How Did Mariam Grow Up In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Similar to Alvarez’s novel, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, highlights the upbringing of two young girls over two generations growing up in war-stricken Afghanistan. However, this novel emphasizes how people are sometimes forced to grow up when they may not yet be ready. Mariam is an illegitimate child of a very wealthy businessman and is told by her mother her entire life that she is not good enough and that he father does not really love her. She grows up and marries a wealthy shoe maker, suffering abuse in her marriage as well. Laila is born a generation later, next door to Mariam’s adult home and is a very privileged child, free to pursue an education and choose who she wants to marry. However, when tragedy strikes their town,

the two women are brought together to form a very unlikely pair. This novel deals with coming of age by portraying it in two contrasting circumstances.
Mariam is brought up by her mother, growing up being told that she is unloved, but forever longing for the love of her father.

However, she was born as an accident, her mother having been a servant in her father’s house. Mariam’s mother, Nana, claimed that when she had gotten pregnant, her “own father [...] disowned her” (Hosseini 6). After Mariam comes home one day and finds Nana “dangling at the end of” (36) a rope dropped from a high tree branch, she is sent to live with her father, however temporarily and is shortly thereafter given up for marriage. This is the first instance of Mariam having to make an adult decision and being forced to grow up too quickly. Though she is just fifteen, she marries a man thirty years her senior named Rasheed. For most of the first days “Mariam stayed in bed” (62), but once those months were over, Rasheed began to become very demanding. He wanted Mariam to be his housewife and when she does not perform tasks to his liking, he severely beats her. In addition, after trying many times to have children, Mariam continues to have miscarriage after miscarriage and that puts and even bigger strain on their relationship as well as Mariam’s self esteem. Mariam is very young at this point and instead of experiencing the normalities of young adulthood, she is being forced to act as a wife just after her life is flipped upside-down and then coming to grips with her own fate for the rest of her life.. However, Rasheed is the only “family” that Mariam

has left so she has no choice but to accept this fate.
Laila’s upbringing is entirely different from that of Mariam.

She is the youngest child in the family and is very close with her father. However, her two older brothers are away fighting in the war, so Laila’s mother spends most of her days pining away for her two sons. Unlike Mariam’s childhood, Laila has very close friends, including her neighbor and best friend Tariq, and she also has the ability to go to school and be educated, something that not all females are able to do. However, the war continues to rage on in Laila’s life and she is often forced to make sure she is fed and taken care of because her mother is virtually not involved in her life. Laila acts as the mother of the household most days. From a young age, Laila had also been forced to experience all of the horrors of war first hand. Rockets rained down on Kabul, her hometown, and every time that her house and her family was safe, they had to deal with “the agony of wondering who wasn’t” safe (174). Most of Laila’s childhood was spent hearing stories about people being shot and raped in their homes, and never feeling safe, not being allowed on the street unless she is accompanied by a man. “The streets became so unsafe that Babi” Laila’s father, had her drop out of school and took on the teaching duties himself (177). The horrors go so far that Laila’s best girl friend, Giti is killed walking home from school. This was the first person “that someone whom Laila had known, been close to” and loved had died

(178). This is the first time that Laila comes face to face with the realities of the war, because before then, she had just heard about what was going on. However, the pivotal point for Laila comes after most of the people in her neighborhood had fled the country. Laila’s mother, after years of begging from her father, finally agreed to move the family from Kabul. As they are moving their items from the house to the yard, Laila’s life changes forever. As something “hot and powerful slammed into her from behind,” Laila was lifted into the air and thrown into the wall beside her house. Her house had been blown up by a rocket, leaving her an orphan. Laila is sent to live with Miriam and Rasheed, eventually marrying Rasheed. However, she does not do this because she wants to. Laila finds out shortly after her parents were killed that she is pregnant with Tariq’s baby. Rather than being thrown onto the street, Laila makes a decision for herself and for her baby to pretend that it is Rasheed’s child. Laila is very young at this point, but she understands what she must do in order to keep her child safe. She is willing to sacrifice herself to Rasheed so that the one piece of Tariq she has left is not harmed. This is the pivotal point in which Laila really comes of age before she is prepared to do so, not for herself, but for another.