Summary Of Handmaid's 'The Kite Runner'

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child when she bleeded profusely at the bathhouse, “it’s normal, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it

normal? (P-89)” Rashid mourns over this incident and starts to avoid her and becomes

extremely shrewd. It was then she recalls her mother’s words, “each snowflake was a sigh

heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky,

gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silenly on the people below.... how

quietly we endure all that falls upon us. (P-90)” four years passes during which she suffers

six more miscarriages. She turns 19 on april 17, 1978. All these years, she takes in her

husband’s dominance, insults and disrespect towards her. It wasn’t easy for her to tolerate his …show more content…

He was of the

view that it was a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan. In this part of the story, civil war

is so active in Kabul that buildings have started to blow away, in the course of time Laila and

tariq are separated, since his family decides to move away from Afghanistan, and laila’s

house too gets blown away in one of the explosions, she is left orphaned, the next time she

opens her eyes, she finds herself in a hospital covered in gashes attended by Mariam and

Rasheed. Here is where, the two heroes of the story come together, maraiam and Laila. Two

women in the same house, both are the victims of bad fortune. Rashid now is the husband to

both. Laila discovers that she is six weeks pregnant by tariq’s baby, the part of their love

growing inside, part of her love, tariq still alive inside her, but before Rasheed would get

suspicious about the baby she’ll have to sacrifice herself if she has to give life to her baby.

“She knew what she was doing was dishonourable. Dishonourable, disingenuous, …show more content…

And spectacularly unfair to Mariam..... Laila already saw the sacrifices a mother

had to make. Virtue was only the first. She put a hand on her belly. Closed her eyes. (P-213)”

Laila as a women was now completing the role of a mother, another sacrifice, “lying beneath

his cold sheets that night, she watched him pull the curtains shut” On the other hand Mariam

was dying from inside seeing her husband being shared by another woman. Rashid had been

unfair to her wife. To him, if he as a man keeps relations with other women is not a sin, but,

his wife even showing up to people without being clad in a burqua is the biggest crime. She is

looked down upon by Rasheed in front of Laila, now being addressed like a village girl, and

worse than that, “ have you told her, Mariam, have you told her that you are a harami? (P-

216)” Mariam was thirty three old, but that word still had a sting. She sees her husband

taking care of Laila just the same way he did for her years back when she had his child. Laila

gives birth to tariq’s child, whom Rashid thinks belongs to him. Its a girl, whom Rashid

denies to even see but on the other side Laila rejoices the birth of tariq’s and her

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