Persian Girls: A Memoir

  I put it in my schoolbag and headed home. His remark, “Be very careful,” rang in my ears, and I was tempted to turn around and say the same thing to him. Terrifying images of Jalal getting arrested, his shop being shut down, his being thrown in jail for years or even executed came before my eyes. According to rumors people were punished that way for just that “crime” he was committing. How strange that in our culture books were considered dangerous, that the written word was given so much power, that a person was thought of as a criminal for owning or reading certain books. I had actually taken a few steps back to the store, I realized. I stopped myself. He was older than me, had owned the store for three years, he once told me. He was cautious enough to have gotten away with selling such books. He knew instinctively whom to trust.

  I stayed in my room with the door shut and immediately started reading the book like a child starved for food.

  I wrote a story based on the plight of the woman who had been tempted to abandon her blind child, the story Maryam and Hamideh had spoken of that day in Tehran.

  When Shamsi and her two small children moved into some rooms in our house, they looked very poor and pathetic. My mother took pity on them and reduced the rent. Wherever Shamsi went her children followed. One of her daughters, Monir, the smaller of the two, was blind in one eye and the other eye could see only vague shadows of things. No one knew how Shamsi suddenly began to acquire new possessions. She got new clothes for herself and the children. She bought copper pots and pans, which she shined every day. And a faint smile lingered on her face. Then Monir disappeared. No one saw her in the mornings or at any other time and the smile on Shamsi’s face also disappeared. One day she confessed everything. There was a man who was interested in marrying her but he would not put up with a blind child. So she had taken Monir to the desert at the edge of Tehran and left her there. Then Shamsi had run away and gotten into a jeep full of soldiers. The soldiers had teased and flirted with her but she covered her face under her chador, unable to cry or smile. I picture Monir standing in the vast desert, listening to the vanishing echoes of her mother’s footsteps. Then waiting desperately for her to appear again until other frightening images and echoes swept over her consciousness. . . .

  I showed the story to Pari, as I did all the stories I wrote. As important as it was for me to write, it was equally important to hear her reassuring, encouraging voice. After Pari told me she liked the story, I handed it in as my composition assignment at school.

  “What do you think?” Mrs. Soleimani asked the class after I’d read it aloud.

  “It’s too sad,” one of the girls said.

  “It doesn’t sound real,” another girl said.

  “But it is realistic; it captures the desperation of women all around us,” Mrs. Soleimani said. She was married with a son, thus having fulfilled conventional expectations, and in addition she had managed to have a career. She encouraged us to strive for more than just marriage and children.

  At her comment the class fell into silence.

  “If you had a choice, would you have been born a man or a woman?” Mrs. Soleimani asked.

  I raised my hand.

  “Yes, Nahid?”

  “I would still want to have been born a girl, but I want to go to America and live there.” The idea of going to America had been in my fantasies ever since my brothers left.

  A few others in the class of twenty raised their hands. One said she would want to be born a girl because she could become pregnant, something a man couldn’t do. Another said she didn’t understand boys, so she wanted to be a girl. Yet another said she thought life was harder for men because they had to be the breadwinners and be strong. Only one said she would want to be a boy so she could become a good soccer player like her brother and do other things her brother was allowed to do, like stay out late at night and take trips with his friends without parental supervision.

  “Most of you are fourteen years old,” Mrs. Soleimani said. “Some of you have been promised to men who are much older and know a lot more about life than you do and will no doubt be able to dominate you. You must fight being in that situation.”

  Some of the girls looked at her with awe for saying such things. Others seemed vaguely disapproving, as if she were attacking them rather than giving them guidance. But of course she was absolutely right, I thought. It was the way Pari and I felt, too, that we had to fight against that situation.

  After class Mrs. Soleimani stopped me and said, “You look sad. Are there problems at home?”

  I nodded.

  “Come, let’s talk in my office.”

