A Thousand Splendid Suns Relationships

Harsh, cruel, brittle, abusive -- these words describe bad relationships. Khaled Hosseini reveals this in A Thousand Splendid Suns. In this novel, unloving marriages and harsh relationships show Laila and Tari’s true love for each other, unlike the relationships surrounding them. One brutal relationship in this novel was Mariam and Rasheed. Mariam and Rasheed got married on the same day they met each other, and it was not because of “love at first sight”. They got married because Jalil’s wives wanted Mariam to be gone. Mariam describes Rasheed as “the big, square , ruddy face; the hooked nose”(page 53). She also did not see her new husband until after they had been claimed man and wife. This is only the start of how their relationship is different from Laila and Tariq’s. Rasheed was often mean and abusive to Mariam. He made her eat rocks because her cooking was not great and he says it tasted like pebbles. He also beats her for things such as when he beat her before she was …show more content…
Rasheed and Laila were an unlovong, harsh relationship. They were only married because her house got hit by a stray bomb. Her parents were killed by this bomb and Laila had no other choice. If she did not get married to Rasheed, she could not stay at his house. “[She would have] no food, no water, not a rupiah in her pockets, bullets and rockets flying everywhere”. She would not have lived long on her own. “Pummeling her chest, her head, her belly with fists, tearing at her hair, throwing her to the wall”(305) describes one of the times Rasheed beat her. Another way the reader knows that Rasheed and Laila do not share a love for each other is because Laila had a plan to run away. She asked Mariam to run away with her and Mariam said yes. They set off to Peshawar, but the man, Wakil, turned out to be a traitor and snitches on Mariam and Laila. Laila basically risked her life to get away from Rasheed, so there was definitely no love between