Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  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.

  Two

  During 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.”

  Mohtaram was always pregnant. Maryam visited her younger sister during the pregnancies and childbirth, ostensibly to help out, but more likely just to bask in the presence of children. But it was Aziz (my grandmother) who was there when I was born, not Maryam. When Mohtaram was pregnant with me, the promised child, Maryam was caring for their older sister, Roghieh, who was seriously ill, bleeding internally. While Maryam nursed Roghieh back to health, Aziz watched over Mohtaram. It was Aziz who sent for the midwife.

  That year, from the beginning of Mohtaram’s pregnancy, my father was traveling all the time because of his work as a circuit judge. He was often stationed in small, unsanitary villages and didn’t want to take his family along. He rarely came home, even for short visits, his work was so demanding and consuming. He left his wife and children in care of a live-in maid and Aziz. His absence had made it easier for Mohtaram to carry out her promise to her sister. She knew her husband would strongly object once he discovered I was gone, but hoped he would not go so far as to take me back.

  It took fourteen hours by train to get from Ahvaz to Tehran. Aziz waited until I was six months old to make the trip, so that it would be easier to travel so many miles with me. This gift from one daughter to another had to be protected and delivered in good health.

  On the day Aziz was taking me away, my father was still absent. But Mohtaram had a sudden attack of fear and anxiety. Was she wrong to believe that her husband would understand that she was helping her childless sister by giving her one of their numerous children? Aziz had to calm her down. “Don’t worry, I know he’s a kind man and he likes Maryam. I will speak to him, if necessary.”

  “I hope you’re right. I don’t want to disappoint my dear sister,” Mohtaram said. Before putting me into my grandmother’s arms to be taken away, she gave me a cool bath and dressed me in a pink cotton outfit. She squeezed milk from her breasts into a bott
le and gave it to my grandmother to take along.

  I was sleepless during the long, uncomfortable ride on the old train. After I finished the bottle of my mother’s milk, Aziz bought goat’s milk at a station stop. Other families in the compartment asked questions about me; they approved of her bringing me from a fertile married sister to a childless widow. Sisterhood, family ties, and a woman’s elemental desire for a child to make her feel feminine, whole, were concepts comprehensible to everyone. They listened sympathetically as Aziz told them of Maryam’s years of trying, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant. Now she was a widow, having lost her much older husband three years ago. He died of a heart attack while working at his desk. His job as owner and manager of several bakeries in Tehran had been stressful.

  Mohtaram holding infant Nahid

  The women helped my grandmother by taking turns holding me, so that she could sleep a little. When we reached Tehran, Aziz hired a horse cart to take us to Maryam’s house. It was November; the temperature in Tehran, surrounded by the Alborz Mountains, was at least twenty degrees cooler than in Ahvaz. Aziz put a heavy sweater she had knit herself on me and covered me with part of her chador. The horse cart went slowly—the traffic was hectic in the congested city of about two million inhabitants (now more than ten million).

  At the beginning of a long cobblestoned alley, my grandmother stopped the driver. She stepped off the cart and, walking with me in her arms, approached a house. She sped up as she saw Maryam squatting by the door of her house. Maryam jumped up as we approached, and my grandmother put me into her arms.

  “This is the happiest day of my life,” Maryam said as she held me.

  Maryam had prepared a room for me, which was separated by French doors from her own. She had put a wooden cradle there, with toys on the mantel and around the crib, and she had filled a chest in the corner with clothes. Friends, relatives, and neighbors came to Maryam’s house daily, bringing presents and congratulating her for finally having the child she yearned for. After a few months, Aziz returned to Kashan, where she lived with her son and his wife. It was Maryam and me now.

  As soon as I could speak I began to call Maryam “Mother,” as other children called their mothers. My birth mother was “Aunt Mohtaram.” When I was about five, Maryam and Aziz, who visited a few times a year, told me I had been adopted from Mohtaram. The news had no particular impact on me then.

  On each of her visits Aziz brought me a different regional doll—a gypsy, a Turk, a Chinese girl—distinguished by their costumes and colorings.

  “You have a special place in my heart, Nahid joonam, because you make Maryam so happy.” Aziz was a small-boned woman, with a delicate face, almond-shaped brown eyes, and wavy dark brown hair pulled back and held in place with golden bobby pins. She was as observant a Muslim as Maryam, and as embedded in superstitious beliefs.

  “You should never provoke animals,” she told me. “Some of them are divs, with a little devil in them. You should watch out for jins, too. Allah made man out of clay and the jins out of flames. If you ever notice jins hovering around, you should throw water at them and they’ll go back underground.” Owls were bad omens, she said, and if they came to the house we had to watch out for what might shortly unfold.

  Every food was either “cold” or “hot.” Yogurt, green vegetables, and citrus fruit were “cold”; fried food and nuts were “hot.” She said food had to be balanced between the two, and Maryam went along with that. If one of us got sick, they tried to correct the balance.

  When Maryam couldn’t get pregnant, Aziz had taken her to a fortune-teller, an herbalist, and finally even consulted a male gynecologist, a last resort since it was a sin for a woman to be examined by a man (there was a shortage of female doctors). The gynecologist gave Maryam tests and said he couldn’t find anything wrong with her. He added, “Not everything is known to us.” It was possible it was her husband who was the cause of her not getting pregnant, but in the male-dominated society people never questioned the husbands.

