Persian Girls: A Memoir

by Nahid Rachlin

  I watched the scenery move past me as we drove toward Manhattan, thinking how strange it was that this man from a different culture and religion had met and fallen in love with me, an Iranian Muslim.

  What Maryam had told me about destiny all those years ago came to me, as it often did at crucial turns in my life. Would she, despite her belief in predestination, be hurt that I was marrying someone outside her religion? Her beliefs and feelings were often at odds. I recalled her telling her sisters that Jews were recognized as sharing a common lineage with Islam, that the Koran venerated the Bible as one of its sources, and that Christians and Jews were called “People of the Book.”

  We got married at City Hall. My parents were in Iran. Cyrus, who had married his girlfriend Mildred, couldn’t attend because his wife was in the last days of pregnancy. Parviz was in Iran, having accepted a one-year appointment at a hospital in Karaj, a village in serious need of qualified doctors. Howie’s parents didn’t come.

  I was happy that there were no vigilant eyes on me; no one was going to inspect my sheets the next morning, looking for virginal blood.

  Twenty-eight

  Ifinally wrote to my parents and Pari with news of my marriage. Only Pari wrote back to congratulate me and added:Father brings up your name and shakes his head in anger and disappointment. But I think at some level he’s happy that you aren’t here to add to his problems.

  There were also new developments in Pari’s life. She had a suitor, named Mansour Behbehami, and she was thinking of marrying him. Mansour had been in Ahvaz for a few months for work (sent there by his boss at the National Iranian Petrochemical Company in Tehran to assist with a job). He was staying at the Hotel Pahlavi near our house and had noticed Pari passing by. He inquired about our family, then wrote a note to Pari to express his interest and slipped it into her hand once as she was passing his hotel.

  I wake every day with the hope that I would be accepted by you, a beautiful woman and from an excellent family. It’s hard to capture in words the feeling that comes over me at the mere sight of you. Ever since I laid eyes on you, flowers started to bloom in the salt-sand that my soul has turned into as a result of my tragedies and losses. I can detect some sorrow in you too and hope that a union between kindred spirits will create a fertile soil and our souls will be nourished. God has taken an interest in me by allowing my path to cross with yours. I feel an urgency to be united with you and for us to be each other’s guardians until death. I do believe marriage should give equal responsibility to husband and wife.

  The man’s flowery language at first amused Pari and then made her wary. He reminded her of Taheri and the way he acted when he first began wooing her.

  Mansour didn’t wait for Pari’s response. Soon after writing the letter, he came to our house and asked for her hand. (He came himself because he had no relatives in Ahvaz.) He wasn’t wealthy like Taheri, and wasn’t better educated, either, but Father thought, as a divorced woman, Pari should consider herself lucky that a nice man from a respectable family was interested in her. Father also appreciated the fact that Mansour was willing to accept Pari with a very small dowry, this being her second marriage.

  Pari hoped Mansour would take her to Tehran—she still wanted to pursue acting, but her main desire was to be in the same city as her son. Mansour seemed like a compassionate man and he told her he would welcome Bijan and treat him as his own son.

  From the picture Pari drew for me, Mansour seemed to belong in the category of men we used to classify as “different,” not tyrannical. Mansour resembled Majid a little, with the same widely spaced eyes and high forehead and cheekbones, Pari said, but he didn’t have Majid’s magnetism. A sadness seemed to hang about him.

  He had been married once, but his wife had died of leukemia while she was pregnant with their second child. Then his five-year-old son had died in a school bus crash. He quietly gave in to Pari’s ideas of the life they should lead together, with an almost submissive affection.

  Pari hardly knew Mansour—her contact with him had been confined to a few private hours together in the salon. Yet they married.

  In another letter a few weeks later, Pari wrote that she and Mansour were looking for a different house; the one Mansour had been living in with his late wife and son, he quickly realized, reminded him too much of his tragedies.

  My communication with Pari came to a halt that year, 1971, when the Shah had his extravagant 2,500th anniversary celebration of Cyrus the Great in Persepolis, a city on the outskirts of Shiraz. Iran was in turmoil. Letters disappeared in transit.

