Together Tea

by Marjan Kamali

  People began to disappear. Their neighbor was sleeping one night when the new government authorities banged on his front door, barged in, arrested him, and took him away. His daughters wore black now. Mina eyed them on the street and wondered what it was like to just have your father taken away. She worried about Baba. She didn’t want him to show any signs of being anti-revolutionary.

  OVER A YEAR AFTER THE REVOLUTION’S success, Mina stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom, a scarf in her hand. “Is this how I do it?” she asked. Mamani and Darya sat behind her on the bed.

  “Here, let me show you.” Mamani took the square piece of cloth from Mina and placed it on the bed, folding it into a triangle. Then she put the triangular-shaped cloth on top of Mina’s head and tied a tight knot at her neck. Mina looked at herself in the mirror. A headscarf. She looked like one of her Russian dolls.

  Darya tugged nervously at a baggy gray tunic that lay on Mina’s bed. The sleeves were long and puffed out; the length was long. Buttons went straight down the front.

  “This is your new uniform, Mina,” Darya said quietly. “Your roopoosh.”

  “My uniform for school?” Mina asked.

  “Yes,” Mamani said.

  “Mark my words, before long they’re going to change the law so that it’s her uniform for going anywhere. They want to make hijab mandatory by law.”

  “We don’t know if they’ll succeed,” Mamani said gently.

  “Oh, they’ll get their way. By force. You just wait.”

  Mina picked up the heavy roopoosh. With her tenth birthday coming up, she was approaching the dangerous threshold of adolescence. She looked at herself. All of this—the long hair under that scarf, her round bottom, the tiniest hint of developing breasts—was considered a threat now. She had to cover up for school by law. Her body had become a liability.

  Mamani came up behind her and slid the roopoosh onto Mina’s arms. As she buttoned her up, Darya sat on the bed, arms crossed, frozen.

  “Don’t worry.” Mamani forced a laugh at her own daughter’s pained expression. “Our history is filled with these extremes. Everything by force. When my mother wanted to walk down the street during Reza Shah’s time with her chador, the police attacked and pulled it off her head. That’s what they wanted to do then, make us Westernized, erase religion. Now they’ve decided we’re too Westernized and should go back to our religion. The pendulum swings. One extreme to another.” She sighed and stepped back from Mina. “It’s always through the women that the men express their agenda. Now she has to cover up so they can feel like they’re in power.”

  Mina was familiar now with “they.” Everything was “they” since the revolution. They were the leaders who had replaced the Shah. The brand-new regime. The new authorities. They were the ones the people now feared.

  Mina wanted to tell her mother that the gray cloth covering her head and body felt unusual, but it was okay, she could manage it, her mother needn’t worry so much. It seemed as if Darya fought anger all the time now. She snapped at Hooman. Burned the bottom of the rice so that their tahdeeg came out all black and charred instead of golden brown and smooth.

  THE NEXT DAY, MINA FOUND her mother at the dining room table leafing through yellowed sheets of paper.

  “What’s that, Maman?” All Mina saw on the page were numbers. Endless numbers, written in pencil, with unknown signs and symbols linking them. Why wasn’t her mother cooking dinner? Why wasn’t she patting meat into ovals for the kotelet dish they had on Wednesday nights?

  Darya acted as though she hadn’t heard her.

  “What is it?” Mina asked again.

  “Nothing,” Darya finally said. “Absolutely nothing.” She gathered up the papers.

  On top of one page, Mina had seen the words “Darya Daneshjoo,” her mother’s maiden name. The numbers looked like something Darya had written a long time ago. Maybe something for school.

  “You did lots of math before,” Mina ventured.

  “I did lots of things before,” Darya said. “Your father and brothers will be home soon. We have to cook dinner.”

  They cooked together in silence. They sank their hands into the kotelet meat mixture. The ground beef, turmeric, salt, pepper, bread crumbs, cooked potatoes, and raw eggs oozed through Mina’s fingers. She scooped up a small ball of the meat mixture and passed it to her mother. Darya pressed the ball between her palms and patted it into a perfect thin oval. She plopped it into the hot oil. They repeated that over and over again in silence. Mina wondered if Darya’s head was with those number-filled pages. If she was still trying to solve those old-looking equations.

