Laya returned home in the mid-afternoon and commenced her housework. Meals were mainly abgosht, the same dish she had been accused of stealing a potato from in her first marriage. For special occasions they ate dishes like ashe, dolmeh (stuffed eggplant) and fish with rice. Daily washing was done from a bucket in the small private courtyard outside the home; only occasionally would the family travel by foot or bus to the nearby suburb of Hassan Abad where there was a public bath. In the evenings, Laya would go out into the street and talk and gossip with the other women, or she would stay at home and sew. She made her own clothes, two cotton dresses being enough to last her a year.
Laya received a visit once each month from two local mullahs whom she invited into her house to recite the Rozeh Khani. This is a traditional story telling – a fabricated history of Islam that is sung rhythmically, unaccompanied, by the seated mullah while his audience, sitting on the ground below him, listen. Usually about 20 of Laya’s neighbours, all clad in chador, would come to hear the Rozeh Khani. One mullah would always arrive first. He was a short man with a thin beard who wore a long black shawl and nalain (a sort of leather slipper) but no turban. He would stand outside Laya’s door, saying – almost singing – ‘yullah, yullah, yullah’ (‘excuse me, excuse me, excuse me’). Laya would then invite him inside. A short time later, the other mullah – a tall, imposing man with a full black beard, black turban, brown cloak and nalain – would arrive and repeat the greeting. Laya told me that the short mullah had quite a bad speech impediment. However, because he recited the same prayer over and over, day after day – there was never any variation – he was able to ‘perform’ successfully. While the mullahs took turns to tell the story of Husayn (the grandson of Mohammed), the women would listen without responding and without looking at the mullahs. At the end, the mullahs were given a small amount of money – the equivalent of about five cents – and they would leave. There were never any questions or discussion about the prayers. Four weeks later the whole procedure would be repeated.
~
Laya was known to have a cheeky sense of humour and a limited respect for authority.
Once she was hanging out linen at the hospital with her friend Ozra. One of the sheets Laya was hanging was not straight on the line and so nearly touched the ground. Ozra pointed this out, saying, ‘If General Parsa sees this, he will be angry.’
General Parsa was the manager of the hospital, a formidable man who had only one arm, presumably the other lost to a war wound. But he was well liked and respected. Most people were cautious and courteous in his presence.
Laya scoffed at Ozra. ‘General Parsa can’t do anything.’
‘What did you say?’ came a man’s voice.
Laya pulled the sheet aside and there in front of her was General Parsa himself.
‘Oh . . . oh . . . oh,’ stuttered Laya.
‘I will put you in detention,’ said the general.
Luckily for Laya, the general had a sense of humour and said this in jest, though perhaps from then on she was a little more respectful.
Laya could also be quite harsh. One day Asghar, then about nine years old, aimed a stone at a tree but hit the 11-year-old daughter of a neighbour instead. Laya stormed out of the house, grabbed Asghar, threw him to the ground and sat on his head with his face in the dust so that he could barely breathe. The girl’s mother came out and cried, ‘What are you doing?’ and it was only then that Laya let her son back up. Another time Asghar hit a donkey with a stick and received a kick to his forehead. There was blood everywhere but Laya just yelled at him, asking why he hit the animal. Again it was a neighbour who came to Asghar’s aid, putting antiseptic on the wound and bandaging him up.
To be fair, Laya’s brutality was typical of the treatment of children in Iran at this time, and of methods of punishment which had been passed down the generations. I remember once my youngest uncle hitting his ten-year-old son hard in the face because he was not studying conscientiously enough. He hit him with such force that he broke one of his son’s teeth.
And Laya did have her limits.
When Asghar was 11 years old, Laya had had enough of him doing nothing useful during the day while she was at work. As there was no school in Ghal-e, he spent his days with the other kids either inside the walls of Ghal-e or in the large gardens in the valley below. The gardens, with fruit trees and beds of vegetables, provided a lot of food for the people of Ghal-e but they also provided a shady place for young people to play games. Laya returned from work one day and told Asghar that the next day she would take him to Haj Esmaeil, the owner of a metal-working shop, where he could work as an apprentice. My father always remembered his mother telling Haj ‘he is meat for you and bone for me’, which to his young mind meant that they were planning to kill him.