  “I’m so unhappy,” I said once we were in her office. I told her how abruptly I had been torn away from Maryam and now my mother was totally cold to me. How my father would force my sisters and me to marry whomever he chose for us, how he controlled every aspect of our lives.

  “I’m certain if you were a boy your mother wouldn’t have given you away, even as a kindness to her sister,” Mrs. Soleimani said. “When something goes wrong with my car, male drivers honk and yell at me because I’m a woman. All the men in this school, and everywhere else, get paid much more than women. They’re breadwinners and we women are bread eaters, they say. I had a very authoritative father, too, Nahid, but I fought him and pulled myself out of his grip and managed to go my own way.” She pondered that for a moment, then added, “Within the limits.”

  The bell rang for the next class and we parted, but Mrs. Soleimani’s words had moved me deeply. Back home, I told Pari what Mrs. Soleimani had said about fighting her authoritative father.

  “Father’s will is impossible to bend,” Pari said, despair coming into her face.

  “Why don’t you ask him to send you to America to study? I want to do the same thing. Maybe he’ll agree if you insist that you won’t marry anyone.”

  “He isn’t going to go along with such an idea. He said so many times that education is a waste on a girl.”

  “If you had a choice, would you have been born a man or a woman?” I asked Pari.

  “I don’t want to be a man, dictatorial,” Pari said. She thought about that. “There are exceptions. Some, like Majid, are different.”

  “Parviz and Cyrus are different, too,” I said.

  Pari nodded. “The world would be a better place if there were more men like them.”

  Eleven

  On a Friday, the Sabbath in Iran, I found Pari in her room getting dressed, putting on a blue dress and gold jewelry.

  “A suitor is here, with his sister,” she said. “Mother and Father made me dress up. They’re going to call me in to meet them. I saw him going into the salon. He looks really tense. You want to see what he looks like?”

  We crept slowly to the salon and took turns peeking through the large keyhole. Our parents were sitting on the maroon velvet sofa. The suitor and his sister occupied the two matching dark blue armchairs.

  “Look how his ears stick out,” Pari whispered.

  Everything he did, all his gestures, seemed comical as I saw him through Pari’s eyes. We crept back to Pari’s room as we couldn’t hold back laughter.

  Moments later Father came to her door. “Come with me,” he said. Pari followed him.

  The air in Pari’s room still had a faint scent of the flowers she had received from Majid. And here she was, pressured into being viewed by a suitor, perhaps soon pressured into considering him. Someone she had absolutely no interest in. How ridiculous and unfair it all was.

  After the visitors left, I heard angry voices on the porch.

  “I don’t want to marry him,” Pari said.

  “Come to your senses,” Father boomed. “Taheri is one of the richest men in Ahvaz. He has a share in the Dorang Petrochemical Company. He makes one million toomans a year from his carpet shops in Ahvaz and Tehran. And he’ll inherit a fortune from his elderly father, who has a thriving business in Tehran. And he’s educated, a graduate of the Finance Academy in Tehran.”

  “He values you
so much he’s offering a large sum for your mehrieh,” Mohtaram said. “You can’t throw that away.”

  “You’re trying to sell me.”

  “Pari, don’t be so foolish,” Father said.

  “Let him marry Manijeh instead,” Pari said defiantly.

  “You know very well that as the oldest you have to marry first,” Father said.

  “You aren’t thinking of me at all!” Seconds later Pari was in her room.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “I’m not going to give in to them,” she said.

  But Taheri was persistent. Since his parents lived in Tehran, his oldest sister, Behjat, was the one who mainly dealt with our parents. She was a widow and lived with her brother. He planned to sell the shop in Ahvaz and live in Tehran to be near their elderly parents.

  Behjat was a little more old-fashioned than our parents, from what we could see. She didn’t wear a chador, but she wore a head scarf and conservative clothes and no makeup. One afternoon when she was sitting with Mohtaram in the salon, Pari and I went to the big keyhole again, looking in and listening.

