by Sara Saedi
Despite the void left by the death of her parents, my grandmother grew up to be an ambitious young woman. She was widely known for her intelligence, and she received her high school diploma at a time when education was not a priority for the female population in Iran. By the time she turned twenty-three, she gave in to societal norms and decided to get married to a first cousin she had never met. The marriage was arranged, but my grandmother didn’t put up a fight. She knew she’d put off marriage for long enough, and she’d been told her future husband was a really nice guy. “What the heck,” she thought. “Let’s do this thing.”
The sofreh aghd (reminder: the Iranian wedding altar) includes a variety of symbolic items, like eggs to represent fertility, fruit to represent a joyous life, and a mirror to represent a bright future for the married couple. Traditionally, the bride and groom glimpse their reflections throughout the ceremony. For my grandmother, the very first time she saw the face of the man she was marrying was in their wedding mirror. Her heart sank the moment her gaze fell on his reflection. She knew right then that she would never be attracted to him. (For the record, I’ve seen photographs and I thought he was a handsome guy.) Despite the lack of physical chemistry, her cousin-turned-husband lived up to his reputation as a compassionate and caring spouse who meant my grandmother no ill will. Together, they had three children. Fun fact: her husband already had a daughter from a previous marriage who would go on to marry my grandmother’s brother. My family was as incestuous as the contestants on Bachelor in Paradise.
Overall, my grandmother felt content and safe in her marriage, but it lacked the kind of passionate love she always imagined for herself. And then, one summer, her husband’s nephew moved in with them. By then, she was twenty-eight and the nephew was only twenty-one. He was the romantic type and instantly became enamored with his uncle’s wife. He showered my grandmother with compliments, and for the first time in her life, she felt desirable. Eventually, they fell in love, and though she claimed they never acted on their feelings, they decided that they couldn’t live without each other. There was only one solution: she would divorce her husband and marry his nephew.
In our day and age, you might give a cop-out excuse like “The heart wants what it wants,” but keep in mind this was Iran in the 1940s. Women did not leave their husbands, and they certainly did not run off with their husbands’ nephews. It was a bold move on my grandmother’s part, and though we could all revel in the romance of it, it was a love affair that destroyed multiple lives and scandalized an entire family. Everyone discouraged my grandmother from breaking off her marriage. And they especially discouraged the much younger nephew from marrying her. Relatives warned him that she was too old for him and that he was much better off finding an age-appropriate wife without the baggage of three children. But their advice fell on deaf ears. He refused to listen. He simply responded that he needed to breathe the same air that she breathed.
My grandmother wasn’t quite as certain. In the middle of it all, with family members in a state of ire over their love affair, she got cold feet. But it was too late to undo the damage. Her husband couldn’t forgive the indiscretion and didn’t want to be with her anymore. Can you blame the guy? And so my grandmother followed her heart, dissolved her marriage, and got hitched to her ex-husband’s nephew (who was technically her second cousin). The nephew was my grandfather Ata Baba.
I don’t know if their torrid beginnings cast a dark shadow on them, but my grandparents’ marriage was laced with hardship and tragedy. After her divorce, my grandmother’s family essentially disowned her. Her youngest daughter (my khaleh Mina) went to live with her and her new husband, but she lost custody of her two oldest children (my khaleh Mandana and my dayee Mohammad), who would initially stay with their father. At the age of eleven, Khaleh Mandana began to display signs of an eating disorder, and doctors advised that she was better off living with her mother. Recently, my aunt revealed to me that once she was able to live with her mother, she was terrified to eat, because she worried that as soon as she conquered her eating disorder and gained weight, she’d be forced to move back in with her dad. Of her three children from her first marriage, Mohammad was the only one who never lived with my grandmother after the divorce. Their separation was a void he struggled with through his adolescence and into adulthood. He and my grandmother still had a close bond, but he never had the benefit of being raised by his biological mother. The distance from her firstborn was one of my grandmother’s many scarlet letters. Though she was allowed to visit him often, she was consumed by the guilt of living apart from him.
My maternal grandparents.
But it was another tragedy in her life that deepened the abyss of shame and grief she’d readily succumbed to. It took place on what began as a mundane afternoon in her home in Tehran. Like all life-changing events, it happened unexpectedly and without any foreshadowing. Everyone in the house was taking their midday nap when Mina, who was only six years old, woke up and quietly went into the backyard to rinse off some of her toy dishes in a small swimming pool. While my grandmother was still asleep, Mina fell in the pool and drowned. My grandmother discovered her body and tried to revive her, but it was too late.
Her romance with my grandfather came at the highest of costs. I can only imagine the daily what-ifs that monopolized her thoughts. What if she’d never left her husband in the first place? What if Mina hadn’t come to live with her and my grandfather? Would she have grown up to have a long and happy life? If my grandma could have gone back to that summer when her husband’s nephew moved into her house, would she have avoided falling in love with him? No one knows. I have vivid memories of her, as an old woman, regularly looking at a black-and-white photo of Mina and bursting into tears.