  Mina stared at the pink ground beef in front of her and opened her mouth to say something. But Darya’s posture was so stiff that Mina instead handed her a fresh blob of meat and watched as Darya made kotelet of all the same size and shape, as if manufactured by a machine. The meat sizzled in the oil.

  From the kitchen window, Mina couldn’t see Mamani’s house, but she knew it was there. Across the street, behind the greengrocer’s, past the roofs of the smaller homes with the wrought-iron gates. Three streets down and to the left. It was a comfort to know that back there stood the redbrick house her grandparents had lived in for almost half a century. Roses carefully cultivated behind its gates. Pigeons competing for bread crumbs outside their windowsill. The bushes shining with droplets of water from the garden hose. As their kotelet browned one by one, Mina imagined her grandmother by her own stove, frying onions and singing along with the pop singer Googoosh’s (now outlawed) tapes. She pictured her grandfather lying on his side on the burgundy cushions on their living room floor, leaning on his elbow, his head resting on his hand, as he read the evening paper and sipped from his teensy-tiny tea glass.

  Evening fell. The sun melted and dissolved into the opal sky, casting a reddish hue on the greengrocer’s tin roof. At this very moment, Mina knew that Mamani would turn off the stove. Put aside her fried onions and whatever else she was cooking (eggplant stew tonight? aush soup?) and go to the bathroom sink. There, she’d splash her face with water and stroke her forearms and toes with wet hands. She’d graze her hairline with water. Perfectly perform the ablutions for the evening prayer. Within minutes, Mamani would be on her prayer mat, tasbih prayer beads in hand as she melted into meditation. Mina pictured her grandmother’s face: white, feathery skin, eyes half-shut, lips moving. Mamani’s toes always stuck out from under the prayer chador. Soon Mamani would kneel, facing Mecca. And the next day, at the same time, she’d be kneeling in the same pose, having performed the same ablutions, sitting in the same perfect peace.

  Mina watched Darya remove a few kotelet from the pan and place them on a paper towel to absorb the oil. Mina tried, but she couldn’t muster up a mental image of Darya praying. Her mother’s straight body wouldn’t even bend into the right positions. She wouldn’t want to spend her time standing, kneeling, sitting, murmuring words to an unseen entity. She’d say, “Enough of this,” pat her skirt, and go about accomplishing something. “It’s a crutch,” Darya repeated to the kids. “Religion is a crutch for the weak. An escape. An illusion. A means to get manipulated. Don’t get sucked into the propaganda!”

  But there was a certain beauty to something you could count on like religion, Mina thought, as she scraped the last bits of the meat mixture into a lopsided shape and handed it to her mother. At least you knew what you were doing. Like Mamani. It could be sunny or snowing, they could be in the middle of a huge party or eating watermelon on the beach, a revolution could be going on in the streets with people collapsing in pools of blood, or it could be the middle of a parade for the monarchy’s bicentennial—and one thing would hold true. At sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset, and nighttime, her grandmother would be on her mat, saying her prayers, facing Mecca. And that, Mina thought, didn’t seem like such a bad thing at all.

  The day before the Friday holy day, Mina visite
d Mamani. She wound through the narrow streets, not quite skipping. She followed the water ditches, joob, till she reached her grandparents’ home. Even outside the front door, she could smell Mamani’s aush soup.

  Mamani’s hands were red from seeding pomegranates when she greeted her with a big hug and kisses. Agha Jan lay on the silk Persian rug in his pajamas, reading a book. Mina went to him and kissed him on the cheek.

  “How many pomegranates do you want, azeezam?” Mamani asked as Mina followed her into the kitchen.

  “Give her as many as she wants. Don’t even ask. They’re all for you, Mina Joon,” Agha Jan shouted from the living room.