He wasn’t killed, obviously, but he was bullied and brutalised. Haj was a tyrant who swore all day and would beat Asghar for no reason. One of his ‘games’ was to spit on the ground and then tell Asghar to go and get bread from the square, which was 500 metres away. ‘If the spit is dry before you return, you will be beaten.’ When Haj went to lunch he would give Asghar a heavy steel bar and tell him not to put it down. This was his way of ensuring that Asghar did not sleep while he was watching the shop. An Armenian customer came into the store one day and found Asghar holding the bar and crying. ‘You hold this so they can chew?’ he asked. He walked to the tea house and told Haj that if he treated the boy in this way again, he would go to the police. Asghar’s treatment by Haj improved a little after this, though not for long. And in any case the other employees, who were all older than Asghar, would also beat him.
Asghar told Laya that Haj Esmaeil was hitting him but she did not believe him, accusing him of lying. Eventually, after a particularly bad beating in which he was nearly knocked out, Asghar woke from a nightmare shouting, ‘Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!’
Laya now realised her son had been telling the truth. Next day, she arrived unannounced at the workshop. Wearing a loose chador that was knotted at the back so her hands were free, she walked up to Haj with her hands on her hips. Though Haj was much taller than Laya was, she reached up and slapped him in the face. ‘You nasty person,’ she said. ‘Why do you hit the child?’ She grabbed Haj’s collar and told him Asghar would not return to work for a few weeks and in the meantime she would tell the police (though she did not carry out this threat).
That was not the end of my father’s working for Haj. He eventually found another job, this time with a cobbler, but was also beaten by him. Later, he started making metal objects at home – shoe horns, barbecues, buckets, toy aeroplanes and other small items – until eventually he was given some work by a roofing contractor, a much nicer man who paid Asghar properly and did not abuse him. Perhaps Haj Esmaeil saw what Asghar was able to do when he was not being abused because he eventually asked Asghar to work for him again, and then to join him as a partner. Nevertheless, he tried to dupe Asghar in the partnership. Six years later my father set up his own metal-working shop at the age of 30.
It was only after Laya told me these stories that I started to understand why my father was the way he was as I was growing up. Given more opportunities, including an education, he might have made something of himself. For all his faults, my father always worked hard, which was quite different to my own husband.
~
One day in the early 1950s word spread that the government wanted to take over Ghal-e, demolish the houses and subdivide the land for its own employees. There was much chatter as people worried about where they would go and what would happen to the jobs that so many of them had at the hospital. When they gathered to discuss what might be done, the men said they couldn’t do anything. They were afraid that any sort of demonstration would be seen as dissent. But the women resolved that they must act. They asked Abol-Ghasem – my maternal grandfather – to write a letter. Sharife, one of the more outspoken women, said she would deliver the letter. When it became known that the Shah was goin
g to visit the hospital, the women decided to greet his car; Sharife would hand the letter directly to the Shah.
When the day came, 300 women, including Shahin, lined the street. (Laya was at work that day.) Sharife looked striking: she was tall and slim with sharp green eyes, and she wore a smart manteau and a scarf. Eventually the Shah’s black limousine approached, outriders on each side. Sharife stepped out onto the street and held the letter up high in her hand. The Shah’s car stopped. When the driver wound down his window and took the letter from Sharife, all the women clapped. Now, surely, something would be done to save their land.
But they heard nothing.
Three months later the women decided that they would have to try again. Another letter was written, and this time all the women marched to the Shah’s palace to deliver it in person. When they arrived at the gates of the palace a guard asked them what they were doing; after telling him their story, he said that they had the courage of lionesses. He contacted an assistant to the Shah who came out and told them that they must go away – when there was some news, they would hear.
