Rasheed: Summary

"And Mariam was afraid she lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not." (Hosseini 97) The fifth phase of the life of Mariam is Laila's Entry and Marriage with Rasheed. Laila, a neighborhood friend's daughter of Rasheed is nearly killed in a bomb blast which takes away the live of both her parents. Rasheed saves her and Mariam helps him to nurse her back to normalcy. They give food and pills and take care of her. After a point of time, Rasheed uses this opportunity to marry Laila so that he could get into the saintly cover of giving life to an orphan by granting a life, family, house and food. Laila is not like Mariam to marry Rasheed with no prior thoughts. She agrees to marry him because she finds herself pregnant because of her intimate relationship with her lover Tariq who has left Kabul a few weeks ago. This leaves her with no option. So she quickly agrees to the offer of Rasheed and marries him. She gives birth to two children. The first is

The war affects the life of both men and women of the nation but it highly curbs the freedom of women more than men. The ban on every form of entertainment by the Talibans can be endured while the basic freedom of going out on the street was even restricted for the female counterpart of the society. The people begin to starve for there is no proper work for the men to do and earn the living. Rasheed being a shoemaker suffers a lot along with his family. Rasheed later goes out to work as a doorkeeper in a hotel from where they try to reach Jalil and ask for help. Mariam half heartedly agrees to call Jalil and ask for help but they come back with broken hearts for they find out that Jalil had passed away and all his wealth is gone because of the