Together Tea

by Marjan Kamali

  Dedication

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY PARENTS

  FOR ALL THEIR LOVE

  Contents

  Dedication

  PART I: 1996

  Chapter One: Tea and Questions

  Chapter Two: The Man in the Beige Suit

  Chapter Three: A Puddle of Folders

  Chapter Four: Pillow Talk and Adult Education

  Chapter Five: Spreading Spreadsheet Specs

  Chapter Six: Samosas and Kimbap

  Chapter Seven: Action, Not Reflection

  Chapter Eight: Life on the Hyphen

  Chapter Nine: Coffee Shop Nothings

  Chapter Ten: No, Na, Non, Nein, Nyet

  Chapter Eleven: Darya’s Dreams

  Chapter Twelve: Hovering over Azadi Square

  PART II: 1978

  Chapter Thirteen: Drawings and Demonstrations

  Chapter Fourteen: Pumpkin Stew

  Chapter Fifteen: Mamani and Rumi

  Chapter Sixteen: School and Saddam

  Chapter Seventeen: Breathless from Their Disco Dancing

  Chapter Eighteen: 11:17 a.m.

  Chapter Nineteen: Cut Off Their Tails with a Carving Knife

  Chapter Twenty: Barbie Stays in Tehran

  Chapter Twenty-One: Landing in Lights

  Chapter Twenty-Two: A Box of Crimson Red

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Pizza with Dave

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Yellow Blossoms and TV News

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Fear and Fireworks

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Spidercobwebghostsandgoblins

  PART III: 1996

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: You’ve Come Home to Us

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Red Lamps

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Homecoming Queen

  Chapter Thirty: This Is Not Timbuktu

  Chapter Thirty-One: Breakfast by the Koi Pond

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Scheduling Conflicts

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Under the Sycamore Tree

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Poets, Prayers, and Persepolis

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Half the World

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Dual Existence

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Spreadsheet Good-byes

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Home

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Local Talent at the Coffee Shop

  Chapter Forty: Just This

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  1996

  Chapter One

  Tea and Questions

  Mina was half-asleep when her mother, Darya, called to say that she’d found the perfect gift for her twenty-fifth birthday. “His name is Mr. Dashti,” Darya said, almost breathless on the phone. “Two degrees, a PhD and an MBA. He’s a descendant of the third cousin of Reza Shah. He lives in Atlanta. Has perfect health. The nicest teeth. He’ll be here on Sunday afternoon for tea and questions. Please, Mina. No tricks this time. I’ve done the numbers. And wear the lavender dress with your new belt.”

  Mina put down the phone and slid back under the covers. Another potential husband. Another Sunday afternoon spent nodding at a strange man, with her parents in their best clothes, aiming to please. She didn’t want to get married. She wanted to quit business school and move to the mountains to paint all day. But she had to prepare for her Operations Management exam.

  Mina forced herself up and went to the kitchen. She boiled water and then brewed tea the way Darya had taught her, balancing the teapot on top of the open kettle so that steam from the boiled water underneath would gently simmer the leaves. She covered the teapot with a cloth so no heat could escape. Half Earl Grey, half mystery leaves. Darya’s brew.

  The phone. Again.

  “Yes, Darya.” For the past few years, Mina had been calling her mother by her first name, a small way of controlling the control obsessed.

  “Mina, this is your maman.”

  “The new man over for tea on Sunday, I know. I won’t meet him.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mina—of course you’ll meet him! No, I just wanted to extra remind you that I’m hosting math camp today. And I have a cold, which is why I’ve spent the morning eating raw onions. Your father says it’s nature’s antibiotic. I’m not contagious though. I’ll see you at four fifteen sharp . . .”

  Darya’s voice was replaced by tiny sniffles. Mina imagined her mother dabbing her nose with the lemon-embroidered handkerchief that her mother, Mamani, had made years ago in Tehran. Darya mumbled that she had to go, but that Mina really should come over for tea.

  “Together tea,” Darya said in her Persian way of speaking English. “You come, Mina, and we’ll have together tea.”

  Every Saturday afternoon, Darya’s two friends, Kavita Das and Yung-Ja Kim, joined her for tea and math camp. All three of them lived in Queens and adored mathematics. Lately, Darya especially loved entering values into spreadsheets so she could spit out charts and graphs. When Darya was a young girl in Iran, she’d excelled in arithmetic. She had wanted to become a math professor, but then she got married, had three kids, and moved to America after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Mina’s father, a doctor, had worked at a pizza shop stirring tomato sauce when the family moved to New York in 1982. He couldn’t practice medicine with his foreign license. He studied at night for over a year and surrounded himself with medical journals as he patted dough and sliced green peppers, then took his American medical license exams. He finally succeeded in being a doctor again: practicing internal medicine on Long Island, treating gastritis and ulcers, massaging gallbladders, and examining intestines. He was content with his patients, his medical library, and his daily turkey, tomato, and corn chip sandwiches. But above all, he wanted his wife to be happy. When he saw how miserable Darya was after their first few years in America, he suggested that she start her own math group.