She would go on to have five more children with my grandfather. My mom was the youngest of the lot, but when my grandmother was pregnant with her, she debated whether she should terminate the pregnancy. Abortion was, and still is, illegal in Iran, but women were either able to find medical practitioners willing to perform one or would take the back-alley route. By then, my grandparents had a volatile relationship, plagued by the fact that my grandfather had engaged in an extramarital affair with a younger woman. As it turned out, their relatives had correctly predicted their fate: their age gap would lead to long-term problems in their marriage. The same intensity and passion that brought them together now fueled bitter fights, mostly surrounding Ata Baba’s infidelity, which was why my grandmother worried that the stress of another child would permanently break their already fragile union. It was Mandana who begged and pleaded with her to carry my mom to term. My aunt was sixteen then and promised she would help raise the baby. Khaleh Mandana and I have always shared a special bond, and I’m certain our connection has to do with the fact that she essentially saved my life.
My grandparents would remain married for thirty-five years, until the day Ata Baba died of a heart attack. My mom says that despite their marital woes and my grandfather’s wandering eye, they remained in love till the very end. Now, looking back, my mom thinks my grandmother went through bouts of clinical depression. She never got over the visceral grief of losing her daughter or the fact that she didn’t raise her oldest child. There were also signs that my grandfather may have suffered from a mood disorder. During his upswings, everyone wanted to be in his presence, but during his downswings, he was known to cast a cold shadow.
While both my grandmothers led extraordinary lives marred by drama and tragedy, they were ultimately very different women. Maman Farideh liked her alone time and independence. On the flip side, Maman Soury never lived on her own after she moved to America. For the majority of the years she resided in the States, she lived with Khaleh Mehrzad and her family, but when they left California for Colorado, Maman Soury moved in with us. She lived in the Bay Area for over a decade, but she never learned to speak English beyond words like “please” and “thank you.” She didn’t have
much motivation to learn the language. She never went anywhere alone and was surrounded by Farsi speakers at all times. But the language barrier didn’t prevent her love of American television. Wheel of Fortune and Days of Our Lives (which also aired in Iran) were her two favorite programs. When it came to the latter, it was our job to translate the intricate plot twists and romantic entanglements. Whenever my Farsi failed me, I just made up what the characters were saying to each other with words I could remember. One of the high points of her life was the day she attended a taping of Wheel of Fortune and visited Vanna White’s dressing room. My aunt Geneva’s sister was Vanna White’s neighbor and arranged the meet and greet.
Maman Soury was also a huge fan of Jell-O and sugar-free vanilla ice cream, which I was required to scoop up for her on a daily basis. Unlike Mamani, she was mostly sedentary and spent the bulk of her time on the couch. She had to appreciate the smaller things in life like food and TV. Her health was also a constant battle. She’d been a chain-smoker, and as she approached her eighties, she would spend weeks at a time in the hospital due to emphysema. The sterile hallways of the ICU and the scent of illness caused me bouts of anxiety when we’d visit her, but no matter how bad she looked, she always seemed to make a full recovery. I started to expect that every hospital stint would end with her returning home.
During the Christmas holidays in 1994, she’d been hospitalized again. This time, she seemed more out of it and delirious than during my other visits. It was the morphine, my mom told me. She was in a lot of pain and the drugs were making her foggy. I figured that in a few days she’d be feeling better and we’d get to bring her home, but my siblings and I woke up on Christmas morning to discover that my parents were nowhere to be found. It could only mean they’d been called by the hospital to go see her in the middle of the night. We stared at our unopened Christmas gifts, wondering if we should selfishly tear through the wrapping paper or wait for my parents to come home so we could open our presents together.
Further proof that anything can happen in America.
Aside from my dayee Mehrdad, who had an American wife, we were the only other family among my relatives who bothered to celebrate Christmas. My parents worried we’d get teased by our classmates for not celebrating the holiday, so they decided to embrace the secular elements of Christmas (i.e., tree and presents) and to ignore the whole “birth of Christ” portion. There was one year that I remember opening our gifts only to make the startling discovery that we were poor. When all my friends were getting Pound Puppies and She-Ra figurines, my mom had wrapped up place mats and umbrellas that I recognized from our local drugstore. This particular year, I was hoping for a pricey pair of maroon Mary Jane Doc Martens, but fancy new shoes were suddenly the least of my concerns.
I distinctly remember the way the rest of that Christmas morning played out. I was wearing my oversize terry cloth Victoria’s Secret bathrobe over pajamas while we waited for my parents to return home. In our family room, we had a large window with a view of the street and the entrance of our house. I spotted a few cars pull up and watched the procession of aunts and uncles walk toward our front door. Dayee Mohammad’s wife was the first to greet me, and I asked her how my grandmother was doing.
“She’s fine,” she answered somberly. The relief I felt was instant.
But when my mom walked through the door shortly after, she pulled me into a hug and simply whispered, “She’s gone.” I immediately burst into tears and held on to my mom as we both cried. My grandmother’s death hit us hard. She was eighty-one, but none of us were ready for her to go. She was the matriarch of the family, and it was impossible to picture our lives without her. Losing her was also my first real experience with death. She was the closest person to me who had ever passed away. After watching her deteriorate, I made a promise to myself that I would never become a smoker.
