Persian Girls: A Memoir (2 page)

In the morning, after her prayers, she feeds me breakfast in the living room where rays of colored light, filtering through stained-glass panes in the transom over the French doors, shine on the intricate designs of the rug. She cooks the eggs laid by chickens she keeps in a coop in the courtyard. We have bread that is delivered to the door every morning and is still warm.

I was a gift to Maryam from her younger sister, Mohtaram. I was Mohtaram’s seventh baby, her fifth living child (two had died). Maryam hadn’t been able to get pregnant when she was married. Then she became a widow. She had begged Mohtaram to let her adopt one of her children. Mohtaram promised her sister she could have her next child. I was that next child.

Maryam lived in the ancient neighborhood in Tehran where she and my mother grew up. The neighborhood was more or less untouched by the Shah’s attempts at modernizing Iran. Little had changed there since Maryam was a child. Her neighbors were mostly working-class people, strongly observant Shia Muslims. Maryam’s house was a hundred years old and, like most of the houses in the area, conformed to the standard Islamic architecture. It was set inside a courtyard with high brick walls, with no openings to the streets so that women would not have to worry about being seen unveiled by male passersby. Instead, tall French doors with stained-glass transoms opened from each room onto the courtyard and to other rooms. In the courtyard, there were three sets of staircases, one leading to the roof, one to a kitchen, one to a basement.

Maryam shared the courtyard with two other widows. Our rooms lined one side, and the porch, which extended from our rooms, was adorned with six columns engraved with animals and fruit. The communal kitchen was set off in a corner; in the center was a pool of cool, clear water used for ablutions. The courtyard was shaded by large plane and plum and pear and apple trees. The plane tree had a hollow in its trunk. Maryam had covered the floor of the hole with plastic so that I could sit inside it and play with dolls.

In autumn, Maryam and the widows filled the flower beds with roses, asters, and geraniums. Blue snapdragons crawled up the walls. A trellis against one of the brick walls supported an old grapevine with a twisted, gnarled trunk, on which Maryam lavished attention when she gardened.

“God is merciful,” Maryam told me repeatedly. “He answered my prayers and sent you to me.”

Alas, God wasn’t merciful that day when our lives, hers and mine, underwent a sudden and irrevocable change.

 

 

 

 

 

It was 1955. I was nine years old. The Treaty of Amity between Iran and the United States had just been signed and Iranian women were eight years away from getting the right to vote. The young Shah, who had replaced his father on the throne in 1941, was set on modernizing Iran. He had attended primary school in Switzerland and he wished to make Iran the Switzerland of the Middle East.

School was about to start for the year and Maryam was taking me shopping to buy fabric to have dresses made for me.

At the bazaar we wove in and out of narrow lanes sheltered by vaulted ceilings. Sunlight poured through little windows carved high into the walls. Donkeys, heavily laden with merchandise, made their way laboriously through the crowds. After we left the bazaar we stopped at a store where Maryam bought me a double-decker ice cream sandwich, fragrant with rose water and full of pieces of hardened cream, pressed between three thin wafers.

That evening she took me to the seamstress’s house for a fitting.

“She’s reached that age. Would you like me to make a chador for her?” the woman said as we were leaving. Islam required women to begin wearing chadors, or head scarves, around the age of nine. Nine was also the age when Iranian girls could legally marry.

Maryam blushed and shook her head. Aware of her embarrassment, I felt blood racing to my face, too.

“Sooner or later I need to get a chador for you,” Maryam said, outside.

“We don’t wear it at school,” I said.

The Shah had made it optional for girls to wear a chador. Maryam chose to wear one. My school’s principal, with his progressive ideas, shared the Shah’s inclinations and didn’t require that students cover up.

The next day began like any other day. I woke to the voice of the muezzin calling people to prayers,
Allah o Akbar.
After Maryam finished praying we had our usual breakfast—
sangag
bread still warm from the stone oven it was baked in, jam that Maryam made herself with pears and plums, mint-scented tea. On the way to school I stopped at my friend Batul’s house to pick her up. Batul was my best friend and lived in the same alley as I did. We passed the public baths and the mosques, sights visible on practically every street in the Khanat Abad neighborhood.

