembered how, as a boy, I would stew over all the things Mama wouldn't do, things other mothers did...Those things were true enough. But, all these years, I'd been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. This was her gift to me...She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than I did the sun shining on me."
This quote really spoke to me. The relationship that Markos had with his mother is almost exactly like the one I had with mine growing up. As a kid, one of the hardest things to be is appreciative of your parents' every day efforts. I was taught and grew up in a fast-paced environment, and I always remember having (not sure if it was instilled or not) a "more, more, more" attitude. I was, in every way, a blessed kid, but I didn't show as much appreciation as I should have. To this day, she reminds me that I was downright rude at times and suspects that I did it on purpose, which is untrue. (In actuality, I know I wasn't a calculating kid. I was rushed, maybe, and openly admitted that I didn't have time for emotional moments, but I can see now that I didn't cherish their efforts or those moments when they came through for me.) At the very core of what my parents gave me, though, was the confidence that they loved me and wouldn't give me up for the world. I suppose having two loving parents who move earth and sky might be rare nowadays, and I didn't become aware of that until I grew up, until I matured and had life experiences. While Markos volunteered in Afghanistan, I dealt with "reality" when I came to UH-Manoa. Both Markos and I realized how lucky we were when the blinders were ripped off, so to speak, and we saw the real world. This quote really spoke to me because both Markos and I took a long time to realize that what we had in our parents were much more meaningful and significant than we thought growing up.
Markos's mother has Lou Gehrig's disease and his friend, Thalia, has held a prism up to the light for them to see.
"Look at that, Markos!" Mama says, grinning unabashedly with delight like a schoolgirl. I have never before seen her smile this purely, this guilelessly.
We sit, the three of us, watching the trembling little rainbows on my mother's hands, and I feel sadness and an old ache, each like a claw at my throat.
"You've turned out good. You've made me proud, Markos."
I am fifty-five years old. I have waited my entire life to hear those words. Is it too late now for this? For us? Have we squandered too much for too long, Mama and I? Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we don't know how ill suited we have been for each other. Less painful that way. Perhaps better than this belated offering. This fragile, trembling little glimpse of how it could have been between us. All I will beget is regret, I tell myself, and what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
And yet when my mother says, "Isn't it beautiful, Markos?" I say to her, "It is, Mama. It is beautiful," and as something begins to break wide open inside me I reach over and take my mother's hand in mine.
There is a reason that this chapter spoke to me so deeply. It was about a mother and son, and their tenuous relationship, exacerbated by years of conflict and pressure. In the last moments of his mother's conscious life (Lou Gehrig's disease will eventually render her immobile then unconscious), she says outright what was previously unspoken. I saw a lot of myself in this chapter. It was about redemption and a rekindled maternal relationship that the son had, for so long, tried to run away from. He kept seeking greener pastures abroad, not realizing how beautiful his side of the world really was. The chapter was also about family. At the end of the day, I know I'll always have my family. Even when the world seems so big or impossible to conquer, there's always a tiny group of people who have my back. Markos wasn't a perfect son, but he came back when his mother needed him most.
Chapter 9 "'Everything will remind me of you.'
It was in the tender, slightly panicky way he spoke these words that I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast and permanent as the sky, and that it would always bear down upon me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor, even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself."
In this scene, Abdullah, now an old man, has a daughter named Pari who is an aspiring art student. When it came time for Pari to decide on a college, Abdullah was diagnosed with dementia. At that pivotal moment in her life, her father says the above quote, which leads Pari to choose home to take care of her father. What spoke to me in this chapter was the verbal and nonverbal queues that parents often communicate to their kids, either intentionally or not. In so much as parents want what is best for their kids, I think they also consider what is best for themselves, especially when they're faced with a health crisis. It's hard for kids (i.e. me speaking from experience) to consider the tradeoff that ill parents face when they decide to mention that they're sick and might need help. On the one hand, I bet parents want to see their kids go out in the world, flourish and achieve their dreams, but at the same time, who else can they ask for help as their abilities are reduced? And shouldn't a sick parent tell their kids that they're sick, rather than hide the fact? My parents both have their share of health problems, and the decision to devote part of my life to helping them is not as simple as saying we're blood related. As much as I feel I owe them and want to help them, what I'd be sacrificing is my hopes/dreams/etc. but also my youth, the prime time of my life. The question of where to draw the line between pursuing my own self interests and doing for my parents what I feel I owe them is always blurry. It's also an awkward conversation to have because communicating what I feel can come across as disloyal or insensitive. Everything they say to me would automatically make me feel bad, even if they're telling me to go out and leave. It's very difficult to tell whether they actually feel that way or are saying so out of duty or a sense of obligation. I understood what Pari was going through because I can feel that crossroads coming for me too. I am already familiar with the kind of overwhelming, sometimes smothering love that she referred to.
