Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  I woke late the next morning and made my way to the college dining room. It was nearly empty. I took some food from the buffet and sat at a table with two other girls. I asked one of them, in broken English, what I had put on my plate.

  She stared at me for a moment. “Grits,” she said, pointing to a white lump. Then pointing to a hunk of bread, she said, “Corn bread.”

  In a moment they got up and left. I lingered in the large room by myself.

  I registered for as many courses that didn’t require fluent English as possible—piano, swimming, home economics. In home economics, the professor taught us how to set a table and seat guests. She also taught us “charm”—not much different from taarof in the Iranian culture. We should always say, “Yes, ma’am,” she said, when addressing a woman older than ourselves; we should write a thank-you note to our hostess and it should be phrased in a certain way. At the required introduction to English literature, I could absorb only some of the lecture. The one English course I had taken in high school hadn’t prepared me adequately. Between classes I sat in my room or on a swing chair and tried to understand the assignments and make sense of my notes, poring over my Farsi-English dictionary.

  After dinner I went to my room, leaving the door half open to create a draft with the breeze coming through the window. As the evening wore on other students began to come back, holding Cokes or instant coffee, cellophane-wrapped crackers, cheese, and cookies. Some of them stood in the hall in clusters and talked. When the weekend came most of the girls went out together or on dates with boys from nearby colleges. I stayed in the dormitory, studying.

  My isolation felt like freedom at first. But soon the reality of the college and my separation from the other students began to hit me.

  Beauty contests, mixers with boys the school invited from colleges in the area, sermons in the Presbyterian chapel at which attendance was required no matter what your religion—all just floated around me without meaning. The ideal young girl, one whom the staff and parents approved of and promoted, was a good Christian who dressed properly and was agreeable and sociable. If a student didn’t go on frequent dates with boys she was “antisocial” or “a loser.” If a student had plans with a female friend and then a boy called and asked her out at the same time, she would automatically accept the date and cancel plans with the girlfriend. If a student dated a boy from outside her religion it created problems. Smiling was compulsory. One girl in my dormitory said, “Smile,” every time we passed in the hall.

  The pocket money Father sent me through Parviz shrank when converted from toomans to dollars. The other girls flew home often for family gatherings or to reunite with a high school sweetheart. They had their hair done in expensive beauty salons in St. Louis, then went shopping and returned with packages of hats, gloves, blouses, shoes. They often skipped dormitory meals to buy their own food. The girls who didn’t have cars took taxis everywhere, rather than buses, which ran infrequently on limited routes. They decorated their rooms with their own personal furniture.

  I was out of the prison of my home, but I was here all alone. I didn’t have easy access to my brothers. I didn’t know a single other person.

  One day toward the end of the semester I found a note from the dean in my mailbox inviting me, along with the three other foreign students on campus, to participate in Parents’ Day. She asked that I stop by her office. The dean was wearing a linen suit, her blond hair set in neat short curls. She greeted me with a warm smile. “I’m telling this to all the foreign students on campus,” she said. “You should wear your native costumes on Parents’ Day.”

  I was silent, feeling awkward. I had no costume. She was waiting.

  “In Iran, some women cover themselves in chadors, but they wear them on top of regular clothes, similar to what people wear here,” I said.

  “Then wear a chador,” she said.

  My awkwardness only increased.

  “I never wore one in Iran,” I said finally, my voice drowned in the sound of laughter and conversation in the hall.

  “I still want you to wear it for this occasion, to show a little of your culture to us,” she said, smiling cheerfully.

  To me the chador had come to mean a kind of bondage, as religion had. It felt ridiculous to wear it in this American college. “Maybe I can think of something else to wear,” I mumbled.

  “No, no, the idea of the chador is excellent. I’ve seen pictures of women in Islamic countries wearing them. It fascinates me. What is the point?”

  “Well, in Islam, exposed hair and skin is considered to be seductive to men.”

