A Billion Denied Daughters

Last spring, strapped in my Economy Plus seat with little to do but munch on 5 cent pretzel packets (yes that’s how much airlines spend on pretzel packets – who doesn’t think emulsified cardboard has to be an ingredient at those prices?) and play Risk on my laptop until the battery died, I first read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and then days later on a trip to the motherland, I finished Barbara Kingsolver's master-piece - The Poisonwood Bible.

Hosseini's better known for The Kite-Runner, a book that touched and saddened me - and that I loved because it ended on a hopeful note. The half smile on the kid's face at the end of the book (if I remember correctly) - was like seeing a brief burst of sunshine during the dreary weeks of cloudiness that sometimes accompany San Francisco winters - enough to remind you that there are sunny days ahead and sometimes enough to drive away any incipient Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)-ness.

A Thousand Splendid Suns, has the same setting - Kabul, and similar story elements as the Kite-Runner - brief happiness, quick disillusionment and despair, sadness, extreme loss and devastation and thankfully, ultimate redemption. But its a book worth reading in its own right - because it has two crucial plot-lines that were not there in Hosseini's first book - firstly, the main protagonists remain in Kabul throughout the three decades of death and devastation from the late 70s to the mid-2000s instead of leaving it somewhere at the start of the civil war as happened in the Kite-Runner. And secondly, the protagonists are two women - Mariam and Leila - and not two men/boys. That makes a big difference - because as the book makes clear, while every Afghan, male or female, faced years of violence; for the women the impact was much greater because it was accompanied by a complete loss of social and civil liberties. While no one in the West seems to ever talk about the Communist regime in Afghanistan having any redeeming qualities - the fact was that the Communist era was also the most liberated period for Afghan women – who were encouraged to shun the conditioned prison of the burqa and come out of the house - to study, participate in government and academia, even join the military. Once Najibullah's government fell, and even before the Taliban stormed to power, women were quickly stripped off most of their short-lived freedoms and dressed up once again in their age-old head-to-toe garments. A good way to compare the varying impact on the two sexes, would be two juxtapose two of the many repressive laws introduced by the Taliban that made it to Indian newspapers at the time - The men were forbidden to shave; the women were forbidden to be seen anywhere in public without a man.

The book traces the impact of the turmoil in the country on the lives of the two women protagonists effectively imprisoned in their home by the tyrant they're both married to, who seems to hit them as easily as - and more often than - you or I would swat a pesky fly. As I read the book I was initially surprised by how much time was spent detailing the lives of the two women in their modest two-story domestic prison and comparatively how little time in talking about the repeated rape of Kabul through those years. Until it struck me that perhaps Hosseini was using the women's plight - their rapid descent from the early hope of youth into a hellish triple decade, from relatively healthy beings into bruised, battered, mentally scarred women looking much older than their years as a metaphor for what happened to Kabul. Just as they were imprisoned in their home, Kabul was besieged for years by the Mujahideen and then the Taliban. Just as they were battered repeatedly by their husband, so was Kabul pounded almost daily by mortar and bombs, entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble. Just as they were left helpless by the medieval laws imposed by the conservative fighters - so were thousands of children orphaned and left to fend for themselves in bombed out shelters, as often abused as they were cared for. The fate of Kabul and its women followed the same terrible trajectory.

I have to admit that I couldn't wait for the book to end. The pace is fast enough - but it felt excruciatingly slow. I was silently begging for an end to the daily trauma being inflicted on these women by their husband. I wanted one of the women to just stab the bastard in his sleep and be done with it. They couldn't, for if the man of the house died, the rest of the household would starve too: Without a man the women could not go to the grocery store to buy food…and they wouldn’t be served even if they managed to risk going alone.

I’ve written about The Poisonwood Bible before – a saga of a woman and her 4 daughters led into 1960s Congo by her husband, an evangelical priest convinced that converting the teeming heathen masses in the Congo was his life’s calling. Because I read it just days after Hosseini's book I was struck by the common thread running through the lives of Orleanna and her four daughters to that of Mariam and Leila even though they were set worlds and decades apart. It didn't matter that she was an American woman living in the Sixties, considered a fairly modern time in that country's history, Orleanna felt just as helpless as the two Afghan women in opposing her husband's will. She failed to stop a cruel man she detested from dragging her and her daughters to a place she couldn’t have cared less about and which she considered wild and dangerous. Orleanna's failure to stand up to her husband eventually led to a tragedy that tore her family apart. In the book Orleanna is also unable, to the end, to explain her helplessness. But the writer leaves no one in doubt, that the reason is centuries of social conditioning that delegated until recently, a secondary status to women and a sense of complete entitlement to men. A social conditioning that was common to the vast majority of societies and countries through the ages.

There are many countries today where the grossest gender inequities have been eliminated. Being aware of them and being the optimistic liberal that I am, for a long time I’ve assumed the gender equality battle to have been won in much of the West as well as in urban pockets of developing countries like India. Oh I knew that in scores of nations women are still just plain oppressed and are prevented from reaching anywhere close to their potential. But even there I assumed it was just a matter of time.

Hosseini and Kingsolver’s novels read in quick succession were a twin epiphany for me: that, according a subordinate position to women seems to be an instinct built into human societies and for this reason, no progress on gender equality can be taken for granted. For when you take a harder look, women strive on a daily basis to establish their credibility, dignity and equality in ways large and small, with family and friends, colleagues at work and society in general. They face legal and cultural humiliations not just in medieval societies like Saudi Arabia (not being able to venture out unless accompanied by a man), but also in moderately conservative ones like India (the dowry system) or relatively modern ones like the US (Upto 30% less pay compared to male workers for equal work).

My friend P told me - in a rather non-dramatic, very matter-of-fact tone, while debating the relative merits of Obama and Clinton last year - that I just couldn't understand what it was like, to be a woman in a man's world and that she felt compelled in almost a visceral way to support Clinton. That visceral instinct for a visible demonstration of full equality in many of Clinton’s supporters sustained her campaign way past its sell-by date. It is also that instinct which will sustain the feminist movement over the decades of struggle that are necessary to ensure that billions of women across the world are no longer denied a shot at a free and fulfilled life. So mock not that instinct, dear reader. For what is truly past its sell-by date, is the patriarchal system that has mistreated the world's largest and longest minority.