The Book of Fate (2 page)

And Mother would exclaim, ‘Oh! What are you saying? What's ugly about my sons? They're as handsome as can be, it's just that they're a little olive-skinned, and that's not bad. A man isn't supposed to be pretty. From back in the old days it has always been said that a man should be uncomely, ugly and bad-tempered!' She would sing these last words and Uncle Hamid would laugh out loud.

 

I looked like my father and his sister. People always thought Mahboubeh and I were sisters. But she was prettier than me. I was thin and she was plump, and unlike my straight hair that wouldn't curl no matter what I did, she had a mass of ringlets. But we both had dark-green eyes, fair skin and dimples on our cheeks when we laughed. Her teeth were a bit uneven and she always said, ‘You're so lucky. Your teeth are so white and straight.'

Mother and the rest of the family looked different. Their skin was olive-toned, they had black eyes and wavy hair, and they were somewhat fat. Though none of them was as portly as Mother's sister, Aunt Ghamar. Of course, they weren't ugly. Especially not Mother. When she threaded off her facial hair and plucked her eyebrows, she looked just like the pictures of Miss Sunshine on our plates and dishes. Mother had a mole on the side of her lip and she used to say, ‘The day your father came to ask for my hand, he fell in love with me the instant he caught sight of my mole.'

 

I was seven or eight when Uncle Hamid left. When he came to say goodbye, he took me in his arms, turned to Mother and said, ‘Sister, for the love of God don't marry this flower off too soon. Let her get an education and become a lady.'

Uncle Hamid was the first person in our family to travel to the West. I had no image of lands overseas. I thought it was some place like Tehran, except farther away. Once in a while, he would send a letter and photographs to Granny Aziz. The photos were beautiful. I don't know why he was always standing in a garden, surrounded by plants, trees and flowers. Later, he sent a picture of himself with a blonde woman who wasn't wearing hijab. I will never forget that day. It was late afternoon; Granny Aziz came over so that Father could read the letter to her. Father was sitting next to his mother on the floor cushions. He first read the letter to himself and then he suddenly shouted, ‘Wonderful! Congratulations! Hamid Agha has got married and here's a picture of his wife.'

Granny Aziz fainted and Grandmother, who had never got along with her, covered her mouth with her chador and chuckled. Mother hit herself on the head. She didn't know whether to swoon or to revive her mother. Finally, when Granny Aziz came to, she drank plenty of hot water and candied sugar and then she said, ‘Aren't those people sinners?'

‘No! They're not sinners,' Father said with a shrug. ‘After all they're well read. They're Armenian.'

Granny Aziz started hitting herself on the head, but Mother grabbed her hands and said, ‘For the love of God, stop it. It's not that bad. He has converted her to Islam. Go ask any man you like. A Muslim man can marry a non-Muslim and convert her. And what's more, it merits God's reward.'

Granny Aziz looked at her with listless eyes and said, ‘I know. Some of our prophets and imams took non-Muslim wives.'

‘Well, God willing, it is a blessing,' Father laughed. ‘So, when are you going to celebrate? A foreign wife really calls for a festivity.'

Grandmother frowned and said, ‘God forbid, a daughter-in-law is bad enough, now to top it off this one is foreign, ignorant and clueless about purity and impurity in our faith.'

Granny Aziz, who seemed to have regained her energy, collected herself, and as she got up to leave, she said, ‘A bride is a home's blessing. We're not like some people who don't appreciate their daughter-in-law and think they've brought a maid to the house. We cherish our daughters-in-law and are proud of them, especially a Western one!'

Grandmother couldn't tolerate her boasting and snidely said, ‘Yes, I saw how proud you were of Assadollah Khan's wife.' Then she maliciously added, ‘And who knows if she has in fact converted to Islam. Maybe she has made a sinner out of Hamid Agha. In fact, Hamid Agha never had proper faith and practice. Otherwise, he wouldn't have moved to Sin-estan.'

‘You see, Mostafa Khan?' Granny Aziz snapped. ‘Did you hear what she said to me?'

Finally, Father intervened and put an end to the squabble.

