A Thousand Splendid Suns

Nana is buried in a corner of the cemetery in Gul Daman and Jamil makes “a great show of tending to Mariam” (37). Mariam is rigid and resentful to him, only crying when Mullah Faizullah comes in and she blames herself, remembering Nana’s words:“I’ll die if you go. I’ll just die.”(38)

Jalil says that Mariam can stay with him and “for the first time” she can hear him “with Nana’s ears […] the insincerity that had always lurked beneath, the hollow, false assurances” (38). At Jalil’s lavish house, where she wished to be two days earlier, she installs herself in the guest room. An “inexpressible blackness” passes through Mariam, however much Mullah Faizullah tries to reassure her that her mother was an unhappy woman and “the seed for what she did was planted long ago” (40, 43).

One of the visitors to Mariam’s room is one of her father’s wives, who tells her she has to come downstairs so they can talk to her.

Mariam is summoned downstairs to her father and his three wives, who give her “thin, tolerant smiles” (46). They announce that she has a betrothed, a 45-year-old widowed shoemaker from Kabul named