 There was a whole facet of Afghan society which I hadn't touched on in "The Kite Runner", an entire landscape that I felt was fertile with story ideas...In the spring of 2003, I went to Kabul, and I recall seeing these burqa-clad women sitting at street corners, with four, five, six children, begging for change.I remember watching them walking in pairs up the street, trailed by their children in ragged clothes, and wondering how life had brought them to that point...I spoke to many of those women in Kabul.Their life stories were truly heartbreaking...When I began writing "A Thousand Splendid Suns", I found myself thinking about those resilient women over and over.