by Dina Nayeri
“Is the wedding soon?” asked Nader, leaning over the fence that separated the shared terrace from a small grassy area. A wave crested in my stomach. What wedding soon? Whose wedding? One of Baba’s sisters? My beloved Uncle Ali?
Baba shrugged. His voice was now gravelly and low; I struggled to hear. “It’s just talk,” he said. “She’s a simple woman, a villager; I’d almost rather hire her to do some light work. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m sorry. I don’t want to upset Pari.”
“Pari is fine, Agha Doctor,” said Nader. “She’s complicated. An iron cage around that heart. A fortress. She’s impossible to hurt.”
“Impossible?” Baba smirked and shook his head at Nader, as if to say, and you know Pari, do you? He put out his cigarette. Seeing that he was about to turn toward the apartment, I jumped out, afraid of being caught spying.
“Baba, I brought pictures,” I said, holding the album on top of my head.
“Oh, Niloo, my Niloo,” he sang as he followed me inside. “What good instincts you have. I want to see every picture you’ve taken. Where are those cream puffs?” He turned and waved goodbye to Nader, who took a last puff, licked his teeth, and made his way around the apartment and back to his car.
The next night Baba disappeared. He didn’t say where he was going and he didn’t take much, just his leather satchel with his cash, IDs, and green prayer beads. (“For secular counting only,” he often said. “Is tranquilizing, to count.”) He left before Maman returned from her second job at the pharmacy. When she found him missing, she muttered to herself and ransacked his belongings. She opened his suitcase without the slightest hesitation or guilt. She simply unzipped it, tossed aside shirts, rummaged through underwear and socks. When her hand grazed an inexplicable lump, she took out one of Nader’s steak knives and she punctured the lining of his expensive suitcase as if it were the plastic around an English cucumber. In those days, there were no airport scans of suitcases and manual searches were random and never took into account the fact that a crafty bon vivant with money and connections might have false linings sewn in. “Shameless, lying dog,” she whispered as she pulled out the cotton-wrapped cans of Caspian caviar, the boxes of homemade sesame brittle, the used pipes with that dangerous pungent smell.
For hours she raged. When Baba returned at six in the morning, she was still awake, waiting in a kitchen chair, breaking off split ends with her fingernails, her precious sleep sacrificed to the promise of releasing her fury on his gingery gray head the instant his wandering foot touched her property.
She knew where he had gone. And he didn’t try to deny it—he had found an Iranian exile with a manghal and a willingness to trade hits for cash. He had gone to this new friend’s home, sat at his sofreh and reclined on his floor pillows, smoked and eaten and drunk with him, and offered his family a “gift” of pistachios or fruit leather or caviar from home. The family had demurred, practicing the Iranian art of tarof, refusing the gift until it was offered thrice. Finally they had accepted it, knowing all along how many fifty-dollar bills would be tucked inside.
It seemed they had even given him a place to sleep it off, because Baba looked unchanged to me—only tired. My parents fought for hours. There’s hardly any point in recounting the details. Maman felt used. He had taken advantage of her kindness again, and he had endangered his own children’s future—what about our green cards? What about the impression he was making on his daughter, who was already showing signs of wantonness?
By the time the hot Oklahoma sun had peaked, Baba was tossed out of our home. He moved into the Red Carpet Motel, a dingy, musty place with dark rooms arranged in a horseshoe pattern around a cratered parking lot. I insisted on accompanying Maman to drop him off. I never admitted my fear that he would leave and return to Iran, maybe stopping to wave goodbye to us through a window. Kian came too, but he stayed in the car with Maman while I helped Baba carry his bags into the room. The bed was on wheels, a thin white sheet covering the mattress and a single pillow. The sight of a Cheetos bag and tissues left in the trashcan by the last resident (or a careless maid) saddened me and I turned to go, afraid my feelings would spill out. Baba exhaled loudly and kissed me goodbye. “Go, Niloo joon, we don’t want to make her madder.”