It was a crisp, cool autumn day. The red fruit on persimmon trees on sidewalks were glistening like jewels in sunlight. Water gurgled in
joob
s running alongside the streets. The tall Alborz Mountains surrounding Tehran were clearly delineated in the distance. We paused at a stall to buy sliced hot beets and ate them as we walked.

Tehrani School for Girls was on a narrow street off Khanat Abad Avenue, about ten blocks from home. It had the same Muslim architecture as all the houses around it and was surrounded by an expansive courtyard.

At a class recess, as I stood with Batul and a few other girls under a large maple tree in the courtyard, waiting for the next class to start, I noticed a man approaching us. He was thin and short, with a pockmarked face and a brush mustache. He was wearing a suit and a tie. Even from a distance, he seemed powerful.

“Don’t you recognize your father?” he asked as he came closer.

In a flash I recognized him, the man I had met only once when he came to Maryam’s house with my birth mother on one of her visits. He was there for an hour or so, then left to stay with his brother who lived in midtown Tehran.

I was afraid of my father, a fear I had learned from Maryam. Having adopted me informally, Maryam didn’t have legal rights to me; even if she did, my father would be able to claim me. In Iran fathers were given full control of their children, no matter the circumstance. There was no way to fight if he wanted me back. To make matters worse, my father was also a judge.

So often Maryam had said to me, “Be careful, don’t go away with a stranger.” Was Father the stranger she had been warning me against? Our worst fears were coming true.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’m taking you to Ahvaz.” He took my hand and led me forcefully toward the outside door.

“Nahid, Nahid,” Batul and my other classmates called after me. I turned around and saw they were frozen in place, too stunned to do anything but call my name.

“Does my mother know about this?” I asked once we were on the street. My heart beat violently.

“You mean your aunt,” he said. “I just sent a message to her. By the time she knows, we’ll be on the airplane.”

“I want my mother,” I pleaded.

“We’re going to your mother. I spoke to your principal; you aren’t going to this school anymore. You’ll be going to a better one, a private school in Ahvaz.”

I tried to free myself but he held my arm firmly and pulled me toward Khanat Abad Avenue. Still holding me with one hand, he hailed a taxi with the other. One stopped and my father lifted me into the backseat and got in next to me, pinning my legs down with his arm.

“Let me go! Let me go!” I screamed. Through the window I saw a white chador with a polka-dot design in the distance. It was Maryam. “Mother, Mother!” As the car approached, I realized the woman wasn’t Maryam.

“Don’t put up a fight,” my father said as the cab zigzagged through the hectic Tehran traffic. “It won’t do you any good.”

Before I knew it we were in the airport and then on the plane. The stewardess brought trays of food and put them in front of us. I picked up a fork and played with the pieces of rice and stew on my plate, taking reluctant bites. Nausea rose from my stomach in waves.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Go ahead,” my father replied.

“The toilet is in the back,” the stewardess said.

I must hold it until I get to the toilet,
I said to myself, but my stomach tightened sharply and I began to throw up in the aisle. The stewardess gave me a bag and I turned toward the bathroom with it pressed against my lips.

When I returned, the stewardess had cleaned up the aisle.

“How do you feel?” Father asked me. “Better?”

I didn’t answer.

“You’ll be fine when we get home, your real home,” Father said, caressing my arm. “Your mother, sisters, and brothers are all waiting for you. And I’ll look after you.”

Finally I fell asleep; when I awoke we were in the Ahvaz airport. I was groggy and disoriented as we rode in a taxi. Flames erupted from a tall tower, burning excess gas from the Ahvaz petroleum fields. A faint smell of petroleum filled the air.

We passed narrow streets lined with mud and straw houses and tall date and coconut palms. We entered Pahlavi Avenue, full of glittering luxury shops and modern, two-story houses and apartment buildings. Most of the women walking about were not wearing chadors and were dressed in fashionable, imported clothes. The modern avenue reminded me of the sections in north Tehran where I had ventured a few times.