  “You have to do what you love, Darya,” Baba said one night at dinner. “You can no longer just push it away! Don’t you see? You say you love math. You say it’s your passion. But where is it in your life? If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain. You have to focus your energy on mathematics. Seize it!”

  As he said these last few words, he leaped out of his chair and punched his fist triumphantly in the air. Mina and her two older brothers, Hooman and Kayvon, quietly chewed their stuffed eggplant. In the late eighties Baba had discovered the tapes of a life-improvement guru and had become obsessed with self-esteem and self-confidence. He quoted the guru daily.

  “But I haven’t done math in years.” Darya swirled her fork listlessly in eggplant sauce. Since arriving in America, she had worked at a dry-cleaning shop, tailoring clothes.

  “No matter!” Baba punched his fist in the air again, then clapped his hands forcefully. He had learned the motions from the free seminar video that came with the audiotapes he’d ordered through the Home Shopping Network. “The past is not your dictator! If you believe it, you can give birth to it! You have to use your inner volition to make your life resplendent!”

  Darya stared at him through tears and nodded like a child as she put down her fork. That night Baba and Darya worked together on various strategies for bringing more math into her life. Mina, Hooman, and Kayvon watched as their parents sat at the dining room table. Baba scribbled on me
mo pads, Darya brewed pots of tea, and they brainstormed. Baba paced up and down, occasionally bursting into an energizing set of jumping jacks. His favorite kind was the scissor jumping jack.

  Mina and her brothers walked quietly around their parents to go up to bed.

  The next morning at breakfast, Baba tapped his tea glass with a spoon. “Listen up, children! Listen well. From now on, Saturday afternoons will be different around here. Your mother will be pursuing her passion then. She will meet with her friends to do mathematics. On Saturday afternoons, they will immerse themselves in their work. During those hours, the dining room will be a mathematics think tank. You will respect your mother’s space and her group. You will not run around or scream or argue during that time. If you wish, you are more than welcome to participate in the workshop, but only if you come prepared, having completed the problems and proofs due that week. No noise during that time. We must all support your mother as she takes targeted action to live with passion. Fahmeedeen? Understand?”

  Hooman, Mina’s oldest brother, who was a senior in high school at the time, grunted yes, then left for basketball practice. Kayvon, the middle child at fifteen, said, “Cool,” and kissed Darya on the forehead before turning up the volume on his Walkman. Mina heard the muffled beat of a Tears for Fears song through the foam of Kayvon’s headphones.

  “Mina,” Darya said in a squeaky voice. “Will you comply with these new rules so that I can, um, live with . . .” She turned to Baba. “What was it, Parviz, that I’m supposed to live with? Obsession?”

  “Passion.” Baba looked encouraging.

  “Oh yes, Parviz. Passion,” Darya repeated.

  Mina took in her mother’s hazel eyes. Darya actually looked vulnerable.

  “Of course I will.” Mina picked up her backpack and left for school. As she walked down the block, she thought about Baba’s solemn speech and Darya’s request for compliance with the new rules. She thought about math camp, the idea of inviting friends every Saturday to do equations together, and she wondered again, as she often did during her years of adolescence, what her parents would have been like if they hadn’t moved to America.

  Her small black address book in her lap, Darya parked herself by the phone later that evening and called all her friends. Of the dozen or so people she called, the only ones who agreed that spending every Saturday afternoon working on algebra and calculus was a fun idea were Kavita and Yung-Ja, two of Darya’s oldest friends in America and immigrants themselves. From then on, every Saturday afternoon, they met over tea. They started with the basics, since they were all rusty. Mina could understand some of what they were doing at first. But together the women whipped through one textbook after another, and pretty soon it got too complicated for Mina. Not that Darya didn’t try to include her. “Please join us, Mina Joon,” she would say, using the affectionate term “Joon,” which meant “dear” in Farsi. “You don’t know how beautiful math is.” For Christmas (which none of them celebrated, as they were a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Buddhist), Baba bought each of them a financial calculator. Darya cried when she untied the wrapping to find the small machine, the photo of which she had fingered longingly in technology catalogs. After that, the women whizzed through their work. Within two years Darya applied for a job at a local bank branch in Queens. She told Mina she loved punching in the figures and getting the right answer. She loved the whir of the paper as it slid out of the calculator. She loved how numbers added up to what you expected them to add up to.

  MINA FINISHED HER TEA AND got some peanut butter from the fridge. Her tiny apartment was on the Upper West Side, close to the Columbia Business School campus. Darya loved the idea of Mina’s getting a master’s in business administration, even though Mina wanted to be an artist. The pursuit of well-respected, high-paying professions was the duty of the Rezayi children. And since Mina had already ruled out medicine, engineering, and law, her only option was business. The Rezayis had to rebuild their wealth and prestige and, most important of all, stability in this new country. Art wasn’t going to fit into that mold. Art, Darya said, meant standing on the street corner hoping to get noticed. With your nose running and no-good shoes. It was for the flighty, flaky, and feckless. Not for the daughter of immigrants who had given up their country, time spent with grandparents, and the best pomegranates in the world to come to America.

