This chapter-by-chapter summary contains plot spoilers!

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Navigate the Summary Parts: Part 1: Mariam waits for her dad Part 2: Mariam follows her dad Part 3: Mariam gets married Part 4: Mariam gets pregnant Part 5: Young Laila misses Tariq Part 6: Laila goes on a field trip Part 7: Plans to evacuate Kabul Part 8: Laila gets married Part 9: The Taliban shows up Part 10: Conclusion

Summary of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini:
Pages  244 - 277

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(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  Chapter 37: Two more years go by.  It's September 1996, and the Taliban rolls into Kabul to take over from the Mujahedeen. The citizens are cautiously optimistic because they think of the Taliban as pious men as opposed to the chaotic, corrupt Mujahedeen who are getting rich off heroin production and killing everyone in sight.

Then Rasheed takes Laila and Mariam and Aziza out for a walk in the streets, and they witness a Taliban soldier screaming through a loudspeaker at the crowd.  Behind him, two men who have been tortured to death hang from the traffic lights; they are Najibullah who was the last president and his brother. Aziza starts screaming in fear, but Rasheed smirks.

The next day, the Taliban send trucks through the streets of Kabul, blaring announcements that they also print up on handbills distributed everywhere. This information concerns the religious penalties that will now be exacted upon the impious, including cutting off someone's hand if he steals and cutting off a woman's finger if she wears nail polish. Women are also supposed to wear the burqa at all times, and if a man says they've committed adultery, they will be stoned to death.

Chapter 38:  Laila thanks God that her father isn't alive to see the Taliban destroy the museums and the university.  She realizes that she's pregnant again, this time with Rasheed's baby.  She considers giving herself an illegal abortion, but decides it wouldn't be fair to the baby who is an innocent creature who never asked to be Rasheed's offspring.

Chapter 39:  It's 1997, and Laila is about to give birth.  But there is a complication, and Rasheed and Mariam, holding Aziza, rush Laila to the hospital. But then they realize that the Taliban has closed off the hospital to women. They have to go to a substandard facility filled with desperate women.  The place is unsanitary, stinking, and chaotic. Mariam fights her way to a nurse and apprises the woman of Laila's situation.  The nurse says they only have two doctors and both are presently doing operations.

Hours later, the nurse calls them in.  The woman doctor wears a burqa; she has absolutely no supplies.  No X-rays, no antibiotics, no oxygen. What little money from relief agencies that makes it into Afghanistan, the Taliban seizes and funnels to the men. The women get nothing. This doctor is lucky to be allowed to practice.  She takes off the confining burqa so that she can work, but has to whip it back on if the nurse who is standing guard reports that anyone is coming. She says she'll have to do a caesarian on Laila with no anesthesia. Desperate, Laila agrees. Mariam stays with her and holds her hand.

Chapter 40:  Two more years pass.  It's 1999, and Kabul is suffering its second year of drought. Laila's baby son Zalmai is two years old and looks exactly like his father who indulges him in every possible way.  Zalmai vacillates between being a sweet boy and a spoiled brat.  Rasheed, who goes into debt to buy the kid stuff, actually buys him a television though the Taliban has forbidden such things.

Since the Taliban conducts frequent surprise-searches of people's houses, Laila and Mariam decide to bury the television set in the back yard for their own safety.  Later that night, Rasheed says he wants to send Aziza into the street to beg for money.  He thinks they can make a lot of money that way.  Laila says no.  He slaps her, and then she punches him in the face, making him stagger two steps backwards. He goes to get his gun and shoves the barrel into her mouth.  Of course the kids are terrified.

Chapter 41:  It's 2000, and the drought reaches its third and worse year.  The people of Kabul get obsessed with the movie Titanic, smuggling illegal copies of the film in from Pakistan.  Rasheed's shoe-shop burns down. The family sells everything. Rasheed stays home now, bullying and abusing his wives.  He gets fired from a job at a kebab house because he gets in a fight with a customer.  Money runs out and the family starts starving.  Rasheed steals food and brings it home, giving most of it to his son Zalmai.

Finally one day they get so desperate that Mariam puts on her burqa and walks with Rasheed to a hotel where a doorman who's a friend of Rasheed lets them borrow the phone to call Herat. Mariam calls the mayor in Herat, trying to locate her father Jalil so that they can beg him for money. She finds out that Jalil died back in 1987.
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