Persian Girls: A Memoir (35 page)

I put it on next to my wedding ring. It fit perfectly. When Maryam finished praying I showed her the ring on my finger.

I thought of the stories I had woven around Mohtaram having an affair with a jeweler.

Could it be true? It was such a taboo subject that I could never discuss it with Maryam or Mohtaram.

“I’m happy you have it now,” Maryam said, but there was a touch of sorrow in her face. “I imagined you would live near me when you got married.” Then she repeated what she had said when she visited me in Cambridge, “But it wasn’t our destiny.”

I
began visiting Maryam regularly after that. When Khomeini died in 1989, things were not as strict as during his reign. Iran-America relationships have never been mended. President Bush, in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, named Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, an “axis of evil.” Now in 2006, there are huge tensions over nuclear weapons being made in Iran under the latest president there.

I know firsthand, though, that Iran’s government hasn’t gone from good to evil, but rather from bad to perhaps worse. Under the Shah’s rule people didn’t have most of their rights. I experienced firsthand my sister Pari automatically losing custody of her son when she left her abusive husband. During Mohammad Khatami’s two terms as president (1997-2005), Iran went through a period of relative reform. Part of that was due to Khatami making the Internet accessible to a large number of Iranians. Women frequenting the hundreds of Internet cafés in large cities in Iran to go to chat rooms or look at blogs in Farsi and other languages have become aware of different ways of life. There are more women than men in universities now, and many girls hold jobs.

But then, rules in Iran are in constant flux and I have to assess the political climate every time I visit. At times I have had to hide my American passport in the lining of my clothes or I have left it with the American consulate in Istanbul; at other times I have been able to show it with no trouble. Sometimes I needed a letter of permission from my husband to go to Iran; at other times I didn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

Typical of the meandering and unpredictable life my family and I have led, on one visit I found Maryam and Mohtaram living together. Maryam had rented out her house and moved in with Mohtaram and Farzin, who was divorced. They lived in an apartment on the top floor of a three-story building that Mohtaram purchased in Tehran. It was interesting how the apartment accommodated their individual needs, combining modern and old elements. It had a modern kitchen and bathroom but was set in a courtyard with high walls in the traditional Muslim fashion. From its balcony the turquoise dome of a mosque was visible. It was furnished with sofas, tables, chairs, and also thickly woven rugs on the floor and cushions to lean against. The building was on a quiet, tree-lined street but was within a few blocks of the bustling Vali Asr Avenue with shops carrying both traditional and modern merchandise. Maryam liked to spend time on the balcony facing the courtyard. “Sunlight soothes my aching knees,” she told me.

I could see that Mohtaram and Maryam were closer to each other than to any of us children. In some ways we had let them down. I lived far away from Maryam, shattering her hopes that I would one day share my daily life with her. The idea of destiny became abstract to her at times when she was faced with reality. My brothers had no intention of returning home. Manijeh’s blaming Mohtaram for her unhappiness in her first marriage, though in the form of a very mild protest, had hurt Mohtaram enough for her to comment on it. Farzaneh, married with two daughters, lived far away, out of the country. Farzin was “in her own world.” And Pari, of course, was no longer alive.

“Pari, my dear firstborn daughter, was the focus of all my attention until Manijeh was born,” Mohtaram told me. “Manijeh was weak and needed attention. I neglected Pari too much.” She began to cry with fresh grief. “My wonderful Pari, I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.” Her grief and regret were deep and real.

Maryam even slept close to her sister, on a mattress in the ell of Mohtaram’s bedroom. Mohtaram had adopted some of Maryam’s values and now she prayed. This wasn’t due to pressure from the regime—there was no way that the new ideology could be enforced in the privacy of homes. It was because Mohtaram wanted to be close to her sister.

 

 

 

 

 

The last time I visited, Mohtaram and Maryam both needed care. Maryam’s arthritis had become more severe and she could walk only with the help of a cane. Mohtaram also could barely walk, although it was not clear what the underlying problem was—the doctors said it could be due to partial paralysis from a minor stroke.

Surprisingly Manijeh had moved into the second floor of Mohtaram’s building. She was divorced from her second husband, and both her children were in America, living with their father’s relatives. Manijeh devoted herself to taking care of Mohtaram, Farzin, and Maryam. She made sure that everything was running smoothly for all of them. She supervised their daily tasks and solved problems as they came up. She found a family, Nasrin and her husband and two children, to do the cooking, shopping, and cleaning, and to take care of the flower beds and the pool in the courtyard. In exchange, they lived rent free in the first-floor apartment and were paid a small salary. Our old servant, Ali, had moved out of our family’s house years ago and now worked in an orchard belonging to his wife’s family.

On Nasrin’s day off, Manijeh did the shopping and cooking and helped my mother, aunt, and sister to take showers. She went out and returned with bags full of fresh produce, meat, bread, and pastries. She was happy to be of help to them. Of course, not everything about a person is in the open and explainable. Still, I had not expected Manijeh to be capable of so much tenderness and self-sacrifice.