And so began two weeks of Baba trying to atone for his bad behavior by taking us on exciting American outings. Eight of those days were at a Western-themed water park called White Water Bay, a strange amalgam of hackneyed Americana, exploitative Cherokee kitsch, waterslides, surf motifs, and overpriced Tex-Mex. It was unclear whether the schizophrenic park thought it was in Oklahoma, Montana, California, or (to my bafflement even back then) someplace near a rain forest.
Baba discovered the park while watching television in his motel room that first night. I knew the commercial, a frenzy of water splashing at the camera lens, hard-bodied twenty-year-olds chugging diet sodas and tackling each other, and a neurostimulant of a song by the Surfaris that was basically some cackling and the word wipeout howled over and over in an echo chamber.
The first time Maman dropped us off in front of the ticket station, I just wanted the day to be done. Many of my middle school classmates hung out at this water park. And here I was, after years of trying to seem American, arriving with my mustachioed father, his great cask of a belly blanketed in ginger fur, his neon Persian script trunks, a cigarette barely hanging on to his lips. He was a spectacle just stepping out of the car, even before he bellowed in the ticket line, in broken English, “This! Oh watery paradise! Let us find proper verse for this day!”
“Let’s not,” I said in a threatening whisper. “Baba, stop it! I’m serious.”
“Stop what?” he said in loud Farsi, exhaling a long tendril of smoke.
“No more Farsi,” I said. “And do you have to talk so loud?”
Kian didn’t seem to care. “Can we go on the big slide first?”
“See, Niloo joon? Kian has it right,” said Baba, taking the longest drag and flicking his cigarette right into the next line. He had switched back to Farsi. “We live for us. Not for the watchers. Be free now that you’re in a free country.” He paid for our tickets with a wad of cash roughly the girth of two Rubaiyats, and ignored the glare of the ticket taker as he lit another cigarette. On the way in, I’m pretty sure he gave one to a loitering teenager.
A few hours into the day, Baba, who is light-skinned and ginger, started to burn. He stood by our lounge chairs for ten minutes, rubbing lotion into his arms and legs with great care, leaving a white residue all over his body “for added protection.” Before I could rush off, he begged me to do his back. I wanted so much to run away, but his skin was flushed, even his knees a few shades redder. I hurried to lotion his back, looking around for classmates, but the sunscreen wouldn’t absorb. The thick layer of hair on Baba’s back was making it foam. “I’m done,” I said, and ran away to join Kian in the rapids, leaving Baba to fill his time alone.
Once or twice throughout the day, I spotted him ambling through the park, full of wonder in his straw hat and tangerine trunks.
Sometime later, Kian and I wandered to the Acapulco Cliff Dive, a monstrosity of a slide shaped much like a stretching basilisk, with a short initial drop, then a long, steep free fall that flattened out again near the end. When we arrived at the bottom of the ride, an athletic college boy was coming off the bottom, shaking and in turns swearing and cackling to himself.
“Wanna go on?” Kian asked, glancing at me quickly, then away again. I could tell he hoped he wouldn’t have to try this.
“I’m not getting in that line for a dumb slide,” I said, to spare him.
So we stood there and watched people barrel down. Two swim-team types later, a familiar shape took form at the top of the slide, which was so high the figures atop it were reduced to specks, recognizable only by the color of their hats or T-shirts. But something about the gait of the person laboring to maneuver his bulbous body,
basted in white, into starting position caught both of us unprepared. Kian looked at me, his brown eyes, already round as coins, widening. Then, before we could exchange two words, his body came thumping and slapping down, as he screamed in ecstasy and abandon and fear “Oh great god” again and again in Farsi.
He waved at us as he picked himself up from the landing pool. Then, striding past us as if we were ungrateful traitors and not his impressionable adolescent offspring, he said, “That slide is like a shot of liquor from a Rashti bathtub!” He pounded his gleaming lotion-white chest and strode off to get in line again.
The water park transported him, maybe in a way similar to his opium.