"Mama was elegant and talented. She read books and had many strong opinions and always she was telling them to people. But she also had very deep sadness. All of my life, she gave me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari."
In this scene, Pari (Abdullah's sister, whom he was separated from when they were children) recalled her adopted mother, Nila Wahdati, for Pari (Abdullah's daughter, named in memory of his sister). While the reader goes three fourths of the way through the book before revisiting Nila, we first get a glimpse of her sad existence through the eyes of Nabi, Pari's uncle and chauffeur for the Wahdati family in Kabul. Nabi was in love with Nila but was only able to admire her from afar because she was married to his employer, Suleiman Wahdati. As it turns out, Suleiman had always loved Nabi from afar, which Nila knew and eventually convinced her to leave her husband for Paris. Because of her sham marriage, tumultuous childhood and fertility problems, Nila had a lot of emotional issues and eventually drank herself to death. Of all the characters in the book, Nila felt the most distinct to me. She had her own personality and identity that didn't depend on any one other character. Everyone she lived or interacted with were, as Nabi realized, only temporarily part of her orbit. It was because of her apparent selfishness that she left devastation in her wake, yet she was morally complicated, empty and lonely. Because of the trauma of her childhood and early adulthood, Nila took the route of self-harm and she was unable to escape the fate bestowed upon her by others. It struck a chord with me that Nila's greatest joy--the adoption of her daughter, Pari--was also a reminder of her greatest pain, being unable to conceive. As her issues escalated, Nila turned her daughter into a landfill for her emotional overrun. It's one thing to have a parent who is also your best friend, and it's another to have a best friend who happens to be your parent. I admire parents who can be best friends with their kids, but I frown upon parents who play the best friend role first (i.e. Dina and Lindsay Lohan). Emotional and mental damage seems inevitable to me when parents rely on their kids to heal or serve purposes that only an adult friend or spouse can. No kid should have to do that because of the burden it imposes. In the case of Nila, however, I felt her pain more than I felt Pari's. Pari was conflicted but she saw the pain in her adopted mother and felt empathy. Nila, in all her selfishness, was manipulative of Pari in the latter years of her life, but Pari couldn't turn away, even though she knew what was happening.
Pari 1 (Abdullah's sister): "Maybe you should think about finding professional help, no?"
Pari 2 (Abdullah's daughter): "I know, but not yet. I want to take care of him as long as I can."
Pari 1: "I understand that."
Pari 2 (thinking): I am not sure she does. I don't tell her the other reason. I can barely admit to myself. Namely, how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me, what I will do with myself, when Baba is gone. All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath. The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back."
This quote is an interesting observation about human interdependency and the intricacies of the parent-offspring bond. When we think about our life plans, it's always easier to achieve our goals if we don't have others to take care of. Biologically, however, something about attachment links us to our parents/parental figures or other members of society. We take care of each other, and time that could be devoted to furthering our own wellbeing or that of our genes is spent assisting the old, diseased or disabled, or someone unrelated at all. It's also interesting to think about the psychological attachments we create when we begin to incorporate caring for others in our daily routines and as part of our identities. Eventually, they become part of us and maybe we can't picture ourselves without them, even when our roles are no longer supplementary care and it starts inhibiting other ambitions. I hesitate when making the comparison, but the reliance of a sick parent on their child (something I can relate to), is almost like a drug dependency for the child. The child may want to leave, but can't leave the parent to suffer, while the parent has a duty to feign independence.
"Je pouvais oublier. I still had the luxury of forgetting. He did not."
How ironic this quote was. While Abdullah was haunted his whole life by the separation from his sister, Pari was the one who, though unable to remember much from her childhood with her brother, in the end, came face to face with the truth and would have to die with it on her mind. In a way, brother and sister wrote the beginning and ending of the book through their experiences. They were more than just close blood relatives, they were two halves of the same saga.
