Well, they were wrong. It was nothing like that. She loved her husband. Sam was just different, that was all. A “laid-back” person who was always “mellow.” Darya didn’t know too many mellow people in the Persian community.
The bell rang. It was Yung-Ja, holding a Tupperware dish filled with kimbap, or “Korean sushi” as Yung-Ja described it. Over the years, math camp had turned into math camp with food. Which none of them minded because they all loved to show off the cuisine of their homelands and, more than that, they all loved to eat.
“It’s the early onset of menopause that has me all aflutter,” Kavita said. “My face is burning half the time, and sometimes I truly feel as though smoke is emanating from my ears. When Shenil smirks at me, I am tempted to take my hand and slap the side of his face for no reason whatsoever other than this rise of feminine hormones that plagues us all at this stage in the wild charade that we call life.”
Darya sighed. Yung-Ja looked confused. Yung-Ja’s English, even after years in the United States, was still not that strong, and half the time she could barely understand Kavita. Darya was used to Kavita’s unique excessive verbiage, her British English sprinkled with French, her constant references to her husband as some kind of menace when he was actually a charming, sweet biology professor and hardly thoughtless. Kavita loved to joke about cheating on Shenil, although her only points of reference seemed to be Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, and Spencer Tracy. Kavita now focused on who American Sam looked like.
“Humphrey Bogart?” Kavita asked eagerly.
“Who’s that?” Yung-Ja said.
“No, no. Not Bogart.”
“Jack Lemmon?” Kavita quizzed.
“No. I saw a movie from the video store the other day—wait, what was it called? Crimes of the Heart. He looks like the man in that movie. Sam Shepard, I think is his name,” Darya said.
“Who’s that?” Yung-Ja asked.
“Never mind,” Darya said. “Let’s just do math.”
As Darya placed the samosas and kimbap on the table and got out the math workbooks, she wished that she had never told Kavita and Yung-Ja about Sam because they were making it out to be more than it was, when it was actually nothing. But part of her also enjoyed having friends to chat with about something so silly. She couldn’t tell Parviz, of course, because he might think it was actually something, when it wasn’t, and she couldn’t tell Mina or her sons because, well, that just wouldn’t be right. So, grateful for the company of Kavita and Yung-Ja, and for the equations they were about to tackle, and for the smell of spicy samosas and sweet kimbap, Darya sharpened her pencil and asked her friends to take a seat.
FOR A SOLID FORTY-FIVE MINUTES, they lost themselves in math. That was their rule. To stick to the project at hand for forty-five minutes, no veering, no break. They were allowed to talk, but only about the math problems. No one could go off topic. And they stuck to that rule strictly because all three of them loved rules, and all three of them had deep disrespect for people who broke them. That’s what brought them together. Strong convictions about math and life. Love of numbers. A need to solve. They scribbled and thought and broke things down and built them back up. They showed their work and argued about how to arrive at the answer. Darya had even invested in a big white dry-erase board. She loved the squeak of the markers on the board, loved seeing how the solutions all made sense. When they were finished with their work for the day and reemerged into the real world around them, it was as though they had been swimming underwater and were now coming up for air.
And they were starving. The samosas had an excellent kick, the kimbap hit the spot, and Darya’s handmade baklava was the perfect accompaniment to tea. When Darya hosted, math camp always ended with tea. She had even succeeded in stopping Kavita from putting milk in hers.
After math, they were allowed to talk about anything. Usually, they talked about their children and husbands. Occasionally, they discussed politics. Darya and Yung-Ja competed over who had suffered most in the twentieth century: Iranians or Koreans. Whenever Darya brought up dictatorship, military coup, torture, war, Yung-Ja said, “Ya. Korea had that.” To which Kavita would say, “Yes, but do you two ladies have a country that has been artificially manipulated into two based on nothing more than the false gods of organized religion and the fallacies of fatuous farts in office who wish to portend great power and prestige?”
And then Yung-Ja would be silent because she didn’t understand what Kavita had just said, and Darya would get up to open a window because when Kavita discussed “The Division,” as she called the topic of India and Pakistan, she got overly animated and menopausey and before long would be dripping with sweat and asking Darya for a glass of water and a wet washcloth for her forehead.
Today’s math camp ended with a short discussion about their respective children’s inability to truly understand the gifts of America and how they were all so sheltered in New York because they knew neither war nor bombs nor true poverty. “These children of ours do not know the pain of prolonged prostration under the piddling paucities of pauper politicians turned princes,” Kavita said.
That was another thing. Sometimes the combination of calculus and menopause made Kavita extra alliterative. Made her “mull over the messy and malleable morphings required to manage magnificent mathematical mountains from mere marginal molehills.”
At the end of math camp they did the dishes together. After that, Yung-Ja, who was the best at calculus, reviewed the best way to answer some of the harder equations. Then Yung-Ja took her Tupperware dish, Kavita took her empty samosa plate, and Darya kissed her friends good-bye.
Whenever math camp was over, Darya felt a certain emptiness. She loved these afternoons with her friends. She loved being in her dining room with two women who, unlike most Americans (and this included Sam), knew a thing or two about war and dictatorship and “the pain of prolonged prostration.”