Sharife stepped forward. ‘We will not move until we get a response,’ she declared.
With a sigh the assistant returned inside. An hour later he came outside again. He reported that there had been some discussions and that something would be resolved soon. They would not be left without any land.
The women returned to Ghal-e tired but very happy.
A little while later the Ministry of Economy and Wealth came with an offer. They wanted to demolish the existing houses and subdivide the land, but each family would be provided with a block of land at a very low rate. Alternatively, they could move to the new suburb of Nazi Abad where they would get a larger block of land for just one toman per metre – again a very low rate. Most people chose to move to Nazi Abad to be closer to amenities; Laya and my parents were among this group. Years later the appreciated value of the land they were awarded would allow my father and my uncle Ahmad to buy and build on the land in Takht-e Tavoos.
In time, Ghal-e Yusef Abad was demolished and subdivided. Sadly, no remnant of it remains today. However, the relationships formed in that community lived on, many lasting for lifetimes. The residents of Ghal-e were warm, passionate and community minded, despite the poor living conditions and occasional fights over their kids or other local issues. Decades after Ghal-e was replaced by a new suburb, my parents’ best friends, and those of Laya and Ahmad, were people they had lived beside in Ghal-e.
~
Laya eventually married again, to a man called Hossein (but whom everyone called Aboo). They were introduced by one of Laya’s friends at the hospital. Once a sergeant in the army, Aboo worked at a munitions factory with the husband of this friend. Later in his life he had one of his legs amputated above the knee as a result of a bullet wound from many years before becoming infected. He had been shot in that leg during World War I in Tabriz, Azerbaijan. Aboo was a very nice man with no other family and he loved his step-sons very much. However, he also left Laya a widow, dying in 1962 from stomach cancer, possibly brought on by the opium he had smoked and ingested throughout much of his life.
After Laya died in 1987, I wrote to my uncle Ahmad, who had been Laya’s main carer in her last years.
Laya was a brave woman. In her long life she tasted comfort, hardship, ugliness and beauty. Humiliation and respect, screams and silence, ups and downs.
The memories that I have from her are a mixture of tears and smiles. This woman, for seven or eight years, was crippled, and with her tiny body she fought. If she was outside of Iran she would have been in a nursing home, but instead until the last moment of her life she was with her family. To hear your voice and experience your kindness. You and Aunty Mahin gave warmth to her. You did a lot of work for her, comforting her body and soul.
We can’t imagine being crippled for so long. Many of us couldn’t bear it for seven minutes, let alone seven years.
Rest in peace.
13
An end and many beginnings
Three days after Reza pulled the pearls from around my neck, I lodged my application for Legal Aid. The next day I filed a complaint of assault at the Frankston Magistrates’ Court and a hearing was set down for the following Wednesday, 27 January 1988 – a date I will never forget.
Reza arrived at the court that day wearing a grey suit but no tie and with a lawyer beside him. But these symbols of power could not hide the fact that he was pale and nervous. This man who loved to parade his strength in front of me had become a mouse when confronted by the law. After a police officer read my complaint to the judge, Reza’s defence was that in the last seven years I had never accused him of assault before. The court also heard from the police officer to whom Reza had falsely reported me missing.
The judge granted an interim intervention order against Reza. He was restrained from ‘assaulting, harassing, molesting, threatening or directly contacting’ me for one year.
The next morning I contacted Legal Aid again. I had represented myself at the Magistrates’ Court, which was not unusual for an intervention request. However, now that I knew Reza had a lawyer I asked if Legal Aid could find a lawyer to assist me with future hearings. I received a telegram that afternoon to advise me that they had found one for me; I called him and made an appointment for the following Wednesday.
By now, I allowed myself the smallest hope that I might be close to seeing my children again. They were on my mind constantly. At one point I searched the community telephone book and was able to find the home phone number of Kerry, one of our neighbours in the Kananook units. She assured me that the children were okay. She had seen them playing outside.
