A Thousand Splendid Suns: Part III: Chapter 41 Summary & Analysis

In the summer of 2000, the drought is worse then ever, and villages turn nomadic, searching for water and pastures and settling in slums outside Kabul. This is also the summer when all of Kabul is obsessed with the movie Titanic. People smuggle pirated copies into Kabul and watch with the volume down late at night. Sometimes, Mariam and Laila unearth the TV to watch with the children. Kabul River has dried up and the riverbed becomes “Titanic City,” with people selling all kinds of Titanic-themed objects, from toothpaste to perfume. Laila tells Mariam that it’s become an obsession because everyone wants Jack, the main character of the movie, to rescue them—but Jack is dead, and isn’t coming back.

Later that summer, a merchant falls asleep without putting out his cigarette, and Rasheed’s shop is one of the ones consumed in fire. Thrown into poverty, they must sell everything. Rasheed stays home every day, slapping Aziza, kicking Mariam, and yelling at Laila. He is fired from a job at a kebab house for getting into a fight, and from a restaurant because customers complained about long waits. When Laila says he was probably napping, he goes at her with both fists, kicking until he no longer can.

Soon, hunger is all they can think about. They skip meals, eating dried bread, stolen canned ravioli, raw turnips and blackened bananas. Aziza grows extremely thin and Zalmai becomes listless and pale.

But Mariam has a plan. She and Rasheed walk to the Intercontinental Hotel, and Rasheed greets one of the doormen, who Mariam finds vaguely familiar. Every few minutes, cars drive up to the hotel holding men in turbans—the Pakistani and Arab Islamists who Rasheed says are really running the country. An hour later, the doorman leads them inside, to a balcony where he gives them a small black phone and a scrap of paper with a number on it.

Mariam thinks back to the last time she’d seen Jalil, thirteen years earlier, in the spring of 1987. He had stood outside her house next to the blue Benz with Herat license plates, calling her name. Mariam had caught a glimpse of him from her window, but she refused to leave. Now she wishes she hadn’t had so much pride, and had forgiven him—his faults seem like so little next to Rasheed’s malice or the violence of the Mujahideen. She reaches the mayor’s office in Herat on the phone, and asks for Jalil Khan. He says he doesn’t know him—the cinema has long been closed. Mariam pleads with him, and he tells her that there’s a groundskeeper who has lived in Herat all his life. After a few minutes, he returns to the phone to report that Jalil Khan died back in 1987.

Mariam realizes that Jalil was dying back then, and had driven from Herat to say goodbye. Rasheed looks at her, and Mariam shakes her head. Rasheed calls her useless.