Chapter Seven
Action, Not Reflection
You are in the right place at the right time. You are the best and the brightest. Your future is filled with wealth and opportunity.”
Mina bit into a slice of greasy pizza as she sat in the business school auditorium listening to Dean Bailey’s monthly “Question and Answer Lunch Bunch!” which had been advertised all over the B-school buildings.
Mina knew that Dean Bailey couldn’t answer any of her questions. Like whether she should just quit business school and once and for all focus on being an artist. But there was free pizza.
“You will go to Wall Street and create wealth. This economy is going nowhere but up. Financial success is yours for the taking. The first decade of the 2000s will be phenomenal. Unstoppable. And you will be at the helm.”
A drop of oil slid off the pizza slice onto Mina’s white shirt. She watched as it soaked into the cotton fabric.
“You will go further than any previous generation. But remember: This school is a place for action. Not reflection. Reflection is for the MFA students.”
Some students laughed.
But Mina reflected. She thought of all the pizzas she’d had at B&K’s Pizza where her father had pounded dough when they first moved to America. She reflected on her lunch with Mr. Dashti. It isn’t worth it anymore. That’s what Darya had said finally. You are worth more. Mina wanted an end to her mother’s graphs and charts, an end to the parade and charade of men over for tea. She certainly wanted that. But now what would happen?
As Dean Bailey droned on about the excellent promise of the stock market, Mina fingered her pink coral necklace. It had been a gift from her best friend, Bita, given in a rush on her last afternoon in Iran. Where was Bita now?
Just after Mina left Iran, Bita had written about how she and her family shelled peas in the bomb shelter, and about what a vermin Saddam was for bombing them. How she had to wear a mouth guard at night because during the bombing she ground down on her molars. In the last
letter that Mina had received from Bita, she said how good she looked, indoors, of course, with her new bob hairdo. Outside, she had to cover her hair like everyone else.
After the first few years, the letters stopped.
“And remember when the recruitment officers are here, the worst thing you can do is renege on an offer. We do not renege. No reflection. No reneging,” Dean Bailey said into the microphone.
With the hand that wasn’t holding the pizza slice, Mina sketched strawberries and veiled women in the margins of her notebook.
LATER THAT DAY, PROFESSOR VAN HEUSEN, her finance professor, lectured from the podium, water bottle in hand. Mina never understood how he knew which student to call on. He rarely looked up at them, preferring instead to stare straight down at the floor as he lectured. She hoped he wouldn’t call on her today. She was completely unprepared.
“Who can review for me the CAPM formula and equity versus debt?”
Chip Sinclair, the finance superstar and first-class jerk, raised his hand. Mina listened to Chip review the formula as she plugged her laptop’s internet adapter card into one of the newly installed internet connection sockets. After a few minutes, she was connected to the web via dial-up and a website about oil paintings popped up as her homepage. She pulled out her legal pad and copied down Professor Van Heusen’s formulas from the whiteboard.
What is r?
It is the cost of capital, the sacrifice involved. It is the WACC.
WACC
Weight of that company for its cost of debt plus cost of equity.
WACC
alphaKD+(1-alpha)KE
Discounted Cash Flow
PV=C1/(1+r1)1+C2/(1+r2)2+C3/(1+r3)3 . . . . . . .
Darya would be breathless. She’d be up there in the front row, her hand high up in the air. “Oooh, oooh, pick on me, Professor, pick on me.” She’d tell Professor Van Heusen the value for alpha KD. A hundred times over. Her financial calculator would click the fastest of all. The financial calculator was a specialized machine that Darya said made all normal calculators feel like toys.
“If I get in an interest squeeze, am I going to fall off a steep cliff into oblivion or is it a bump in the road? Meaning, is it a big drop or a little drop?” Professor Van Heusen talked into his water bottle.
Chip Sinclair bedazzled with a labyrinthine answer. Mina copied down more formulas from the whiteboard.
“Competitors: Are you dominant? Are they dominant?” Mina’s laptop screen showed the artwork from a recent gallery show in Marblehead, Massachusetts. In a painting of a lone china teacup, white and blue mixed perfectly. Mina copied down the brand of oil paint the website recommended, even though she hadn’t done a real painting herself since college, which now felt like a very long time ago.
“Are these supply sources relatively flexible? If you get into trouble, are they going to help you or liquidate you?”
Mina remembered the mixture of blue and white on the dome of the mosque near her grandparents’ house in Tehran. She wondered what it would be like to go back there. She typed “Tehran” in her search tab. Photos of universities and buildings popped up, none of which she recognized. Which university had Bita gone to? Had she gone to university? Was she being set up with Mr. Dashti types over there? Maybe she was already married and had a few kids.
“Are your dealers loyal?” Professor Van Heusen asked. “Will they desert you?”
Mina clicked through photo after photo. She had not been back to Iran in fifteen years. She often thought of what would happen if she ever went back. Would she see what she had left behind? Would it still be there?
A girl in a camel cashmere cardigan a few rows down typed as if her life depended on it. A tall redheaded boy next to Mina wrote diligently in his notebook.