Granny Aziz quickly threw a large party and bragged to everyone about her Western daughter-in-law. She framed the photograph, put it on the mantelpiece and showed it to the women. But up until the moment she died, she kept asking Mother, ‘Did Hamid's wife become a Muslim? What if Hamid has become an Armenian?'

After her death, for years we received very little news of Uncle Hamid. Once I took his photographs to school and showed them to my friends. Parvaneh really liked him. ‘He's so handsome,' she said. ‘He's so lucky to have gone to the West. I wish we could go.'

 

Parvaneh knew all the songs. She was a fan of Delkash. In school, half the girls were Delkash fans and the other half liked Marzieh. I had to become a Delkash fan. Otherwise, Parvaneh wouldn't stay friends with me. She even knew Western singers. At her home they had a gramophone and they played records on it. One day she showed it to me. It looked like a small suitcase with a red lid. She said it was the portable type.

The school year had not yet ended and I had already learned a lot. Parvaneh always borrowed my notebooks and lecture notes and sometimes we studied together. She didn't care if she had to come to our house. She was very nice and easygoing and paid no attention to what we had and didn't have.

Our house was relatively small. There were three steps at the front door that opened into the front yard, which had a rectangle reflecting pool in the middle. We had put a large wooden bed on one side of it and on the other side there was a long flowerbed parallel to the pool. I mean its long side was parallel to the short side of the pool. The kitchen, which was always dark and black, was separate from the house and at the end of the yard. The bathroom was next to it. There was a sink outside and we didn't have to use the pool's water pump to wash our hands and faces. Inside the house, to the left of the main door, there were four steps that led to a small landing. The doors to the two downstairs rooms opened here. And then there were stairs that led upstairs where there were two other rooms with an adjoining door. The room in the front was the living room and it had two windows. From one side you could see the yard and part of the street and from the other side you could see Mrs Parvin's house. The windows of the other room, where Ahmad and Mahmoud slept, opened on to the rear courtyard with an open view of the backyard of the house behind ours.

 

Whenever Parvaneh came over, we would go upstairs and sit in the living room. There wasn't much there. Just a large red carpet, a round table and six bentwood chairs, a big heater in the corner and next to it a few floor cushions and backrests. The only decoration on the wall was a framed carpet with the Van Yakad verse from the Quran on it. There was also a mantelpiece, which Mother had covered with a piece of embroidery and on it she had put the mirror and the candelabras from her marriage ceremony.

Parvaneh and I would sit on the floor cushions and whisper, giggle and study. Under no circumstances was I allowed to go to her house.

‘You're not to step inside that girl's house,' Ahmad would bark. ‘First of all, she has a jackass brother; second, she is shameless and fickle. To hell with her, even her mother goes around with no hijab.'

And I would say, ‘Who in this city wears hijab?' Of course, I would only mumble it under my breath.

One day when Parvaneh wanted to show me her
Woman's Day
magazines, I snuck over to their house for just five minutes. It was so clean and beautiful and they had so many pretty things. There were paintings of landscapes and women on all the walls. In the living room, there were large navy-blue sofas with tassels on the bottom. The windows that overlooked the front yard had velvet curtains in the same colour. The dining room was on the opposite side and it was separated from the living room by curtains. In the main hall there was a television and a few armchairs and sofas. The doors to the kitchen, bathroom and toilet were here. They didn't have to constantly cross the front yard in the cold of winter and the heat of summer. The bedrooms were all upstairs. Parvaneh and her younger sister Farzaneh shared a room.

They were so lucky! We didn't have that much space. Although on the face of it we had four rooms, in reality we all lived in the large room downstairs. We ate lunch and dinner there; in the wintertime we set up the
korsi
, and Faati, Ali and I slept there. Father and Mother slept in the room next door where there was a large wooden bed and a wardrobe for our clothes and odds and ends. We each had one shelf for our books. But I had more books than everyone else, so I took two shelves.