  The amount of money spent on the celebration highlighted the monarchy’s extravagant existence while many people were living in poverty. In speeches the Shah referred to himself as the latest heir in a 2,500-year-old monarchy stretching back to Cyrus the Great, the very first of the world’s empires. To impress foreign dignitaries, he spent nearly two billion dollars on the celebration.

  For six months the Imperial Iranian Air Force made repeated trips between Shiraz and Europe, bringing in air-conditioned tents, Baccarat crystal, Limoges china, Porthault linens, an exclusive Robert Haviland cup-and-saucer service, as well as five thousand bottles of wine. These items were carefully loaded into army trucks for transport to Persepolis.

  Each month, supplies were driven down the desert highway in full loads. Tents were decorated differently in classical and modern styles. The walls of the banquet rooms were of velvet, sewn in France. The Shah hired teams of workers to get rid of thousands of poisonous snakes and scorpions that populated the desert where the tents were set up, to build decorative water fountains near the tents, new roads planted with acres of small pine trees. The National Iranian Oil Company set up torches fueled by oil barrels. Hundreds of thousands of posters, stamps, and coins were made to mark the occasion. Teams of bulldozers demolished a few old village houses in the area and the whole town of Shiraz was cleaned, shop facades and houses repainted. Elizabeth Arden created a new line of cosmetics and named it Farah, after Queen Farah. Maxim’s of Paris led the team of chefs and caterers. Except for Iranian caviar, served in quail eggs, all the food and wine were flown in from Paris. Foreign dancers were hired to perform. Orson Welles made the film Flames of Persia for the occasion.

  As the celebrations were taking place, several students were arrested for writing anti-Shah graffiti: “Thief Shah is stealing from the starving people,” they wrote. Khomeini, still in exile in Iraq, called the Shah’s celebration the “evil celebration.” The liberal press in Iran now openly criticized the Shah. “Lavish at the Expense of Starving People,” read the headlines, or, “An Insult to Our Culture to Serve French Food.”

  Terrorists attacked a number of banks, assassinated police officials, and blew up cinemas. Guerrillas threatened to drown the Persepolis events in a bloodbath. SAVAK detained at least 1,500 suspects, but more sprouted up. After the celebration, the Iranian consulate in San Francisco was bombed; the Federation of Iranian Students claimed responsibility.

  Twenty-nine

  We had moved to Cambridge when Howie got into Harvard’s psychology doctoral program. I worked as a medical pamphlet writer at a local hospital by day, and wrote at night. We wanted to wait until we were more comfortable financially before starting a family. But a desire to have a child was growing in me so intensely that we decided to go ahead and try.

  I knew I was pregnant even before I took the test. I was sitting on a bench in a little park not far from where I worked.

  Then I was dreaming. I was in Maryam’s house and my aunts and Mohtaram were sitting in her large living room, eating pastries and talking. Maryam suddenly smiled at me and said, “Now we’re together.”

  It was so unusual for me to fall asleep in the morning that I knew something was happening. I did not have an easy pregnancy. Much of the time I had morning sickness, and afternoon sickness, as well, so I quit my part-time job and stayed home.

  Howie and I talked about names. Leila was both a Persian name and similar to
Lena, Howie’s grandmother’s name. Cyrus, too, was a Persian name and similar to Howie’s grandfather’s name, Charles. Evidently neither of us was completely detached from our backgrounds.

  I had contractions in the middle of one night and woke Howie. It was a cold December night and there was already snow on the ground as he drove me to the hospital.

  The baby was big for my small size, eight and a half pounds. She had bright blue eyes (like her father’s), which were open and looking around with curiosity. She had a pile of curly brown hair already. How would I raise my child? I couldn’t look at Mohtaram as a role model. I wanted to be like Maryam, lenient and full of praise.