  “I wish I felt my hair and skin were so seductive that I had to cover them up,” she said with a chuckle. But her attempt at humor only made me more insecure in this unexpectedly alien environment. I was realizing quickly how different this place was from my expectation of America.

  That afternoon after classes I walked to St. Louis’s Main Street to buy fabric for the chador. On one side of the street was a pharmacy, a post office, a small department store, a small supermarket, and a diner. Several residential streets branched off it and led to the Mississippi River, a muddy and turbulent body of water, with traffic racing on the wide street running alongside it. I thought of standing on the bank of the Karoon River and looking at the Americans on the other side. Here I was among them and feeling cut off and insecure.

  In the department store I looked at stacks of fabric in one corner. I wondered what to buy, a lightweight bright fabric like Maryam and other women wore around the house when a man was there, or the more somber black material they wore outside. Finally I decided on a few yards in blue with floral designs in paler blue. I also bought thread, scissors, and a needle.

  Back in my room, I spread the fabric on the floor, cut it in the shape of a chador, and hemmed the edges. It was hard to cut it right; I went very slowly. Maryam used to have hers made by a seamstress. As a child, I chose not to wear the chador. Now cutting one felt almost like making a shroud, as I had seen Maryam and her tenants doing. My mind went to my grandmother telling me that Reza Shah, the father of the present Shah, had forbidden women to wear the chador. The police used to pull it off the heads of women who wore it outdoors. He wanted the world to see Iran as modern. Then the present Shah, who had the same idea of modernizing Iran, as a compromise to please the clergy made wearing it optional. Women like Maryam, who were totally observant, wore it; some, who were less religious, wore head scarves; more Westernized women like Mohtaram didn’t cover their heads. The whole notion of the chador was very strange to Americans; I could tell by the dean’s reaction, yet she wanted me to wear it.

  On Parents’ Day I put the chador on and looked at myself in the mirror. I was reminded of the times I wore it to passion plays and to a mosque Maryam took me to. I didn’t connect to the chador and the realization had made me sad—at one time Maryam and I were so much alike. Now, here I was in this land of freedom and more or less forced to wear it. I tried to brush off my thoughts, to not be so easily dissatisfied.

  I went to the room where the reception was taking place. Framed photographs of various benefactors hung on the walls. As I stood with Margarita, from Greece, who was wearing a full embroidered skirt and blouse; Rachel, from Turkey, in something similar; and Bharti, from India, in a sari, everyone’s eyes focused mainly on me.

  “Isn’t that pretty,” one young mother said, with a Southern drawl. “But it must be difficult to move around in.”

  “Does everyone dress like that in Iran?” another woman asked.

  “No,” I said, “it’s optional; only about half the women wear it.”

  “I can’t imagine wearing it.”

  Though I didn’t accept the chador, I felt insulted, thinking of Maryam always enclosed in one, by choice.

  After enduring more questions from mothers, the foreign students and I left together. Outside, sitting on facing swings, we talked among ourselves. Margarita, dark-haired and plump, was a sophomore; she said she disliked th
e college and planned to return home as soon as the year was over. Rachel, red-haired and pale, with a quiet manner, said she was happy enough so far, this being her first year. On the plane ride to the United States she had met a man from her own country who attended a nearby college; the two of them spent a lot of time together. And Bharti, thin and dark and serious, was unhappy but intended to stay on until she graduated. I told her I also intended to finish, although I was beginning to feel the college wasn’t the right place for me and wasn’t what I had imagined it to be like.

  Maryam

  “I think they gave us single rooms because we’re foreign,” Bharti said. “Everyone else shares rooms. They didn’t think anyone would want to room with us. I get strange glances from everyone when I say I’m a Hindu.”

  “They’re narrow and bigoted,” Margarita said.

  “No one has tried to befriend me,” Rachel said.

  “I feel the same way,” I said. “But maybe it’s an illusion.” Rachel shrugged her shoulders.

