Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns.

And here goes another amazing book added to my "Completed Reading" list, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. Its the second installment from the author of The Kiterunner fame.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a story again set in Afghanistan, Herat and Kabul to be exact. And this time there is no escaping to the U.S. but it starts, suffers and end in Afghanistan switching for a very short time to Pakistan.
The story is mainly based on two women, and gives us a close up view of their everyday life, their joys, their sufferings, their desperation to be independent from the tortures and misery and their efforts to claim it. The two female characters are chosen very carefully, the first one is Mariam, a harami born out of an accidental affair between the most richest person of Herat and his maid servant while the other one is Laila, the daughter of an university professor, educated in school and is free from wearing burkha or following any improper rules of the Muslim community. As luck would have it, the lives of these two women from completely two different rungs of society clash together and are made to walk the same path. But finally, one

The Gift In Return

Rajibh was working in his laptop sitting on the bed when a sudden electronic beep made him look up at his digital table clock. The time was 12:00 am and it was the hourly beep. He was about to get back to his laptop screen when something suddenly caught his eye. The date. And with the date came a flood of memories.

It was on this day, exactly a year back, that Rajibh and his wife had parted their ways and put the last nail on the coffin of their three year old marriage. Yes, this was the day when Rajibh had finally got his freedom from Mousomi after several tormenting months.

What not she had done to make sure that Rajibh realised every bit of his mistake of marrying Mousomi. She had sent him to jail for a couple of days, make him pay a huge sum as alimoni, took away his mansion and even sent his ailing mother to jail. What a lady! Not lady but a bitch she was. And what was his mistake? Just to complain about her flirting nature with his friends. She had found the clue in it to divorce him. What she failed to see was his unconditional love which was the reason of him being so possessive about her.

PADE Post #1 (Theme- Candle)

This photo is my interpretation of today's theme of the PADE contest: candle.
This photo was taken my be in Park Street, Kolkata on December 24, 2012. The guys in the photo are protesting against the incident of rape of the young girl in Delhi which took place a few days back from that day.