  Leila was a good baby and very quickly began sleeping through the night. She didn’t cry much and she smiled a lot. I watched with fascination all the changes she went through and the surprises she brought. The way she turned her head to look at something or someone, the smile of recognition that lit up her face, her first word, the first steps she took without falling.

  Then came stretches of melancholy. I thought of my mother drawing milk from her breasts to give to my grandmother for me for the long trip to Tehran. I thought again and again of Maryam, of her taking me to a mosque where she worshipped occasionally. She held my hand as we climbed the steps to the entrance. She had on her black chador and I a scarf I had borrowed from my cousin for the occasion. A fine rain was falling, though it was sunny. I looked at her through the shiny veil of the drizzle and I thought I saw tears in her eyes as she said, “I pray to God every day that you won’t be taken away from me.” Inside, the chamber was lit by the flames of hundreds of candles in candelabras. She picked up a candle from a brass tray on a table, lit it with an already burning one, and put it in one of the candelabras that wasn’t already full. She closed her eyes and after a moment of silence, prayed aloud.

  When my husband’s mother became a part of our life, accepting our marriage because of our child, I felt guilty that Maryam wasn’t the one sharing Leila with us. As Leila would run to me to ask questions or get a hug and a kiss I thought of how I used to run to Maryam.

  Then, one day, I received an unexpected letter from Maryam. The political climate in Iran was in a quiet period and the letter reached me without delay.

  She had divorced Rahbar and was now back in her house in Tehran. She didn’t explain in the letter what had led to the divorce, only that she was able to get a temporary visitor’s visa for a month to come and see me. Being unmarried and fatherless, she didn’t need a permission letter from anyone to leave Iran. Luckily, one of her neighbors had a teenage son who had been accepted at a university in the United States, and he would accompany Maryam all the way to my apartment in Cambridge—something that Maryam couldn’t do alone because she didn’t speak English.

  We prepared a bed for her in the living room. Knowing she ate meat only if the animal was slaughtered in a halal way, I called a Middle Eastern restaurant I found in the Yellow Pages and asked the chef if he knew a halal butcher. He gave me the phone number of one in Boston; I ordered chicken and lamb.

  I opened the door to Maryam and Bahman late one afternoon, and Maryam and I embraced and kissed, breathless with excitement. Bahman said he had to leave immediately and so we spoke only long enough for me to thank him for bringing Maryam.

  “Nahid joonam, I’ve been sleepless at the thought of seeing you,” Maryam said as I led her into the living room. “I thank God to have enabled me to live long enough to have the pleasure of seeing you in your new home.”

  “I’ve been so looking forward to this,” I said.

  Howie came in from our bedroom, where we had our desks, and greeted Maryam.

  I translated the exchange between them.

  “Welcome. Nahid has so been excited about your visit,” Howie said.

  “Please forgive me for the inconvenience I’m creating coming here,” she said.

  After a few moments Howie went back to the bedroom so that Maryam could take her chador off and we could speak freely in Farsi.

  It was hard to believe she was inside my apartment in Cambridge. At fifty, Maryam looked youthful. She had covered the few strands of gray in her hair with henna, giving highlights to her lustrous wavy hair. Her face was nearly wrinkle free and her figure in good shape. She was wearing a navy dress with colored leaf designs, and she smelled of rose water.

  I brought Leila from her small room adjacent to our bedroom. Maryam put my two-year-old little girl on her lap and hugged and kissed her with tears in her eyes. “Angels have been kind to you to give you this child,” she said to me.

  After Leila wandered back to her room, Maryam and I slowly tried to catch up with each other’s lives.

  As dusk approached, Maryam found the direction of Mecca, spread her prayer rug on the living room floor, and prayed.

  For dinner I served the halal dishes I had bought.

  “Bahman told me they use pork fat in cooking in America,” Maryam said, looking a little embarrassed for mentioning it.

  I assured her that everything I was serving was halal.

  “I’m sorry for the trouble I’m causing,” she said.

  “It’s no trouble,” I said. Howie smiled, getting the meaning of our conversation.

  After dinner Maryam went to sleep early to recover from the long flight.