At its center was a square, dominated by a large statue of the Shah.

“Stop right here,” Father said to the driver, pointing to a house on a street that branched off Pahlavi Avenue just beyond the square.

The taxi came to a halt in front of the large, modern two-story house, with a wraparound balcony and two entrances.

“We’re home,” Father announced. A group of boys were playing hopscotch on the cement sidewalk. I felt an urge to bolt, but Father, as if aware of that urge, took hold of my hand. Grasping it firmly, he led me into the house.

A woman was sitting in a shady corner of the courtyard, holding a glass of lemonade with ice jingling in it. She wore bright red lipstick and her hair in a permanent wave. She looked so different from Maryam, who wore no makeup and let her naturally wavy hair grow long.

“Here is Nahid, Mohtaram
joon.
We have our daughter back with us,” my father said to her.

Mohtaram, my birth mother.

She nodded vaguely and walked over to where we were standing. She took me in her arms, but her embrace was tentative, hesitant. I missed Maryam’s firm, loving arms around me.

“Ali, show her to her room,” Mohtaram said to the live-in servant, who came out of a room in the corner.

“Go ahead,” Father said to me. “You can rest for a while.”

Ali led me up a steep stone stairway and to a room. He left for a moment and returned with a nightgown, a bathrobe, slippers, and underwear. He told me where the bathrooms were, if I wanted to wash up. He left again and I closed the door behind him.

I lay down on the bed. I ran my hands over the folds of my dress, one Maryam had made for me. The soft springs of the bed felt strange; I was used to sleeping on a mattress rolled out on the floor of my room or under the mosquito net set up on the roof.

There was a knock on the door. “Please come to dinner, miss,” Ali said from the other side.

I kept silent. He knocked again and when I didn’t answer he walked away.

Gradually everything around me blurred and I plunged into a deep, dark sleep.

When I awoke, it was the middle of the night. I felt dehydrated and reached for the earthen pitcher of water Maryam always kept beside my bed. Instead my hand hit a vacuum.
I have been taken away from Maryam,
I thought in a panic. When Maryam got the message Father sent that he was taking me away, she must have started crying. Then she must have calmed herself by thinking she would come to Ahvaz as soon as possible and plead with Father to let me go back to her.
How soon will she be here? Will she be able to take me back?
A tangle of disturbing thoughts clogged my head.

The next time I woke it was dawn.
Maryam is waking up with the voice of the muezzin. She is performing ablutions at the pool’s faucet. She is spreading her prayer rug on the living room floor and praying. In her prayers she pleads with God to put it in Father’s heart to let me go back to her. Then she will get ready to come to Ahvaz and take me back. No, she must be already on the way.

I sat up, breathing with difficulty. My arm, on the spot that my father had held so tightly at school, was throbbing with pain and my eyes burned with tears that wouldn’t come out.

The unfamiliar room pressed in on me. It was furnished with a wooden bed, a painted white-and-pink chest, and a matching fluffy pink rug. The curtains were white with pink flowers on them. It was a comfortable, pretty room, but I missed my own room—the colorful light filling it during the day, the mantel on which I kept story magazines and hand-painted clay animals, the rug with floral and animal designs, the embroidered cushions and bolsters against the wall.

I went to the window. Outside, the square was already filled with people gathering around carts carrying a variety of merchandise—produce, clothes, household gadgets. A row of Arab women, balancing pots on their heads, passed by in a line. It was all strange.

D
uring their years growing up in Tehran, Maryam and Mohtaram had been the closest among their siblings, four sisters and two brothers. Maryam, five years older than Mohtaram, helped her little sister get dressed in the morning and combed her hair. When Mohtaram was ill, Maryam sat by her side day and night, putting cold compresses on her forehead, bathing her, and telling her stories until she got well. And it was Maryam who taught her sister how to knit, embroider, and cook.

The two sisters remained close, even though their marriages took them in different directions, on roads laid down for them by their husbands: Maryam remained a practicing Muslim, while Mohtaram became “modern.”