  “My mother asked me to ask you if you’re a Catholic.” Judy Conrad was a pretty blonde who lived on my floor. She had stopped me in the bathroom.

  I shook my head no.

  “But my mother said you were wearing a habit.”

  “That wasn’t a habit, it was a chador. Good Muslims wear them.”

  “Are Muslims Catholics?”

  “No, it’s a different religion.”

  “Are you a good Muslim?”

  I just stared at her. When I didn’t answer she put her hand on her hip. “Well, in this college we’re all Christians,” she said coolly and walked away.

  Twenty

  I was feeling hot and stifled by the sermon in the chapel. The preacher was a stout, gray-haired man. He talked monotonously about passages in the Bible, interpreting them. I kept staring at the stained glass, my mind going to happier childhood days when multicolored light poured into my room through stained glass. Though Maryam’s household had been filled with talk of religion and religious practice, I never felt pressure from her to believe or to practice religion. Here in this college I felt a pressure to believe in Christianity, and going to the chapel was compulsory.

  I was sitting next to Janet, a girl from my hall. She frowned at me as I kept shifting in my seat. I got up and left before the sermon was over and sat under a tree in a meadow that stretched beyond the campus.

  When I returned to my dormitory later that day, the housemother, Cynthia, approached me in the lobby and asked me to come to her room on the first floor. According to rumors, she had been married to a Lindengrove professor and he left her for one of his students. He had been fired and the student expelled, but Cynthia had stayed on.

  “It’s sacrilegious to leave the sermon halfway through,” she said the moment we reached her room.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered.

  “Anyway, you keep to yourself too much. Try to mingle more, make friends. To start with I want you to go to the mixer next week.”

  I had no idea what a mixer was and was embarrassed to ask. So I just looked at her.

  “We invite boys from the surrounding colleges. We play dance music. We have mixers a few times a year. The girls love them.”

  I nodded noncommittally.

  “You must go, be more sociable. There may be a few foreign boys there from the Missouri School of Mines. The engineering school attracts foreign boys.”

  “I don’t know how to dance. I only learned a little from my brother,” I said.

  A clock on the wall chimed, interrupting us.

  “You can just follow the steps,” she said and got up. I assumed that meant it was time for me to leave. So I got up, too, and left.

  Before the party on Saturday night, the bathrooms on my floor were filled with girls checking their makeup, spraying perfume on their necks and arms, fluffing up their hair, and examining their dresses one more time. I put on a pale yellow dress I had made in my home economics course and low-heeled shoes I brought with me from Iran. The shoes were handmade with good leather but had an old-fashioned, un-party-like look. The other girls wore dresses with low-cut necklines and high heels. They wore rouge, lipstick, eye shadow. I wore no makeup as I was not used to it.

  As soon as I arrived at the mixer I regretted coming. Girls stood around the room with smiles glued on their faces. None of the other foreign students was there, and neither were there any foreign boys, from what I could tell. The boys scrutinized us superciliously. A few asked some of the girls to dance. The girls who weren’t asked began to talk among themselves and laugh in an artificially cheerful way.

  Since I was neither asked to dance nor pulled into conversation by other girls, I left and sat on a swing in the far corner of the campus. A full moon was shining in the sky. I thought of Pari and me standing on the terrace at night talking, with the same moon dangling in the sky. Now we were so far away from each other.

  As I trudged through my days in a place where I didn’t fit in, I tried to focus on my future. I would go somewhere in America where I could blend in more, though I had no idea yet where that was or how I would get there. I thought about what Maryam had said to me, “As soon as a baby comes into the world an angel writes its destiny on the baby’s forehead.” I hadn’t accepted that as a child, and now, too, I believed that it was my own sheer determination that had enabled me to come to America. I should be able to determine what I would do next.

  I reminded myself of the luxury of being able to read and write what I wanted without Father’s vigilant eyes on me, or the fear of SAVAK in my heart.