Rating: A
My favorite parts of the book came towards the end, when the focus is less on the frenetic drama of the post-9/11 Middle East, and the story returns to Abdullah and Pari in their old age. The back end of the book was all about reunions and reconciliation. It's not difficult to follow that the book, and all of it's characters, are a more elaborate true-life version of the tale that Saboor told his children. In a way, the father tells the story then, through the chance encounters of related and unrelated individuals, becomes the story. Throughout the book, you quickly realize that it is better to assume that nothing is permanent. We don't live as long or as fulfilling a life as we dream that we will, we can never assume that what we have or who we are today will stay constant. We are all born of flesh, we eventually turn to dust, and every second of our lives brings us closer to revelations, disappointments, triumphs and contentment. It's strangely calming to find
Favorite Quotes:
Chapter 8
"I think a lot about Thalia, sitting on the rock, looking out at the sea. I sense something deep inside me drawing me in, tugging at me like an undertow. I want to give in to it, be seized by it. I want to give up my bearings, slip out of who I am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin."
In this scene, Markos Varvaris is gazing at an old photograph from his childhood. Thalia was his childhood friend, a girl whose movie star mother abandoned her because her face was deformed. When they grew up, Markos became a plastic surgeon, while Thalia stayed in Tinos with Markos's mother. This quote is really beautiful. When I read it, I felt an instant connection to the idea of stripping off everything familiar, everything you've known, everything you've become in your life, everything you thought you were, for an ideal. Maybe the ideal is just a hope, or maybe it's a dream that could only come to fruition in an alternate reality. The ideal is powerful in the way that it provides the possibility of escape and rebirth as something new, yet there is an element of real life that keeps you grounded in resignation that the dream might never come true. For Markos, the ideal is Thalia and a life of comfort and familiarity on Tinos. After running successful practices around the world, Markos set off for Afghanistan where he developed a clinic for treating injured civilians. In the most challenging moments of his life, Markos would look at the photograph and he'd find a temporary oasis, the fantasy of a life of comfort.
"Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly."
This quote is Markos reflecting on the superfluous nature of beauty. As a plastic surgeon, Markos saw a stark and disturbing difference between the necessary surgical work of people injured in war and the cosmetic procedures demanded from the rich. Growing up with Thalia was the most influential experience of his childhood. It motivated him to become a doctor, but he also became jaded towards beauty. Some people are born with it, some people seek to manufacture it and some people could care less, yet it is an ideal sought universally by cultures around the world. Markos recognized that internal qualities did not seem to matter as much as external appearances and that realization disgusted him. The woman with the most beautiful soul and endless strength, Thalia, had a facial deformity which would forever limit her opportunities.
"It's a funny thing, Markos, but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But what really guides them is what they're afraid of. What they don't want."
In this scene, Markos is talking to his mother. He had come home to visit her and he wanted to discuss the possibility of staying with her while she fought her degenerative illness. His mother dismissed the sentiment because she knew why he left. She also wanted him to know that she saw him bound for bigger things, and that what he could accomplish through his work was more important than what he could do for her. He left partly because he wanted to escape the confines of small island life, but mostly he was trying to shake off the weight of his mother and Thalia. Both oppressed him unconsciously, in their own way: his mother was a domineering figure who he thought took up everyone else's cause but his, while Thalia was a depressing symbol of unfulfilled potential. This quote describes my current situation perfectly, and it's a good filter with which to sort through motivations. When I read the quote, I immediately thought about my own ambitions. Do I want to live in New York City because I truly love the city, or do I want to leave because I'm running away from something in Hawaii? Do I want to have a career in medicine because I want to help people/because I believe in natural healing, or because I don't want to disappoint my parents? As easy as it seems to answer those questions, it's much more complicated. The answer is concealed by years of buried and confusing direction and misdirection. One thing I find interesting retrospectively is that Markos's mother didn't say whether or not being motivated by what one doesn't want is better than being motivated by what one does want. You could argue either way about the power of intent, denial and external forces.
"I remembered how, as a boy, I would stew over all the things Mama wouldn't do, things other mothers did...Those things were true enough. But, all these years, I'd been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. This was her gift to me...She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than I did the sun shining on me."