  Mina noticed the wooden box outside the kitchen windowsill. It still had bread crumbs for the pigeons.

  Mamani stirred her aush soup. “I added extra noodles, reshteh, Mina Joon.” Without turning from the stove, she yelled, “Agha Jan! Pasho!! Get up! Get the yogurt!” She smiled at Mina. Then yelled again. “Beeya! Come on! This poor child is hungry.”

  Agha Jan walked in and removed the yogurt he’d made from the fridge. Yogurt-making was his one contribution to the household cooking. Mamani did the rest. There was a certain distinctive taste to the cooking of the Daneshjoo women that Mina loved. Spices and recipes and secrets that Aunt Nikki and Darya now continued. Mina wondered if one day her stews would carry the same balance of turmeric and allspice. Would she be able to sauté her onions till they were perfectly translucent? Would she cut meat in the shape of diamonds, using the knife in that quick expert way? Mina watched as Mamani sprinkled cumin into the aush. She suddenly realized that her brothers wouldn’t necessarily be folding dolmeh. She’d have to learn to carry on the works of art from her palette of spices just like the women before her.

  After dinner, they ate pomegranates sprinkled with echinacea powder. Mina bit into the pomegranate seeds. The tart kernels burst into her mouth with a delicious rush.

  “Do you like these pomegranates?” Mamani asked.

  “Very much,” Mina said.

  “Then I will get some more for you.”

  “Ones just like these?”

  “The best ones are at the meeveh-foorooshi downtown. I will get for my Mina Joon the pomegranates that she loves. Next time. Next time, I will go to the store downtown.”

  “Thank you, Mamani. Thank you.”

  THE NEWS THESE DAYS WAS ALL ABOUT deaths. Not from people dying on the streets—the bloody revolution was over. But now came word of executions. Killing behind closed doors. Executions of all those who were too close to the Shah, too close to the West, too similar to what spies might be perceived to look like, too taghooti and attached to the monarchy, too short, too tall, too fat, too rich, too loud—it didn’t seem to matter anymore. The killing did not stop. Mina knew all this, knew that her country had turned upside down, that a revolution was revolving into something else. She’d been told. The conversations at home were all about her brothers’ changing political views and her parents’ frustration at the hopelessness of it all.

  But her grandparents seemed immune from the drama playing outside the walls of their house. They were detached from it all. Mina wanted some of their calm. How did they stick to their daily routines so diligently when the rest of the country was confused and in a state of chaos? Back in the kitchen, Mina watched Mamani spoon the remainder of the leftover onion, cucumber, and tomato salad into a ceramic dish for storage. Agha Jan sucked serenely on a lemon. Maybe their calmness was a reward of old age. Maybe this was the payoff for staying in the world long enough.

  “How is school?” Mamani asked.

  “Well, it’s all girls now. Except for the janitors. And we have lots of new rules. You know. The hijab. And our new teacher said we shouldn’t look at boys. Ever. Except our husbands once we’ve married.”

  Agha Jan winked and pinched Mamani. “Hear that? You’re supposed to be looking at me!”

  Mamani swatted his hand away. “Basseh! I’ve looked at you enough—forty-five long years, I’ve ‘looked’ at you!”

  “Mrs. Amiri is always giving orders. Cover your body. Chant the death slogans. Don’t be immoral. Don’t be anti-revolutionary. Die for the cause if you have to. My friend Bita thinks that Mrs. Amiri is a donkey.”

  “I always liked that Bita,” Mamani said.

  “The nonsense they teach you these days! The nonsense these . . . what was it your friend called them?” Agha Jan raised his eyebrows at Mina.

  “Donkeys,” Mina said shyly.

  “You have a good friend right there, Mina Joon,” Agha Jan said.

  At least they could joke about it. If Mina told Darya all this, Darya’s forehead vein would throb overtime. But Mamani and Agha Jan just shrugged it all off.

  Mamani got up and left the room. A minute later she came back with a book.

  “This, Mina Joon,” she said, “is my antidote to all the nonsense.”

