Fiction – and Fact: Hues of Life

It is trite to say that life – a fact – is stranger than fiction. When one reads newspapers or watches television, and when events unfold, one notices that what the Hollywood or Bollywood shows pales into insignificance before reality: as they say, reel life as opposed to real life. Increasingly, one realizes that human life takes such twists and turns that facts are, more often than not, more unbelievable and incomprehensible than fiction.

Let me come to fiction first: I chanced to read two books by Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan writer settled in the United States of America, last week [please see www.khaledhosseini.com for more details.] The first was A Thousand Splendid Suns. In the publisher’s own words, it is is “a breathtaking story set against the volatile events of Afghanistan’s last thirty years—from the Soviet invasion to the reign of the Taliban to the post-Taliban rebuilding—that puts the violence, fear, hope, and faith of this country in intimate, human terms. It is a tale of two generations of characters brought jarringly together by the tragic sweep of war, where personal lives—the struggle to survive, raise a family, find happiness—are inextricable from the history playing out around them”. To me, it was a devastating experience, to say the least, to read of the horrors that the Afghanis, especially the women and children, had to live through.

So, when Hosseini’s The Kite Runner came my way, I was not too sure whether I should read it or not. The publisher described it as “the story of a young boy…who juggles to establish a closer rapport with his father and cope with memories of a haunting childhood event. The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its many themes include ethnic tensions…in Afghanistan, and the immigrant experiences of (the boy) and his father in the United States”. The printed word has a charm of its own, and I am one who cannot resist temptation when a book beckons. Knowing full well that this could well be another depressing read, I still went ahead – and I was not wrong.

Afghanistan baffles me – not just me, but the world as a whole. It is as if it is the most fertile ground for invasion, and tragedy and trauma. Down the millennia, this land has been pillaged and ravaged by assorted invaders. Yet, it is a testimony to the will and spirit of the Afghanis that they have survived these catastrophe over the centuries, though badly battered and bruised in mind, body and soul.

Afghanistan and its people went through yet another traumatic period starting with the Soviet occupation, followed by the internecine fight among the rival war lords, and then the Taliban occupation. The abysmal depths of human tragedy which the Afghans were forced to descend have been poignantly portrayed by Khaled Hosseini in his works.

As in any other conflict, the worst victims of the Afghan imbroglio were children and women - all through the Soviet era, the warlords’ time and the Taliban days. Of course, it reached a new low under the Taliban. No woman, even a girl child, could come out of the house unless accompanied by a male member of the family. If by any misfortune a woman was seen outside alone, she would have had to face extremely dire consequences. Hosseini narrates how thousands of children lost their parents – and their childhood, forever. Some people would set up a shack as an orphanage; mothers who were lucky to have survived till then would send their kids there so that they could have at least a loaf of bread a day, which they could share with the many genuine orphans. Most of them were maimed, sick and vulnerable. And the Big Brother in the form of the Taliban was always watching – intensely, and menacingly. The Kite Runner describes how the local Taliban leader would come regularly and randomly pick up small girls and boys of seven and eight years and take them to his house – and the same Taliban would stone to death a woman or man for violating their moral code!

And the intense green eyes of The Afghan Girl (photo by Steve McCurry which appeared in the National Geographic) kept haunting me…

The barbaric cruelty and the myriad miseries which the children and women were subjected to – and which have been tellingly brought out by Khaled Hosseini – make me wonder what we mean by `humanity’ and `civilization’. To comfort myself, I thought, Hosseini, like all good stoory tellers, must have taken the liberty to narrate events in a more fictionalized manner – may be more fiction than fact.

And let me now tell you The Fact…

I completed Hosseini’s books last week-end. Yesterday, I happened to meet a friend who had returned to India after spending three years in Afghanistan. Hosseini fresh  in mind, I shared with him my apprehensions of Khaled’s creativity having taken wings while describing the plight of children and women there. And to my utter dismay, he told me that Hosseini spoke truth only in part; what happened in Afghanistan was still worse, he asserted. Then, to prove his point my friend narrated an incident which actually happened during the high tide of Talibanism: Hosseini’s stories were only a figment of imagination, now I am sure…

As was often the case, this Afghan family was left with only three members – and all women, including a nine-year-old girl child. They could not go out of their hutment because of the prevailing code which warranted that a male family member should be accompanying them. They were starving to death, and the child was suffering. Finally, the will to live made them courageous and they took the decision to send the kid out – dressed as a boy! So, after some searching, she got work as child labour in a bakery along with several other kids – and no one noticed that the kid was a girl.

Things were going fine under the circumstances, till the day the Taliban came calling to the bakery for kids. All children, including the boy-girl, were rounded up and taken, where else but to the orphanage. An octogenarian mullah was in charge, always at the beck and call of his Taliban masters who sent regular demands that select kids may be sent to them. Our girl was paranoid when she landed at the orphangae, and naturally so, in the midst of a hundred and more boys.

Since there was never any proper bathroom or lavatory facilities, all kids were forced to undress and take bath together – that is, if and when water came. For several days, she escaped the ordeal by hiding, but her time had to come, and she was eventually caught one day. The Taliban are a very vengeful lot, more so when their writ and dictates are challenged, especially by women, even if the woman in question happens to be a child of nine years. And the Taliban never expected a girl child less than ten to hoodwink them: it doesn’t matter to them that she did it to live to see another morning.

And so they decided to teach her the lesson of her life and also make her life a lesson to others who might venture to question their authority. They stripped this frightened girl in front of the whole crowd of kids and others, and hung her head down from a  tree, and left her hanging there for further action. And then, the girl, to her own horror, started menstruating for the first time in her life. The poor child, already terrorized by all what was happening around her and to her, suddenly saw blood dripping down her body; her wailing was lost in the cacophony all around, and she fainted.

They pulled her down from the rope and dragged her to the Taliban office which was also the trial room. There was no one to comfort this child of nine, who was victim to many adversities – and none of her own creation - in the few years that she had walked the earth. The darkest of fate awaited her as she lay crumpled in one corner, like dirty cloth left in a trash can.

And then the octogenarian mullah, who was in the good books of the Taliban, for the best reasons known to both of them, intervened. With a leer that belied his many years, he requested that the child may be spared; in return, he would restore her honour by marrying her. The child’s fate was sealed…

Now I know Khaled Hosseini was not letting his imagination and creativity take wings. Life in Afghanistan was – and still is – stranger than fiction.

PS: For those of us who felt comforted that things have improved in Afghanistan after the Taliban left, my friend has a message. He says, many Afghanis are praying that the Taliban should make a come-back!

Picture courtesy: Steve McCurry’s “The Afghan Girl” from the Internet