This quote really spoke to me. The relationship that Markos had with his mother is almost exactly like the one I had with mine growing up. As a kid, one of the hardest things to be is appreciative of your parents' every day efforts. I was taught and grew up in a fast-paced environment, and I always remember having (not sure if it was instilled or not) a "more, more, more" attitude. I was, in every way, a blessed kid, but I didn't show as much appreciation as I should have. To this day, she reminds me that I was downright rude at times and suspects that I did it on purpose, which is untrue. (In actuality, I know I wasn't a calculating kid. I was rushed, maybe, and openly admitted that I didn't have time for emotional moments, but I can see now that I didn't cherish their efforts or those moments when they came through for me.) At the very core of what my parents gave me, though, was the confidence that they loved me and wouldn't give me up for the world. I suppose having two loving parents who move earth and sky might be rare nowadays, and I didn't become aware of that until I grew up, until I matured and had life experiences. While Markos volunteered in Afghanistan, I dealt with "reality" when I came to UH-Manoa. Both Markos and I realized how lucky we were when the blinders were ripped off, so to speak, and we saw the real world. This quote really spoke to me because both Markos and I took a long time to realize that what we had in our parents were much more meaningful and significant than we thought growing up.
Markos's mother has Lou Gehrig's disease and his friend, Thalia, has held a prism up to the light for them to see.
"Look at that, Markos!" Mama says, grinning unabashedly with delight like a schoolgirl. I have never before seen her smile this purely, this guilelessly.
We sit, the three of us, watching the trembling little rainbows on my mother's hands, and I feel sadness and an old ache, each like a claw at my throat.
"You've turned out good. You've made me proud, Markos."
I am fifty-five years old. I have waited my entire life to hear those words. Is it too late now for this? For us? Have we squandered too much for too long, Mama and I? Part of me thinks it is better to go on as we have, to act as though we don't know how ill suited we have been for each other. Less painful that way. Perhaps better than this belated offering. This fragile, trembling little glimpse of how it could have been between us. All I will beget is regret, I tell myself, and what good is regret? It brings back nothing. What we have lost is irretrievable.
And yet when my mother says, "Isn't it beautiful, Markos?" I say to her, "It is, Mama. It is beautiful," and as something begins to break wide open inside me I reach over and take my mother's hand in mine.
There is a reason that this chapter spoke to me so deeply. It was about a mother and son, and their tenuous relationship, exacerbated by years of conflict and pressure. In the last moments of his mother's conscious life (Lou Gehrig's disease will eventually render her immobile then unconscious), she says outright what was previously unspoken. I saw a lot of myself in this chapter. It was about redemption and a rekindled maternal relationship that the son had, for so long, tried to run away from. He kept seeking greener pastures abroad, not realizing how beautiful his side of the world really was. The chapter was also about family. At the end of the day, I know I'll always have my family. Even when the world seems so big or impossible to conquer, there's always a tiny group of people who have my back. Markos wasn't a perfect son, but he came back when his mother needed him most.
Chapter 9 "'Everything will remind me of you.'
It was in the tender, slightly panicky way he spoke these words that I knew my father was a wounded person, that his love for me was as true, vast and permanent as the sky, and that it would always bear down upon me. It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you into a choice: either you tore free or you stayed and withstood its rigor, even as it squeezed you into something smaller than yourself."
In this scene, Abdullah, now an old man, has a daughter named Pari who is an aspiring art student. When it came time for Pari to decide on a college, Abdullah was diagnosed with dementia. At that pivotal moment in her life, her father says the above quote, which leads Pari to choose home to take care of her father. What spoke to me in this chapter was the verbal and nonverbal queues that parents often communicate to their kids, either intentionally or not. In so much as parents want what is best for their kids, I think they also consider what is best for themselves, especially when they're faced with a health crisis. It's hard for kids (i.e. me speaking from experience) to consider the tradeoff that ill parents face when they decide to mention that they're sick and might need help. On the one hand, I bet parents want to see their kids go out in the world, flourish and achieve their dreams, but at the same time, who else can they ask for help as their abilities are reduced? And shouldn't a sick parent tell their kids that they're sick, rather than hide the fact? My parents both have their share of health problems, and the decision to devote part of my life to helping them is not as simple as saying we're blood related. As much as I feel I owe them and want to help them, what I'd be sacrificing is my hopes/dreams/etc. but also my youth, the prime time of my life. The question of where to draw the line between pursuing my own self interests and doing for my parents what I feel I owe them is always blurry. It's also an awkward conversation to have because communicating what I feel can come across as disloyal or insensitive. Everything they say to me would automatically make me feel bad, even if they're telling me to go out and leave. It's very difficult to tell whether they actually feel that way or are saying so out of duty or a sense of obligation. I understood what Pari was going through because I can feel that crossroads coming for me too. I am already familiar with the kind of overwhelming, sometimes smothering love that she referred to.