“The higher the coverage, the more sensitive you are to interest.” Professor Van Heusen’s marker squeaked as he wrote on the whiteboard. Some students nodded with understanding. They’d solved the problem. Mina had the germ of an idea: if she went back to Iran, she could figure out what her family had been, what they’d lost, what they’d gained. She could expel this sense of never belonging, feeling lost. She could “find herself,” like every character in every book she’d ever read about immigrants going back to the homeland.
But more important, she could find Bita.
Mina was excited about her new plan.
“What is the point at which debt starts to interfere with operation?” Professor Van Heusen asked the floor. “Ms. Rezayi, could you tell us, please?”
Mina stiffened at the sound of her name. The students up front turned around and looked at her. Mina had no idea what the question meant. She fumbled through her backpack for her calculator. Where the hell was it? She turned to her laptop only to see her screensaver staring back at her. She looked at her notebook. It was filled with formulas she’d copied down, the name of that brand of paint the artist from Marblehead used and endless strawberries and women in veils.
Professor Van Heusen blew into his water bottle. It made a hollow, whistling sound.
Mina’s face grew hot. Her underarms grew sweaty. Chip Sinclair’s hand shot up. A few others did too.
“Ms. Rezayi?”
Perspiration slid down Mina’s forehead. Why hadn’t she been paying attention?
“We are waiting, Ms. Rezayi.”
Mina had no answer. She pressed her keyboard. The screensaver disappeared only to be replaced by pictures of Tehran. It was pointless.
Professor Van Heusen tapped his foot. “Ms. Rezayi, I can’t wait till the new millennium. Surely you were working hard to arrive at your answer?”
A small icon flashed at the bottom of Mina’s screen.
“Check your mail,” the redheaded boy next to her muttered.
Mina quickly clicked on her mailbox. She had half a dozen new messages, with more coming in. She opened one of the messages. There in front of her was the answer to Professor Van Heusen’s question, along with a formula for how to arrive at the solution. She clicked on the next e-mail. The same. Her classmates were sending her the answer.
“Ms. Rezayi?” Professor Van Heusen’s voice was loud.
The screen blurred in front of Mina.
“Do you have the solution?”
“Yes.” Mina spoke up. “I do. I have the solution right here. And the method of arriving at the answer. It’s all right here, in front of me.”
The redheaded boy next to her breathed a sigh of relief.
“But I can’t explain because I wasn’t working on the case. I hadn’t even read it.”
Stunned silence. One did not admit to not reading Professor Van Heusen’s case. One did not admit to not knowing in his class. One feigned knowledge or stayed up all night trying to attain it so that one’s grades were high enough for a stellar investment bank or consulting firm to offer one a job. Starting salary: 100K minimum, plus signing bonus, plus perks. Mina knew all that. She knew Dean Bailey’s lectures by heart. This was the school for the best and the brightest in finance. These were the good times. The year 2000 was just around the corner. Nothing could go wrong. Competition, Mastery, Success. Doubt was weakness. Action mattered.
“Well,” Professor Van Heusen finally said.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I don’t really belong here.”
More students turned around to stare at Mina.
Professor Van Heusen looked up from his water bottle and squinted in Mina’s direction. His face was surprisingly small when he actually lifted it up. The clock on the wood-paneled wall ticked loudly.
“Well, Ms. Rezayi,” Professor Van Heusen said. “I don’t know where you belong, but I understand that you have not be
en with us.” He cleared his throat. “However, in business school, as in life, honesty is always the best policy. And that’s a message for all of you. Let’s walk through this problem again together. So everyone can arrive at the solution by actually knowing what it is they’re doing. Shall we?”
Chip Sinclair groaned. A few emboldened students actually raised their hands and asked new questions. The girl in the cashmere sweater turned around and gave Mina a thumbs-up sign. The classroom went back to work. Fingers tapped on keyboards, pencils scribbled, calculators clicked.
Mina concentrated on the problem. She scribbled and struggled her way to the solution. And she suddenly felt better than she had in ages. Part of her had always been hovering in midair over the place that she had left. What if the country and history her parents loved was still buried there? What if she could find it? Could Mina go back and see what Darya meant when she said she wanted Mina to have “everything she had”? Mina had always wished that she could have known the Iran Darya had grown up in, instead of the Iran she herself had escaped from. Could she find it and piece it together if she went back there as an adult?
You will go to Wall Street, Dean Bailey had lectured. But first, she would go to Number 23 Takesh Street in Tehran, Iran. She would land firmly on that street and take in that other world again.
Chapter Eight
Life on the Hyphen
The river reflected the streetlights, and all Mina could hear was the passing traffic on the Drive. As she jogged along Riverside Park, Mina saw Mr. Dashti’s doughy hands holding his tea and his look of hesitation when their eyes met. Of course he was like all the other men: well educated, polite, careful. But there was something different this time. Maybe it was the palpable relief she saw on his face when they didn’t click. The sense that he was equally lost in this messy matchmaking business. He didn’t want it either. Poor Mr. Dashti was just as stuck as she was.
Together Tea Page 5