  Mina ate the peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. She put it back in the fridge next to the rows of neatly stacked Tupperware that Darya had dropped off: olivieh chicken salad, potato quiche cut into triangles, oval meat cutlets sitting in rich tomato sauce, stuffed grape leaf dolmeh, barberry rice, and the sweet-and-sour walnut-pomegranate dish called fesenjoon.

  Mina was relieved that there were still so many lunches and dinners left for her in the fridge. Nothing was quite like the food Darya’s skilled hands had patted into being.

  IN THE CAR, MINA TURNED ON the news. “Iran” was mentioned in the same breath as “terrorist” and “rogue.” Just once, Mina wanted to hear the name of her old country mentioned in the same breath as “joy” or “freedom” or “gentle goodness.” She switched to the oldies from the sixties and seventies station, and John Travolta whooped out “You’re the One That I Want.”

  The first time she’d heard that song was with Bita, when they were both nine and living in Tehran. A dozen times they’d danced to it. In the living room, in the kitchen, on Mina’s bed, and by the rosebushes in the yard. They’d played that song everywhere but out in public, where they could’ve been arrested. Mina had wanted to marry John Travolta. His photos were all over her room. Bita kept a photo of his dimpled chin tucked under her headdress. A hundred times they’d listened to that smuggled cassette sound track. A thousand times they’d sworn to be best friends for life. A million years had passed since then. Mina swerved into a different lane, and the driver behind her honked. She had no idea where Bita was now. Best friends forever had turned to be best friends until revolution and war made one of us flee the country. Best friends until one of us became American and the other remained trapped in Iran.

  Mina crossed the bridge from Manhattan into Queens. The last letter she’d received from Bita had come a year or two after Mina had moved to the U.S. The onionskin paper was covered with scratch ’n’ sniff fruit stickers. If she scratched one of those stickers now, would it still smell of sweet summer strawberries? Mina turned off the radio.

  DARYA STOOD OUTSIDE THE FRONT DOOR in her pink housedress, her red hair gathered in a bun, her hands on her hips.

  “Are you feeling better?” Mina called out as she pulled into the driveway.

  “Yes, but don’t kiss me. I’m all oniony,” Darya said.

  Mina walked up to Darya and kissed her anyway.

  “What is wrong with your hair?” Darya asked, as always.

  AT THE DINING ROOM TABLE, Kavita and Yung-Ja sat drinking tea and eating baklava. Kavita was small and plump, with dark hair that used to shine and hands that were rough from years of scrubbing tubs, untangling her daughters’ hair, and raking dirt so she could grow flowers in the stubborn soil of her Jackson Heights garden. Yung-Ja was thin and petite, always dressed beautifully, always made up—Mina had never seen her without heels and nylons. Mina could tell that all three women were on a high from some calculus. Kavita’s frizzy hair was a mess, and Yung-Ja’s kohl-lined eyes were shining. They greeted Mina with hugs and kisses, pinched her cheeks, and laughed.

  “We did some more integrals today,” Kavita said in her high voice. “Just reviewing basics. Applying integration to find total cost from variable cost!”

  “Yes, but we also factor in fixed costs.” Yung-Ja talked quickly in her broken English, like a runner who’d just successfully finished a sprint. “No forget, we also factor in fixed costs.”

  “It was beautiful, Mina,” Darya said. “Beautifully beautiful.

  “Now come, Mina.” Darya took Mina’s hand and pulled her
toward the stairs. “Up to my office. I’ve made charts on Mr. Dashti. They came out so precise!”

  Kavita and Yung-Ja waved their hands above their heads without looking up from their calculators as Mina reluctantly followed Darya. At the top of the stairs stood Baba, feet apart, huge goggles on his head, a drill gun in his right hand.

  “Salaam, Mina Joon!” Baba engulfed Mina in a hug and kissed her on both cheeks. Various objects from his tool belt dug into Mina’s ribs. “I’m off to caulk the bathtub! A homeowner’s work is never done!” He saluted.

  Mina saluted smartly back and watched her father march into the bathroom, his tools bouncing around his waist.

  In Darya’s bedroom “office,” the sight of her two-drawer metal filing cabinet drained Mina’s energy. She knew what woe those alphabetized folders held inside.

  “Let’s see now.” Darya sifted through a file drawer. “Mr. Jahanfard. Mr. Samiyi. Mr. Bidar . . . Mr. Ahmadi . . .” She flipped through folders labeled neatly in Farsi. “Ah, here he is!” Darya swooshed out a bright yellow folder. “Mr. Dashti!”

  A deafening drilling noise from the bathroom blocked out Darya’s voice for a moment.

  “Look!” Darya pulled out a piece of paper from the folder and held it up. It was a neatly typed CV. “Your father’s aunt’s friend in Atlanta faxed me his résumé after speaking to Mr. Dashti’s uncle’s wife. Look at this. He studied chemistry at Yale, got a bachelor’s and a PhD. He then received a master’s in business administration from Stan Fohrd! He likes Persian music and he plays the sitar. He has a very good job with Kodak in Atlanta now, running his own research department. Mr. Dashti decides the balance of the chemicals for each roll of film!” Darya folded her arms across her chest, then added quickly, “His mother was quite pretty.”