That night, my relatives gathered at our house. We cried and laughed while sharing stories of my grandmother. One of my favorite memories was the night a few months earlier when my cousin Neda innocently asked Maman Soury if masturbation was considered a sin in Islam. I’d never seen my grandmother giggle so hard in my life. She couldn’t get the words out to answer the question, and never managed a response.
The evening would only get more surreal as the hours inched later into the night. The gathering was coming to a close, and Neda was putting my brother to bed upstairs, away from the ruckus, when she noticed that my sister’s bedroom smelled like smoke. She quickly alerted our parents, and my uncle went to investigate. By then, the entire second story of our house had filled with smoke. I remember hearing my uncle shout from upstairs for us to call 911 and to immediately evacuate the house. Minutes later, as my entire family stood on the sidewalk across the street, the fire department and paramedics showed up while flames shot through our roof. By the time the fire was under control, my sister’s closet and our bathroom were burned to a crisp. According to the fire department, our whole house would have been up in flames if they’d been called fifteen minutes later.
The cause of the fire was a heater that had been poorly installed prior to our purchase of the house, and we slowly rebuilt the damage. But that night, we were all startled by the same thought as we watched the chaos outside our home. On any regular night, Samira and I would have been long asleep. We could have died of smoke inhalation. If my grandmother hadn’t passed away that morning, we wouldn’t have stayed up late with the rest of our family. It felt like the timing of her death wasn’t by accident. It’s possible she actually prevented another tragedy from befalling our family.
As the years rolled on, December 25 was never the same again for any of us. On the twentieth anniversary of my grandmother’s death, Dayee Mohammad (her firstborn) died of complications from Parkinson’s disease. It’s hard to feel very festive on Christmas when our family has lost two loved ones on the holiday. When I’m in Northern California with my parents, we still start the day by opening gifts, and then we meet at my grandmother’s grave to reminisce, exchange hugs and “I love yous,” and tell her how much we miss her. Without fail, I think of her every time I stumble upon an episode of Wheel of Fortune, and wonder how the hell Pat Sajak and Vanna White haven’t aged since the early nineties.
My problems may have seemed big to me in high school, but I wasn’t dealing with arranged marriages to the wrong man or a love affair that would leave me ostracized from my entire family. Maman Soury didn’t always make the most traditional decisions, but I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her struggles and hardships and the controversial paths she traveled down. My aunts, uncles, cousins, and I are all a product of the life she lived and the life she bravely chose not to live.
And though it was the furthest thing from any of our minds on the day she died, the loss of Maman Soury would also be a stumbling block in our immigration process. Just two years prior, my parents had gotten their divorce in hopes that my mom could secure a green card through her. There had been little movement on the application, and now there never would be.
December 25, 1994
I wish I’d been nicer to her. There were so many things I wanted to tell her. I regret the way I treated her. I want to write everything I remember about her now, so when I read this I’ll remember her. I remember her eyes were green and beautiful, I remember she was a really good cook, I remember the little poems she would say, I remember how she played cards a lot, I remember her charm bracelet with all these golden hearts with each grandchild’s name engraved on it. Most of all, I remember her smile. Sometimes I convinced myself that if I looked at her and smiled and she smiled back, things would be all right.
* * *
* Soury is pronounced SUE-ree. If you want to nail the Persian accent, then roll the r.
We sold our house and we’ll be moving in about ten days. I can’t really believe it. There’s something about this home. It fits us. I love it. I real
ly see it as protection, comfort. I promise one of these days I will buy this home back. I can’t imagine waking up someplace else.
—Diary entry: September 28, 1997
By my senior year of high school, I can say with total confidence, I’d seen my dad cry approximately one million times. I can’t remember the first time he’d burst into tears in front of my siblings and me. Maybe it was at the end of The Little Mermaid when Ariel got legs and left her dad at the bottom of the ocean. (Seriously, WTF, Ariel? No dude is worth leaving your whole family for.) Or maybe it was one of the rare times he was able to talk about his brother even though he was still paralyzed by the grief of losing him. Or maybe it was one of the many times he looked at my mom and spontaneously declared how much he loved her. I couldn’t tell you. But I can tell you the first time I saw him cry from shame. And I was the seventeen-year-old asshat who brought him to tears.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled in Farsi, his arms folded across his chest. “I’m sorry you don’t want to live with us.”
We were at Dayee Mehrdad’s house, deep in the wooded hills of Saratoga, California. We were sitting across from each other on the bench of a bay window that looked out onto the long, steep driveway that led to their magnificent English Tudor. The room was large and well lit, and came with its own entrance and bathroom. It was the home’s guest quarters, which doubled as my aunt Geneva’s sewing room. It was also where I’d decided to run away to without my mom, dad, and brother. So what if I suffered from full-fledged panic attacks every time I drove our beat-up ’88 Camry through the winding, narrow roads to my new temporary digs? My uncle’s house was big and fancy, and I had a queen-size bed all to myself.