  “My brother is an open-minded man,” she was telling Mohtaram. “He doesn’t want a chadori wife. He doesn’t even like me to wear this head scarf. I’m an old woman now, I didn’t wear it when I was young. He wants a wife who can dress well, like your daughter. When he first saw your daughter on the way to school, he knew immediately she is the one for him.”

  Mohtaram came to Pari after Behjat left and they had the same argument as before, with Pari refusing to give in to the marriage proposal. “They keep at me,” she said. “But I can’t imagine sharing a life with that man.”

  Behjat visited a few days later and Pari and I again took our spot by the keyhole. This time Father was there with Behjat and Mohtaram.

  “My brother is threatening suicide,” Behjat said urgently. “He said if your daughter doesn’t consent, he’d rather be dead. Taheri has a romantic soul.”

  “I admit my daughter is headstrong,” Father said. “Bear with her, she’ll come to her senses.”

  Later that day Mohtaram came to Pari’s room and gave her a letter, which she had already opened. She left and Pari and I turned to the letter immediately.

  With all respect, Pari khanoon, the daughter of a distinguished father and respected mother, I can’t imagine a life without you as my wife. I’d rather die than see you marry someone else. I have a plan to kill myself. . . .

  Pari grimaced. “This is just blackmail. He doesn’t know me even slightly. We haven’t spoken to each other once.”

  I felt anxiety in the bottom of my stomach from all the tension building up around Pari.

  “I confess to you, I saw Majid,” Pari said, holding the letter in her lap. “We went to his apartment near the river this time. We kissed. He stopped before going further. He isn’t a selfish man. In fact, he told me we should stop seeing each other unless we can get married. He had actually heard about Taheri’s interest; he said he hoped nothing would come of it. Majid is going to wait until Taheri finally gives up and then send his mother over again.”

  We sank into a contemplative silence.

  “Pari,” Father called from behind the door.

  After Pari left, I wondered what was going to happen. Was Pari going to keep arguing until Father and Mohtaram gave up? Then would she and Majid get married? What would be the consequences of that? Pari would have no support from our parents; in the future, if she needed help, they wouldn’t be there for her. Then I grew apprehensive about Majid’s character. Was he really any different from other Iranian men who expected their wives to be “pure”? Pari had broken a deep taboo by going to his apartment and letting him kiss her. Would he begin to disapprove of her for doing so?

  “Father keeps telling me Taheri is such a good catch,” Pari said, coming into the room. “Why won’t he listen to me? My emotions are all tangled up with Majid. You know what Miss Partovi says, that a good actress should be able to present characters so that all different aspects of them come together in a coherent way? I want that for myself but I feel so fragmented under all the pressure.”

  What Pari said only added to my trepidation. It was as if she had turned into a delicate vase that might suddenly break into pieces.

  On a hot April afternoon Pari and I were sitting at the edge of the pool, dangling our feet in the water. It hadn’t rained for a long time and the date palm trees standing in a row on one side of the courtyard were shriveled and dusty, their fruit all dried up in clusters. Dragonflies darted around the dusty air.

  “Nahid, I’m going to marry Taheri,” Pari said suddenly.

  “Pari, why? How did this happen?”

  “Majid sent his mother here again, and Father and Mohtaram refused to accept the proposal. Even though we weren’t going to see each other again, I did see him. But this really was the last time. It was too painful. Do you know what he said? That we should elope. But of course it’s not possible. No one would marry us without Father’s consent. Majid knows that; it was only a wild fantasy.”

  “You could wait awhile,” I mumbled. “Maybe someone other than Taheri—”

  “I have something to gain by marrying Taheri,” Pari interrupted. “He’ll take me to Tehran. I’ll pursue acting there. People must be more open-minded there about actresses.” Her face looked blurry in the dusty light and I couldn’t assess her feelings clearly.

  “I’m going to be lonely without you,” I said after a moment.