For weeks Baba enjoyed American life in deafening fashion, sliding down the Cliff Dive and eating too much ice cream, and going to visit his new “friends” somewhere we weren’t allowed to know. I’m glad now that he enjoyed it, because he never got another American visa. He got kicked out of the park twice for smoking in restricted areas and for giving out cigarettes to his “staff” of wayward boys, teenagers who fetched his candy and stood in lines for him in return for the smokes. (I spent a lot of time hiding with a book in the changing rooms.) After each eviction, he got back in by bribing the management from his gargantuan bundle of cash.
And so it went, in the sticky heat, until the afternoon I walked from a church camp meeting to the Red Carpet Motel, thinking I would surprise him.
When I knocked, the door gave way. It had been closed hastily and hadn’t clicked shut. So I went in, cheerfully calling, “Babajoon, I’m here.” He had been with us for weeks, and I knew in the privacy of my heart that he would stay for good. Each time he joked with Maman, I grew more convinced. Being around him was becoming easier too, and I was forgetting to fear for my teeth.
The room was dark, though it was midday. The window was sealed shut and sodden towels covered all the cracks. The room smelled so awful, I had to breathe into my hand. The bed and the floor beside it were covered in photographs—his childhood with his mother in old village garb, his first days at Tehran University, black-and-whites of relatives from decades ago, a picnic in an orchard, then with Maman in Ardestoon in their early marriage, the family at the dinner table in our house in Isfahan, me and Kian as babies, and even some Oklahoma photos he had obviously stolen from my album. I ran a hand through them, looking for recent photos of Uncle Ali, but found none of Baba’s current life. I didn’t hear any noises from the bathroom and, though to an adult the scene would have been transparent, I just thought he had gone out to get some ice cream. He was obsessed with the astonishing array of American ice cream flavors—butter (butter!) pecan and rum (rum!) raisin and cappuccino chunky chocolate.
I unlatched the window, gathered the wet towels, and went to the bathroom, thinking I would discard them in the tub. I pushed open the bathroom door, and he was there, on the closed toilet lid. He wasn’t sitting exactly, but slumped, his familiar white undershirt and pajama pants soaked in sweat. His knees were far apart, his hands hanging over them, twitching now and then, his head between his legs so that his silky youthful hair clung to his forearms, like moss against a rock.
He must have sensed me there, because he tried to raise his head. But it lay heavily by his thigh. I heard several deep breaths, efforts at breath. I said, “Baba,” and he finally managed it. He lifted his gaze and studied me, as one might study a stranger. I waited for him to smile, to say hello, Niloo, but his stare was so long, so dark and terrible, so empty of reason and memory, but somehow not devoid of feeling. Though he didn’t believe in heaven or hell or god or demons, wherever Baba was, it was otherworldly. Behind his glare was something raw and unprocessed, animal. Not hate exactly, though people who hate often have that look. It was terror.
After a swallow, he whispered something, in slow croaking syllables. But a gale of other sounds overpowered his words. The trickle of water in the tub, this sweaty stranger’s pained breath, the screaming construction outside; these sounds rushed my ears instead. He reached for a box of tissues but his hand trembled around it, near it, over it. Then he looked at me and asked for it, “Niloo joon . . . tissues.” But I couldn’t. He tried to hold on to a towel rod, his hand slipping twice, but I didn’t rush to help him. This was the man who, not so long ago, had carried me on his shoulders, whose fleshy back had been the ground.
All I could think to do was to run away, leaving him there to recover or not.
The next day, as he gathered his bags for the airport and explained to Kian and me that his return flight had always been arranged for today (hadn’t he told us before? he was sure he had), I didn’t argue. He said, “Sweet Niloo, you know I can’t stay forever.” I hated him, not just for this, but because he had forgotten the previous night, my presence in the motel room. And though this was the first time he confessed breaking his promise to me (“I can’t stay forever”), I already knew. It was obvious in that motel bathroom that he had chosen to live away from me, that there was something he loved more: not poetry or medicine or family, but oblivion.