Images from the past of Mohtaram’s love for Manijeh kept coming to me: Mohtaram putting her arm around Manijeh and saying, “Isn’t she an angel?” Mohtaram putting a flower in Manijeh’s hair and saying, “She’s like a flower herself.” It is poetic justice, in some small way, that Manijeh is now Mohtaram’s caretaker.

Once I had a chance to be alone with Manijeh. It was a pleasantly cool and sunny afternoon and I was sitting on the balcony.

I felt the old tightening in my chest as Manijeh came out and sat on a chair there, too. We had barely interacted during the visit.

“So much time has passed, so much has happened since those days at home,” she said.

“Yes, it seems so far away and yet so near. I think of those days all the time.”

“I wish I had behaved differently when you came home. I was so insecure and jealous. I haven’t forgiven myself for accusing you of being the cause of Javad breaking our engagement,” she said.

I was startled and shook my head vaguely.

“The truth is he was in love with another woman,” Manijeh went on. “There’s so much more to what happened.” Her face, which had retained its beauty, became tinged with bitterness, making her look older for a moment. She sank into herself.

“I didn’t see Pari for years,” she said after she came out of herself. “I wish we had been able to reach out to each other.”

“I wish she was here with us now.”

“Yes, it’s hard to believe what happened, how it happened. When she and I were both home at the same time, I could tell she was deeply unhappy. She used strong words. Once, after an argument with Father, before storming out of the room, she said, ‘I’d rather jump off a bridge than stay with Taheri.’ Another time she said, ‘I wish I were dead.’ But then at other times she seemed happy enough. She was excited about some projects she had taken on at the high school. And she kept up her hope that she would gain at least part-time custody of Bijan, which of course never happened. In a way we both lived in dreamworlds for a while, she hoping she would have her son back, that she could pursue acting. And me thinking I would win my husband’s heart from that other woman.”

The mountains had turned into a gray-blue curtain. Over the courtyard wall I could see streetlamps going on and children who had been playing on the sidewalks leaving to go home. Men rode by on bicycles, carrying loaves of bread, bags of pastry, and fruit.

“Time to get dinner ready,” Manijeh said.

We got up and went inside. I was struck again by how the passage of time and all the new experiences had obliterated certain feelings and even perceptions. Those feelings we used to express by shouting, “I hate you,” had simply melted away. We were now middle-aged women. We had lived with losses, traumas that, though of different natures, were so great in magnitude that they canceled out the long-ago grievances.

 

 

 

 

 

It makes me happy when I think of Maryam and Mohtaram being so close to each other at this stage of their lives. Although I still view Maryam as my mother and it is her I address as “Mother,” I have come to completely forgive Mohtaram and love her. I am grateful to her for being accommodating to Maryam. I am also more aware than ever of how difficult her life was—married at the age of nine to a grown man, starting at the age of fourteen to give birth to ten children and then losing so many of them. I imagine her and Father together in bed on their wedding night, he experienced with women, and she completely innocent, no breasts, no pubic hair. A child next to a grown man. I love Manijeh now, too, for devoting herself selflessly to Mohtaram, and Maryam and Farzin benefiting from it, too.

But the loss of Pari has left a hole in my existence, made deeper and darker by my uncertainty about what happened, how it happened. I have tried to track down her son but haven’t succeeded yet after all these years. When I look at a photograph of Pari on my desk, with her hopeful bright smile, images rush back: how my loneliness disappeared the moment she entered our house in Ahvaz, she on the stage playing Laura, my dreams of writing a play for her, her telling me, as I read her a story, “You’re so good.” Then she is here with me, sitting next to me.

Yes, dearest Pari, it is to bring you back to life that I write this book.

READING GROUP GUIDE

1. One theme in
Persian Girls
is that of belonging. Growing up, the author feels that she does not belong in Iran. But she feels likewise in the United States, and describes “the ambivalent feelings that had plagued me over the years in America, being neither here nor there” (page 202).

2. Pari begs her father to help her divorce her first husband, Taheri, saying: “Aren’t I entitled to some individual happiness?” Her father responds: “[Y]ou’re under the influence of those American movies. Their idea of individual happiness is selfish and it has hurt their sense of family life. That’s why so many Americans are miserable, lonely, killing themselves with drugs and alcohol. What we have is superior; each person should think of the happiness of the whole” (page 171).

3. Another theme in
Persian Girls
is destiny. When the author is a girl, her adoptive mother, Maryam, says to her: “It was your destiny to be my child. As soon as a baby comes into the world an angel writes its destiny on the baby’s forehead” (page 25). Later, the author says: “I hadn’t accepted that as a child, and now, too, I believed that it was my own sheer determination that had enabled me to come to America” (page 150).

4. Throughout
Persian Girls
, Iranian women and girls are said to have to hide or downplay their beauty, and are even flogged for wearing lipstick or nail polish or for not observing the
hejab
properly (e.g., page 254). In contrast, the author discovers a serious beauty culture in the United States, at Lindengrove College. She recounts that before mixers with boys from other schools, “the bathrooms on my floor were filled with girls checking their makeup, spraying perfume on their necks and arms, fluffing up their hair, and examining their dresses one more time” (page 149).