"Mama was elegant and talented. She read books and had many strong opinions and always she was telling them to people. But she also had very deep sadness. All of my life, she gave me a shovel and said, Fill these holes inside of me, Pari."
In this scene, Pari (Abdullah's sister, whom he was separated from when they were children) recalled her adopted mother, Nila Wahdati, for Pari (Abdullah's daughter, named in memory of his sister). While the reader goes three fourths of the way through the book before revisiting Nila, we first get a glimpse of her sad existence through the eyes of Nabi, Pari's uncle and chauffeur for the Wahdati family in Kabul. Nabi was in love with Nila but was only able to admire her from afar because she was married to his employer, Suleiman Wahdati. As it turns out, Suleiman had always loved Nabi from afar, which Nila knew and eventually convinced her to leave her husband for Paris. Because of her sham marriage, tumultuous childhood and fertility problems, Nila had a lot of emotional issues and eventually drank herself to death. Of all the characters in the book, Nila felt the most distinct to me. She had her own personality and identity that didn't depend on any one other character. Everyone she lived or interacted with were, as Nabi realized, only temporarily part of her orbit. It was because of her apparent selfishness that she left devastation in her wake, yet she was morally complicated, empty and lonely. Because of the trauma of her childhood and early adulthood, Nila took the route of self-harm and she was unable to escape the fate bestowed upon her by others. It struck a chord with me that Nila's greatest joy--the adoption of her daughter, Pari--was also a reminder of her greatest pain, being unable to conceive. As her issues escalated, Nila turned her daughter into a landfill for her emotional overrun. It's one thing to have a parent who is also your best friend, and it's another to have a best friend who happens to be your parent. I admire parents who can be best friends with their kids, but I frown upon parents who play the best friend role first (i.e. Dina and Lindsay Lohan). Emotional and mental damage seems inevitable to me when parents rely on their kids to heal or serve purposes that only an adult friend or spouse can. No kid should have to do that because of the burden it imposes. In the case of Nila, however, I felt her pain more than I felt Pari's. Pari was conflicted but she saw the pain in her adopted mother and felt empathy. Nila, in all her selfishness, was manipulative of Pari in the latter years of her life, but Pari couldn't turn away, even though she knew what was happening.
Pari 1 (Abdullah's sister): "Maybe you should think about finding professional help, no?"
Pari 2 (Abdullah's daughter): "I know, but not yet. I want to take care of him as long as I can."
Pari 1: "I understand that."
Pari 2 (thinking): I am not sure she does. I don't tell her the other reason. I can barely admit to myself. Namely, how afraid I am to be free despite my frequent desire for it. Afraid of what will happen to me, what I will do with myself, when Baba is gone. All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath. The truth I rarely admit to is, I have always needed the weight of Baba on my back."
This quote is an interesting observation about human interdependency and the intricacies of the parent-offspring bond. When we think about our life plans, it's always easier to achieve our goals if we don't have others to take care of. Biologically, however, something about attachment links us to our parents/parental figures or other members of society. We take care of each other, and time that could be devoted to furthering our own wellbeing or that of our genes is spent assisting the old, diseased or disabled, or someone unrelated at all. It's also interesting to think about the psychological attachments we create when we begin to incorporate caring for others in our daily routines and as part of our identities. Eventually, they become part of us and maybe we can't picture ourselves without them, even when our roles are no longer supplementary care and it starts inhibiting other ambitions. I hesitate when making the comparison, but the reliance of a sick parent on their child (something I can relate to), is almost like a drug dependency for the child. The child may want to leave, but can't leave the parent to suffer, while the parent has a duty to feign independence.
"Je pouvais oublier. I still had the luxury of forgetting. He did not."
How ironic this quote was. While Abdullah was haunted his whole life by the separation from his sister, Pari was the one who, though unable to remember much from her childhood with her brother, in the end, came face to face with the truth and would have to die with it on her mind. In a way, brother and sister wrote the beginning and ending of the book through their experiences. They were more than just close blood relatives, they were two halves of the same saga.
Rating: A
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