I often wondered how pleasurable it could be, and growing up, I asked Maman to describe his delerium to me. She said a few words about the bliss of it, the feeling of complete cohesion with the universe, but mostly she talked about the agony of withdrawal, the sweating, vomiting, and chattering teeth. She talked about her two attempts to cure him, locking him in the house for weeks, feeding and bathing him, bringing him music and books. The first time, he snuck out. The second time, he was so desperate for a manghal, so consumed by this creature need to be released, to chew off his ties and go hunt for it, that he chased her to the shallow end of our empty pool and beat her with a garden hose until she gave him the keys.
Though I’ve seen Baba three more times since Oklahoma, I can’t imagine how he lives now. Do his days look like mine, reading trade journals at his desk, stopping at the bakery and cobbler on the way home? Or does he spend his days under a leafy canopy in Ardestoon? Does he lie to his new wife? Does she watch for that moment when her clever husband might transform into something beastly? Nowadays in Amsterdam, a first puff of weed or hashish carries me to that motel with him, but I don’t dare try opium. My work offers me oblivion. Often I wonder, what is this urge to set off alone toward some imagined home? Have I inherited it? It must be the way the wanderer endures, a survival instinct from our earliest days. I try to picture it in aggregate—every day across the world, how many wretched travelers crouch in grimy bathrooms, searching for a way to explain that they can’t stay?
Every person has a dozen hidden faces. My memories tell me that Baba’s Oklahoma visit was a hedonist’s manic dash through a permissive, bountiful country, a brief pleasure hunt. I was too young then to see the sadness in his eyes when I crossed my arms and looked away, when I didn’t help him off that bathroom floor, and on our final day, when I hardly said goodbye. I see it now in photos, his arm perched awkwardly on my shoulder as I shifted my weight the other way.
HOUSE ARREST
JUNE 2009
Isfahan, Iran
In his jail cell, Bahman worried his counting beads and recited verse aloud, trying to regulate his breathing. Live where you fear to live, says Rumi, be notorious. It seemed to Bahman that Rumi respected the pleasure seekers, the ones who hunted for the next tumbling of the heart in the cracks between minutes. Those wakeful ones, sucking joy from the bone-dry day. Well, Bahman had tried, hadn’t he? All his life he had tried, chasing every bliss to its fading. He had loved his wives, but never lingered, sedated and eroding, in a comatose marriage. Though he could have taken four wives at once, he knew enough to love only one. And now look. His mouth was full of cotton and his socks wet, his feet itchy and cold. He shouldn’t have removed his shoes to sleep; this was jail, not his bedroom. In a dry corner, he twisted, loosening his belt, desperate to get comfortable under the scratchy blanket.
He spent only one night there. The next morning, his young lawyer arrived
with a minibus full of character witnesses, holy men, and small-town dealmakers, Bahman’s friends and patients and frequent guests. The boy strode in as if he might actually know what he was doing, and he brought a cream puff box full of cash too. Bahman’s cash, but nonetheless, the boy did it. What a good feeling, he thought, to be so well loved in one’s community—or if not loved, needed in more than a peripheral way. Each of these men was afraid of what a jailed Bahman might say of them, or where they would find a host as malleable or with pockets as deep.
Back in the judge’s chambers, Bahman had the great honor of staging a public apology to the man who had sent a poor girl to jail for two days then back to a marriage she had suffered such fevers to escape, wailing and fibbing and throwing her body about. All night, lying awake, Bahman thought of that girl, imagining her wiping her eyes on her chador in a cell nearby. Were her socks wet too? He kept returning to the question of whether she had a lover. If she didn’t, how irredeemable her life would seem. Any poet worth his ink would recommend suicide or the quick procurement of her life’s great passion. But given the impossibility of summoning such passions when they’re needed, then the blade, or bullet, or to be extra poetic, the cobra’s venom. No, he decided, it’s more natural for the man to kill himself.
Bahman reminded himself to ask his lawyer, after these proceedings, if he had found the girl’s name. He would invite her to a meal and he would offer money. But first, he would write and mail a letter he had composed in his dreams, a plea to Niloo to figure out a way to get him out of this wretched place.