  Mina knew that book well. It was small. Tattered. The blue leather cover was inscribed with faded gold lettering. The pages were worn, dog-eared, soft. Mamani’s book of poetry. Inside were Mamani’s favorite stanzas from the ancient Persian poets. Words she’d copied in her own calligraphy, in black ink with sweeping cursive letters.

  “Come look.” Mamani motioned for Mina to come and sit next to her on the carpeted cushions on the living room floor. “Come look at these beautiful words of your ancestors.”

  Mina snuggled in next to Mamani and rested her head on Mamani’s shoulder. Mamani read out loud, without holding back, her voice full of expression. Agha Jan listened in silence. With the sound of Mamani’s voice, Mina felt the stress of school and new rules slip away. She was content listening to Mamani read from the black cursive script of Rumi and Saadi and all the rest of the ancient Persian poets in the crinkly pages of the book. Mina wanted it to stay like that: her head on Mamani’s shoulder, the smell of fried onions and mint on Mamani’s dress, the gurgle from the samovar where tea was being brewed, the sun lowering gently in the crimson sky.

  Chapter Sixteen

  School and Saddam

  Darya marched through the living room, a roll of aluminum foil flashing in her hand like a sword. She unleashed the foil with a loud crackle that whipped through the air. Then she began pressing the foil over the living room window.

  “What are you doing?” Mina asked.

  Darya didn’t answer.

  Families had disappeared around them. One by one, they left. Most to America. And Europe. Some of Mina’s aunts and uncles left without saying good-bye. They ended up in Germany, France, England, Canada, Sweden, and the Land of the Teacups. Los Angeles and New York. Mina heard these names whispered at the dinner table over minted cucumber yogurt. Every week a new family vanished from Tehran. Then suddenly the new government stopped letting them leave. And when that happened, everyone wanted to leave.

  The front door opened, and Baba came in. After a hello and a quick wash of his hands, he helped Darya cover the windowpanes with silver sheets. When the living room was completely covered up, they moved on to the bedrooms. Mina trotted after her parents from room to room, observing this bizarre but apparently important action.

  Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You” played on the cassette player in the living room. Mina had been with Hooman when he bought it from a street peddler’s collection of pirated tapes displayed on an old rug on the side of the street. The street peddler had looked around nervously to make sure that no guards were watching, then pocketed Hooman’s money.

  The three of them in Hooman’s bedroom now, Darya and Baba stood back from the Pink Floyd poster on Hooman’s wall. Darya looked as if she would say something. But she didn’t. A few months ago, it had been an ayatollah’s poster. Pink Floyd. Ayatollah. Darya threw her arms wide apart as she stretched out another shining, crackling sheet of foil. Baba pressed it onto Hooman’s window, attaching it with masking tape.

 
“Why are you doing this?” Mina asked.

  “Because of Saddam,” Darya said matter-of-factly. “Because of his bombs.”

  Baba cleared his throat. “Light travels into the . . .” he began in his let’s-learn-science voice. “See now, there is a distance from which . . .”

  “We’re covering the windows so Saddam’s planes can’t see our lights, so they can’t find the city and bomb us,” Darya interrupted him. “That’s why.”

  Baba paused. “Yes, well . . . that’s another way of putting it,” he said. He waved the aluminum foil in the air like a baton, and tried to whistle along to Olivia Newton-John for a bit. He gave Mina a reassuring smile. “Who’s hungry?” he said. “Let’s have some dinner!”

  SADDAM QUICKLY BECAME A PART of life. He was everywhere. Mina saw an outline of his mustache in the clouds. In the sheen of the oily water of the city’s sewer joob, she was sure she counted his fat fingers floating. Parts of the tufts of his hair appeared in her lentil rice. At night, the sound of his planes terrified Mina. His name was plastered on newspapers, splashed in spray paint on the streets next to the word “Death,” and incorporated into schoolyard chants and recess songs. Always, his name was said with disgust. He had attacked Iran on a September day in the year 1980. And though it didn’t seem possible, a new level of change had been reached.