  Late at night I turned to my writing, my long-lasting friend. I wrote in English now, though I had to constantly look up words in the dictionary. Writing in English gave me a freedom I didn’t feel writing in Farsi. Yet everything I wrote had to do with people I knew growing up. Though Iran and people in it were out of reach at the college, as if from a different lifetime, they occupied my deepest emotions.

  I wrote a sketch about reading to Ali, with some changes from real life.

  . . . On my visits home I read to Ali. He would sit before me with his head bent, his back hunched, while I read from Amir-Al-Salaam, a long heroic tale of a brave man in pursuit of his beloved. The book was very old and had been bound many times. As I read he would gasp or thrust his body forward at the hero’s mishaps or smile triumphantly, revealing his small teeth, at the hero’s good fortune. I read to him very loudly and distinctly because he was hard of hearing. Because he had round eyes and a very small stature, sometimes I would imagine him to be a child and me his mother. He would never tire of my reading, and when I put the book aside he would thank me profusely and shake his head up and down, still tantalized by the book’s flowery language and Amir’s adventures. Then he would take the book from me very gently and mark the page with a pigeon feather.

  On a warm, starry night I was sitting in the courtyard, watching green frogs jump in and out of the round pool, bats travel back and forth in straight lines under a canopy, when I suddenly became aware of Ali standing in his room near the doorway. In the light of a kerosene lamp in his room I could see him bending and straightening up, his hands gesticulating widely. Then I saw the glimmer of a knife he was holding. I got up and walked toward his room. I coughed and made noise with my wooden slippers but he did not seem to hear me.

  He threw the knife on the floor with an élan uncharacteristic of him and knelt before an imaginary figure. “I’m Amir, Amir the fearless, the brave,” he chanted, his voice shaking. “I’m here to free you.”

  I walked away, suddenly wary of being seen by him. After that night, throughout the rest of my visit, he did not ask me to read to him. I had glimpses of him while he washed clothes in a pail or prepared meals. His face was very tense with thought, his gestures had acquired grandeur. He never was aware of anyone even when they came near him, and he often whispered unintelligible words.

  After completing the sketch I burst into tears, recalling Mrs. Soleimani, mourning her d
isappearance all over again. I decided, after some hesitation, to hand it in as my composition assignment. I had the same bland response from the students at Lindengrove as from those at my high school.

  “Can’t Ali read?” Mrs. Smith, the teacher, a young, vivacious woman with a Southern accent asked.

  “Ali was our servant. He was illiterate.”

  “I guess in Third World countries many people are illiterate.” She thought about it. “Isn’t Iran Westernized? The Shah is a very modern man. I’ve seen pictures of him.”

  “His attempts haven’t gone very far yet.”

  The students had started talking among themselves, bored with the conversation. We went to the next piece. I had no idea what Mrs. Smith thought about the sketch.

  I had a desire to talk to her and went to her office one day. But in spite of her friendly manner, she was not open to questions and conversation. She intimidated me, in this place I couldn’t understand. So I got up after a moment.

  “You have talent,” she said as I was leaving.

  I built a cradle of dreams for myself; as I lay in bed at night I imagined having an impact on the world through my writing. I rocked myself in that cradle every night to put myself to sleep.

  Linda Chesterton had a large room to herself because her roommate had left to live at home and attend a local college. She was a thoughtful girl; she spent a lot of time alone, staying in the dormitory even on most Friday and Saturday nights. Tall, with large green eyes and chestnut brown hair that she wore pulled back, Linda was a sophomore who planned to major in art. She knocked on my door one Friday night when the dorm was practically empty and invited me to her room.

  “I know you have sorrow in your heart,” she told me.

  I was startled by her remark. Did it show on my face? The aftereffects of my losses seemed to have followed me like shadows. Then I began to pour out to her about my childhood, how Pari had lifted me out of utter loneliness and desolation when I was abducted by my father from Maryam, and how now I was so far away from them both.