  Ali came out of his room and started throwing seeds on the ground to attract pigeons. Sounds from the streets were beginning to become muffled as dusk was approaching. Pari and I got up and started walking up the steep stairway that took us to our rooms on the second floor.

  After Pari told our parents she would marry Taheri they praised her, telling her she was now finally acting her age of almost eighteen, a mature woman.

  Our parents informed Behjat that Pari was willing to marry her brother.

  “He will be so happy,” she said. “You saved him from terrible things he was threatening to do to himself.”

  They proceeded with serious negotiations about the mehrieh and jahaz. Mehrieh was financial collateral or material backing given by the groom, in case of marital discord. If the husband decided to divorce his wife he would have to pay her the agreed-upon sum. He offered property but our parents decided they preferred a sum of money, which was large, half a million dollars in Iranian currency. For jahaz, or dowry, our parents agreed to send along with Pari old gold coins, silverware, dishes, and other household items. Pari hadn’t participated in the negotiations, as that wasn’t the custom. It was an agreement between our parents and Taheri’s sister.

  Twelve

  In spite of all the pressure on Pari, I kept thinking if she were stronger maybe she could have gotten her way. I could see that at times her rebellion was mixed with a desire for our parents’ approval. Occasionally she went to Mohtaram and Father and was full of smiles and friendliness to compensate for her defiance.

  I still hoped she would try to get out of marrying this man. But close to the end of that year, when Pari was about to graduate from high school, she got engaged. They put off the wedding date until September, when the house Taheri was setting up for them in Tehran would be ready. The house was in a modern, bustling section of central Tehran, he said.

  The engagement party was a small affair, with only the immediate family present. The big celebration was saved for the wedding itself.

  After Taheri and Behjat arrived in the afternoon, we all sat on the porch at small tables set out by Ali. We were dressed up for the occasion. Pari wore a blue dress with designs of shiny, darker blue flowers in a thicker fabric. Her shoes were white and she was wearing white gold flower-shaped earrings studded with diamonds. Everything she was wearing, including the expensive earrings, were presents from Taheri. He was dressed in a wine-colored jacket, light gray pants, and a pink-and-gray-striped shirt. He could have been good-look
ing, had it not been for the extreme intensity about him that practically contorted his face. In the large space, Mohtaram, Manijeh, Behjat, Father, and I receded as Taheri focused almost entirely on Pari.

  He was ten years older than Pari, not as significant an age gap as between many couples, but he spoke to her the way an experienced man would speak to a child.

  “Pari, you aren’t old enough to know what I have learned in life, such as the value of stability, a husband who provides well for you,” I was startled to hear him say.

  “I’m not a child,” Pari said, as directly.

  “I’ll teach you many things when we get to our home in Tehran.” Taheri took from his jacket pocket a box containing a diamond ring. He put the ring on Pari’s finger.

  “I wish you a long and happy future together,” Behjat said.

  “May your union be blessed,” Mohtaram said.

  We all began to clap. Pari was blushing, and I sensed she was uncomfortable with the formality of the remarks.

  Ali brought over a tray of tea and passed it around. From a table set in the corner, Mohtaram picked up a large platter containing sweets, bamieh, zulbia, and other pastries and served them.

  “Would you like some arak?” Father asked only Taheri, as alcoholic drinks were proper only for men, even among the modernized Iranians. Father drank arak (vodka) only with his male friends.

  “I don’t drink, I’m a good Muslim,” Taheri said. “But don’t get me wrong, I like many aspects of Western culture. I like my wife to look modern and speak well.” He turned to Pari and stared at her face, as if he couldn’t have enough of her.

  Pari was namzad, an engaged girl. Father told her and Taheri they could be alone for a while in the salon.

  In a few moments I went to the keyhole. The expression on Pari’s face was conflicted. Taheri’s was possessive, almost tortured. He made me uneasy. I watched as he tried to kiss Pari and she gently pushed him away. This was the accepted way for a girl to behave, to save herself until the wedding night. But I knew, of course, that Pari wasn’t just playing a role.