  Every day Maryam woke at dawn, prayed, and had breakfast. After lunch she prayed, took naps, had supper, and prayed again. She held Leila on her lap and said endearing things to her. After a few days she took on the task of cooking for us—kuku, khoresh, kababs, a variety of rices, and Shirazi salad.

  Parviz, who had returned from Iran, and his wife, Bahijeh, were passing through Boston and dropped by for a visit. He had met Bahijeh in Ahvaz while visiting our parents from Karaj. His marrying an Iranian girl introduced to him by our parents was a surprising turn, considering how Americanized he had become.

  Parviz and Howie began to drink beer in the living room.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Maryam in a whisper, noticing that she looked tense.

  She glanced at the men and then back at me. I understood what she meant.

  “Sorry, Aunt Maryam,” Parviz said to her, noticing the exchange. “We didn’t mean to be disrespectful.” He and Howie went into another room to finish their beer.

  Bahijeh, who had studied abroad and came from a very modern family, seemed uncomfortable with Maryam’s strict adherence to Islamic rules. She went to join the men in the other room.

  “It’s a treat to see you after all these years,” Parviz said to Maryam, as he and Bahijeh were leaving.

  “It’s wonderful to see you, so grown up and with a wife,” Maryam said.

  As soon as Parviz and Bahijeh were out the door, Maryam began to cry. “I’m so sorry, I spoiled things,” she said.

  Her soft, gentle face was so sad that I felt tears coming into my own eyes; I was caught in this conflict.

  “Don’t worry, Mother, it didn’t matter,” I said. “Parviz had to leave anyway.”

  “I wish we could live near each other, but it isn’t our destiny,” Maryam said, as we strolled with Leila.

  “Do you remember that day when Father came to my school and took me away?” I asked Maryam.

  “How can I possibly forget?” she replied. “I had some hint that it might happen; he sent a message to your aunt Roghieh’s husband that he was coming to Tehran around that time. And then Roghieh’s husband sent another message on the day your father took you away from your school. It was as if God had forsaken me.”

  “Were you angry at Mohtaram for not sending me back to you?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t be,” Maryam said. “She was under your father’s control.”

  As we walked, several people gaped at Maryam, who was wearing a long, black chador.

  She told me about her life during the years away from Iran, her marriage and divorce. She praised Rahbar eloquently; he was gentle and sensitive. It was clear she’d been in love with him, though she never
said so.

  “What went wrong?” I asked.

  She sighed. “He started to come home with one young boy after another, going into a room and spending the night with them. He always said, ‘He’s my cousin,’ or ‘He’s my nephew.’ Finally I caught on. I told him I wanted a divorce and he knew why. No fights, no confrontations. It was easy enough for me to get a divorce after I let the judge know what was going on.”

  I was speechless. “Oh, this is unbelievable,” I finally murmured. “I guess you knew little about him when you married him.”

  She nodded. “I’m going back to live in the same rooming house by the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala. I feel peace just being near the shrine. And I have good friends among the women living in that area.”

  Again I was aware how close Maryam and I were in our emotions and how far apart in our way of life.

  “Your mother sent a ring with your grandmother when she brought you to me,” she said after a few moments. “I was supposed to give it to you when you got married but I lost track of it during all those years of moving around. I’ll keep looking.”

  “Really? A ring? You never mentioned it.”

  “I was waiting for when you got married.”

  So Mohtaram had expected me to stay with Maryam until I got married. It was something I’d never considered before.

  On her last day Maryam promised to visit again. She and Howie had gotten along well and liked each other, and she was so happy to be with Leila. But it was clear she didn’t feel comfortable in America. There were all her dietary restrictions. She didn’t know a word of English and it would take years for her to become fluent enough to communicate with others. She couldn’t read or watch TV or listen to the radio. There weren’t that many Iranians in the area, no community for Maryam to get involved in. Other Asians—Japanese, Chinese, Indian—had more of a sense of community; their cultures had become more a part of America, with restaurants and ethnic neighborhoods.