 

Mother liked looking at the pictures in
Woman's Day
. But we kept the magazines hidden from Father and Mahmoud. I used to read the ‘At the Crossroads' section and the serial stories and then I would tell them to Mother. I would exaggerate the details so much that she would come close to tears and I myself would cry all over again. Parvaneh and I had decided that each week, after she and her mother had finished reading the new issue, she would give the magazine to us.

I told Parvaneh that my brothers didn't allow me to go her house. She was surprised and asked, ‘Why?'

‘Because you have an older brother.'

‘Dariush? What's “older” about him? In fact, he's one year younger than us.'

‘Still, he's grown up and they say it's not proper.'

She shrugged and said, ‘I for one don't understand your customs.' But she stopped insisting that I go over to her house.

I received excellent grades in my end of term exams and the teachers praised me a lot. But at home no one showed any reaction. Mother didn't quite understand what I was telling her.

Mahmoud snapped, ‘So what? What do you think you've achieved?'

And Father said, ‘Well, why didn't you become the top student in your class?'

 

With the start of summer, Parvaneh and I were separated. The first few days, she would come over when my brothers were out and we would stand outside the front door and chat. But mother constantly complained. She had forgotten how back in Qum she would spend every afternoon with the women in the neighbourhood, talking and eating watermelon seeds until Father came home. She didn't have any friends or acquaintances in Tehran and the women in the neighbourhood snubbed her. On a few occasions they laughed at her and she got upset. Over time, she forgot her habit of spending the afternoon chit-chatting and so I couldn't talk to my friends either.

On the whole, Mother wasn't happy that we had moved to Tehran. She would say, ‘We aren't made for this city. All our friends and relatives are in Qum. I'm all alone here. When your uncle's wife, with all her airs, pays no mind to us, what can we expect of strangers?'

She nagged and complained until she finally convinced Father to send us to Qum to spend the summer at her sister's house. I quipped, ‘Everyone goes to a country house for the summer, and you want us to go to Qum?'

Mother glared at me and said, ‘You are quick to forget where you're from, aren't you? We lived in Qum all year round and you never complained. Now little missy wants to go to a summertime place! I haven't seen my poor sister for an entire year, I have no news of my brother, I haven't visited the grave of my relatives… The summer will be over by the time we spend just a week at each relative's house.'

Mahmoud agreed to let us go to Qum, but he wanted us to stay with Father's sister so that when he came to visit us on the weekends he would have to see only Mahboubeh and our aunt. ‘Just stay with Auntie,' he said. ‘There's no need for you to stay at everyone's house. If you do, you'll be leaving the door open for all of them to head down to Tehran to stay with us, and it will be one big headache.' (Wonderful! How hospitable!)

‘Right!' Mother replied angrily. ‘It's fine if we go to your aunt's house and they come here. But God forbid if my poor sister wants to come for a visit.' (What clout! Whack him on the head and put him in his place.)

 

We went to Qum. I didn't complain too much because Parvaneh and her family were going to spend the summer at her grandfather's garden estate in Golab-Darreh.

We returned to Tehran in the middle of August. Ali had failed a few classes and had to retake his final exams. I don't know why my brothers were so lazy when it came to studying. Poor Father had so many dreams for his sons. He wanted them to become doctors and engineers. Anyway, I was happy to be back home. I couldn't bear our living like vagabonds, moving from one house to another, going from maternal aunt to paternal uncle and from paternal aunt to maternal uncle… I especially hated staying with Mother's sister. Her house was like a mosque. She kept asking if we had said our prayers and constantly grumbled that we hadn't said them properly. And she wouldn't stop bragging about her devoutness and about her husband's relatives who were all mullahs.

 

A couple of weeks later, Parvaneh and her family also returned to Tehran. And with the start of the school year, my life was again happy and pleasant. I was excited to see my friends and teachers. Unlike the previous year, I was no longer a newcomer and a novice, I wasn't surprised by everything, I didn't make stupid comments, I wrote better and more literary compositions, I was as savvy as the Tehrani girls and I could express my opinions. And for all that, I was grateful to Parvaneh who had been my first and best teacher. That year, I also discovered the joy of reading books other than my textbooks. We passed around romantic novels, read them with many sighs and tears and spent hours discussing them.