~
Some time earlier Mary had organised a break for the family at a holiday house in Apollo Bay for the first week of February, commencing on the coming weekend. Originally it was my intention to go along, but having made an appointment with a lawyer for the middle of that week, I changed my mind. My parents, my brother, Mary and Fariba went to the coast while I stayed alone at Mansoor’s. Later, my father would write in a letter to his brother that he didn’t enjoy this trip. ‘My heart was with Sohila. I wanted this trip to finish quickly.’ (When I first read this, years later after my father’s death, I cried and cried. It revealed a side of my father that I never saw as a child.)
I now started writing. Over the next few days I wrote pages and pages of notes describing what I had been living through for the last seven years. I wanted to be able to give the lawyer a complete picture. In between, at least once a day, I called Kerry to check on Ali and Shirin. Anxiety about them was weighing me down more than the unborn babies in my belly. One day I went to Frankston Hospital for a five-month check-up and to book a room for early June, when the twins were due, and on another day I went to my bank to change the signature on my account, having realised that Reza had fraudulently withdrawn 50 dollars from it.
I woke up on Wednesday, 3 February, feeling as optimistic as I had for a while and looking forward to meeting my lawyer at two o’clock that afternoon. Early in the day I called into the community policing squad to ask them if they could check on my children again. They agreed, but then smashed my positive mood when they informed me that Reza had made some allegations against me. He had told police that I was having an incestuous relationship with my brother and that I had indecently touched my son. I ended up being interviewed for two hours about these allegations, by people from the squad and from community services. I left the office as a walking corpse.
But then there was relief. On meeting my lawyer, Michael, he explained that the police had spoken to him and, while they needed to follow procedure and also interview Reza and Ali, they did not believe there was any reason to be taking Reza’s allegations seriously. Thunder clouds gave way to full sunshine when I learnt that community services would be delivering my children to me at Mansoor’s flat later that same afternoon. What a beautiful surprise! I simply cannot describe the level of relief
I felt at that moment.
At 4.30 that afternoon, one month and three days after I first left Reza, my beautiful Ali and Shirin were back in my arms. Now there were tears again, but finally these tears were of happiness. I was overwhelmed with joy. After so much anxiety and lost sleep and crying, how was this much happiness possible? It was as though the house was full of the perfume of all the flowers in the world.
Of course the children themselves were a bit nonplussed by my excitement. They were far too young to understand what was going on and for a couple of days they were fairly quiet. But they came out of their shells before very long. By the time the rest of the family returned on the weekend, the small flat was filled with the babble of Shirin and the shouts of Ali. And no sounds could have been sweeter.
The next day, one of the workers from community services took me and the children to the Children’s Court in Melbourne – the court responsible for children at risk. On the basis of Reza’s recent behaviour, including the lies he had told police and the intervention order, I was granted interim custody of Ali and Shirin for three weeks, pending a formal hearing. In the meantime, Reza would have supervised access to the children for two hours per day, four days per week, at the Community Welfare Office in Frankston, accompanied not by me but by a community service worker. It was of some satisfaction to me that Reza had brought much of this on himself. Reza did see his children a few times under these conditions, but he also missed an increasing number of sessions. As it turned out, we did not need to return to the Children’s Court. On the day before that hearing date, at the instigation of my lawyer, Reza consented via his lawyer to my having interim sole custody of Ali and Shirin until we attended a compulsory Family Court counselling meeting on 2 March.
The Family Law Court in Dandenong is a very plain, two-storey concrete and glass government building on a nondescript street behind the main shopping precinct. I travelled there on my own, by bus, and arrived at our counselling session ready for Reza’s part in my life to finally come to an end. Reza, unfortunately, seemed less willing to move on. In our session with a mediator he said things he had never said before. He said he loved me and missed me. He brought with him the Koran that he had given me at our wedding – my dowry – but I refused to take it back.
Scattered Pearls Page 21