Woman in wartime

“Yes, you, you are my sang-e sabur!” She strokes his face gently, as if actually touching a precious stone. “I’m going to tell you everything, my sang-e sabur. Everything. Until I set myself free from my pain, and my suffering, and until you, you...” She leaves the rest unsaid. Letting the man imagine it.

While her neighbourhood disintegrates around her in Afghanistan’s civil war, this woman stays at home to care for her husband. He is a fighter, or was one until a bullet pierced his neck and left him utterly unresponsive. Children play in the ruins of houses when armed factions aren’t shooting at each other, and the mullah makes his periodic call to prayer — and all the time the wife stays in the one room where all the ‘action’ of this novel takes place, waiting for some sign from her husband that he is not just the living shell of a man but the man she knew. Her children safely away with relatives, the stress and waiting drive her out of her ordinary reticence and she begins to say to her husband all the things she has never said to anyone else. In doing so she becomes — and is consciously so made by this book’s French-Afghan author Atiq Rahimi — a representative of her entire sisterhood, the Afghan woman, or the woman in wartime.

Well-written if slightly heavy-handed, this is a slim and memorable novel. In its original French, it won the 2008 Goncourt Prize for literature.

THE PATIENCE STONE
Author: Atiq Rahimi
Translator: Polly McLean
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Pages: xvi + 140
Price: Rs 499