Hasina
Hasina is Laila's bold, sharp-tongued childhood friend in Kabul, whose early departure for an arranged marriage in Lahore marks the first major loss of Laila's youth and foreshadows the novel's themes of female dispossession. She is the irreverent, worldly-wise member of the trio she forms with Laila and Giti, dispensing crude advice and mocking the conventions that will eventually trap her. Her sudden removal from Laila's life—forced into a marriage she never wanted—is the first of many separations that strip Laila of her support network and leave her increasingly isolated.
Identity and Personality
Hasina is introduced as a twelve-year-old who has failed third grade once and fourth grade twice, but what she lacks in academic success she makes up for in mischief and a mouth that, Giti says, "ran like a sewing machine." It is Hasina who coins the nickname "Khala Rangmaal" (Auntie Painter) for their communist teacher, Shanzai, referring to the slapping motion the teacher favors. She dispenses what she calls a "foolproof method" for fending off unattractive suitors: eating no less than four cans of beans on the evening the suitor comes to call, so that the gas erupts at the moment of serving tea. When Laila protests that she is too young for suitors, Hasina retorts that Giti is not too young—"That's because you have a beard, my dear"—and Giti's hand shoots up to her chin in alarm. Hasina's mockery spares no one, least of all herself; she tells Laila that her own marriage to a first cousin twenty years her senior who owns an auto shop in Lahore has already been decided, and that both times she saw him "he ate with his mouth open."
Friendship with Laila and Giti
Hasina, Laila, and Giti walk home from school together, and Hasina's banter fills the gaps left by Giti's earnestness and Laila's reserve. When Hasina teases Laila about Tariq—calling him "your young handsome, one-legged prince"—Laila slaps her elbow away but knows that Hasina is not malicious. Hasina is the one who, after Laila tells her of her fears that her depressed mother Fariba might harm herself, helps Laila empty the bottle of aspirin into the gutter and hide the kitchen knives and sharp kebab skewers beneath the rug. She also finds a rope in the yard and removes it. This practical, unsentimental care is characteristic of Hasina: she acts without fuss, addressing the tangible threat rather than offering empty comfort.
Forced Marriage and Departure
As Hasina had feared, her family takes her to Lahore to marry the cousin who owns the auto shop. On the morning they take her, Laila and Giti go to Hasina's house to say good-bye. The three of them cry in a three-way embrace; Giti is inconsolable. Hasina tells them that her husband-to-be has already started the process to move them to Germany, where his brothers live, and that within the year she thinks they will be in Frankfurt. The last time Laila ever sees Hasina, she is being helped by her father into the crowded backseat of a taxi. Hasina's departure is the first of the losses that dismantle Laila's childhood world: Giti will be killed by a stray rocket two years later, and Tariq will flee the country soon after.
Legacy and Fulfilled Prophecy
Hasina once predicted the futures of the three friends with characteristic bluntness: "By the time we're twenty, Giti and I, we'll have pushed out four, five kids each. But you, Laila, you'll make us two dummies proud. You're going to be somebody. I know one day I'll pick up a newspaper and find your picture on the front page." The prophecy proves accurate: Giti dies before she can marry her goalkeeper, Hasina vanishes into an arranged marriage and emigration, and Laila—after years of suffering—does indeed become a teacher and later the subject of a newspaper article about the renovation of the orphanage where she works. The photo does not make the front page, but it appears in the paper nonetheless, exactly as Hasina said it would. Hasina's voice, irreverent and prescient, lingers as a touchstone for the life Laila might have led and the one she ultimately builds.