  Sometimes it was Aziz who put me to sleep at night. She lay next to me and told me stories from One Thousand and One Nights, with their intricate, interwoven plots. Whether the story revolved around a flying horse, a bird that could carry off elephants, doors that opened at the sound of a voice, or a jin who granted wishes, Aziz made them sound as if they were true.

  Maryam, like others in the neighborhood, structured her days around the rituals of religion, following its cardinal rules: prayer three times a day, hejab (covering hair and skin in men’s presence), fasting for one month, pilgrimage, giving alms. Voices of muezzins streamed out of the surrounding mosques three times a day. Women prayed at home rather than in mosques, where men went for their prayers. Women went to mosques only on special occasions—to ask God to fulfill a wish or to listen to sermons given by different aghounds (Muslim priests). For alms Maryam gave so generously to the poor that she rarely had money left over at the end of the month. Her income was the rent she collected from the tenants on the other side of the courtyard, and from the profits of five bakeries she had inherited from her late husband.

  It was almost a refrain with Maryam and others around her to say, “It’s the life beyond that matters.”

  Once, arriving home from school when I was about seven years old, I found Maryam and her two tenants, Hamideh and Ezat Sadaat, both widowed, in the living room, sitting by white cloths spread on the floor. They were cutting them in a certain way.

  “We’re making shrouds,” Maryam explained to me. “It’s good to prepare for the life beyond. It’s nothing to be afraid of if you’re good on this earth. Death isn’t final; you’ll be brought back to life on the Day of Judgment. Angels will come to you and question you the moment you are in your grave. If your answers reflect that you conducted your life in the right way, the angels will lift you and deliver you to paradise. If badness comes through you’ll be sent to hell where burning fires await you.”

  The sound of traffic didn’t reach our alley set within a maze of alleys, all too narrow for cars. I could hear her words clearly, though she spoke very softly. She rarely made me feel as if she were preaching at me or trying to correct my ways.

  I went to my room, trying to engage my mind with my own daily concerns—doing my school work well, wondering if I would spend a night with Batul at the end of the week. Through the open door to the courtyard I could hear the murmur of various sounds—the chirping of sparrows, the tumbling of fish in the pool (when it became cold, Maryam put them in a tank inside), the cooing of mourning doves Maryam kept in a cage, the rippling of water in the joob outside, from which water was channeled into cisterns inside houses. A motley, orange-and-yellow-haired, flat-faced alley cat wandered in from outside and mewed as he headed for the food in the saucer we had set down for him, then went to sit at the edge of the pool and stared longingly at the goldfish in the water. The parakeet in a large brass cage said, “Salaam, halet chetoreh (Hello, how are you)?”

  Later in the day I joined Maryam and Hamideh and Ezat Sadaat for dinner in the courtyard. The three of them had prepared dinner together, as they often did. They were comfortable with one another, shared the kitchen, the courtyard with its rectangular pool. They used the pool’s faucet for ablutions before their prayers.

  We sat on a sofreh spread on the rug on the ground. It was a pleasant spring day. The air was filled with the fragrance of flowers, mingling with the scent of spices—saffron, turmeric—used in the food.

  They bought the ingredients for the food mainly from vendors passing through the alley, carrying their merchandise on round wooden trays on their heads. They called to people, “Come and quench your thirst with the best ruby red pomegranate juice.” “Come and taste the biggest and freshest figs with red flesh inside.” “Come and see the freshest and tastiest herbs you can imagine.”

  They prepared everything from scratch. They stripped the wheat, then crushed the grains between the two round, heavy stones of a grinder. With the flour, they made pastries
and cakes. They made their own pickles, a variety of them, and their own vinegar. They ordered specific cuts of meat for khoreshes and kababs from the butcher on Khanat Abad, who was known for being meticulous in observing the halal rules on slaughtering animals. The women loved the cooperative creation of the food, which came out differently each time.

  As we ate, the three of them focused on me; Hamideh’s two daughters were married and on their own, and Ezat Sadaat, like Maryam, was unable to get pregnant. They said they hoped I would have many children when I grew up, as having children was a woman’s best fortune.

  I was happy in the company of my aunt and the other women. But as the day wore on and I could hear the hooting of an owl on the eaves, my heart beat with sadness, thinking of the shrouds they had been preparing earlier in the day.

  Since there were no phone lines in Maryam’s neighborhood, people just dropped in. A rap on the door with the bronze lion-head knocker meant visitors, including my other aunts and their children, who stayed for lunch or for tea and pastries. The house became vibrant with the women’s conversation, stories exchanged, while we children ran around the courtyard, chased the butterflies, or played hide-and-seek. My cousins often stayed the night, as I sometimes stayed in their homes. We went to the roof and our male cousins helped us fly kites. In the evenings the sky was filled with kites of various shapes that neighborhood children flew, some tangling with one another.

  Monthly, my aunts and neighborhood women came in to hear the aghound s whom Maryam invited to her house to give sermons. For the occasion she covered the walls of the living room with black cloth and set out an armchair for the aghounds to sit on. The aghounds came one after another and their sermons mainly revolved around various events related to the Imams’ martyrdom. The women sat on the rug, leaning against cushions. They cried at the suffering of the Imams, which the aghounds recounted in great detail and in dramatic tones. After Maryam paid the aghounds and they left, the women let their chadors slip down. Maryam served them tea from a large samovar, with a teapot on top of it, standing in the corner of the room, and as they drank they talked.