Together Tea

by Marjan Kamali

  “I’M GOING TO MARRY HIM,” Mina whispered to Bita as they dipped their brushes into the ink during calligraphy class. She’d drawn the crown prince almost every day for the past week and shown the sketches to Bita. Maybe she shouldn’t have drawn him so much. He was royalty, after all. She didn’t want to malign him.

  Bita scowled. “I’m going to marry him!”

  They glared at each other. A test of wills. Bita bit her lip, determined.

  Without a word, Mina thrust her calligraphy brush into fresh ink and drew a dripping outline of herself next to her outline of the prince. “There!” she said. “See? That’s me!”

  Bita’s standoff evaporated when she saw the ink on the page. The dark-haired girl with a wide jaw and a cocky expression created with a few deft strokes conjured Mina perfectly. Bita gave Mina one last glare, but the stoop of her shoulders conceded defeat.

  They picked up their brushes again and wrote the words for the assigned verse from Saadi’s poem. For a second, Mina held her brush in midair and looked at it as though she were seeing it for the first time. Those thin bristles dipped in ink had made Bita give in. They’d made Mrs. Shoghi tell her she was “With-Art.” She looked at her ink-stained finger pads as though they belonged to someone else.

  “NOT BAD,” HOOMAN SAID THAT NIGHT after looking at Mina’s drawing. “I mean for an almost-eight-year-old!”

  “It’s great, Mina.” Kayvon grinned. “You should see how Hooman draws! Seriously, Mina, maybe one day you could be a great artist. Maybe one day we’ll see your work hung up in galleries.” He put his arm around Mina and squeezed her. “My little sis: world-famous painter!”

  When Baba saw one of the drawings, he pretended to stagger backward in absolute awe. “Bah bah! Wonderful!”

  Mina could only shake her head at Baba’s reaction. He did the same thing whenever Kayvon imitated the greengrocer’s nasal voice or when Hooman showed him pages from his science homework. He showed the same exaggerated appreciation when Darya brought out her platter of tahdeeg to the dinner table or when she dressed up for a party. Baba seemed perpetually delighted by all the unexpected gifts of his own family.

  Darya was less effusive. She gently picked up Mina’s paper between her thumb and forefinger and held the page up to the chandelier as if she were studying film negatives.

  “I see,” she said.

  Then she marched to her bedroom and came back with a plain folder. With one of Mina’s markers she carefully wrote “Mina—Almost-Eight” on the folder tab and placed the evening’s artwork inside.

  After a few weeks, the folder was stuffed and Darya prepared a new one. She stacked all the folders neatly in a drawer in her and Baba’s bedroom.

  Mina liked knowing the folders were there, safe and organized. At least her mother didn’t use her artwork as scratch paper, scribbling “milk, eggplants, cucumbers” on the back and crumpling it into her handbag as she ran in her slippers across the street to the greengrocer’s the way Bita’s mother did.

  “WHO’S THIS IN ALL THE DRAWINGS?” Darya asked after breakfast one day.

  “The crown prince. I’m going to marry him,” Mina said.

  Hooman and Kayvon had already left for school. Baba was at his clinic, and Soghra, the housekeeper, was busy sweeping the sidewalk with her wet broom.

  “When you grow up, you should marry whomever you fall in love with. That’s what’s important. And you can’t plan it. It just happens,” Darya said and sipped her sweetened black tea.

  Mina nodded. Her mother’s hazel eyes reminded her of the light green shade in her new paint set.

  “Now hurry up so you’re not late for school.” Darya got up.

  Soghra came in then, broom in hand. “Khanom, missus, this shooting pain in my back will one day cause my death. My hands are all twisted up. The city dust is not appropriate for my lungs. Vay, my breath is all caught up. O Great Big God—the fate you’ve given me. If my great-grandparents had not lost all their wealth, I wouldn’t be reduced to servantry. Fate, you fiend! The foe that prevents me from being a proper lady!”

  “Pour yourself some tea, Soghra Joon, and rest your legs,” Darya said calmly. They were all used to Soghra’s drama. “Mina, up you get! After school today, we’re off to Book City.”

  Mina hugged Soghra good-bye. Soghra seemed perfectly fine now that she was seated and sucking on a sugar cube.

  Mina grabbed her backpack and followed Darya out the door. Book City! They had the best books, the best stationery, and the best selection of colored pencils, markers, and paints. Mina couldn’t wait to go and look at the big sets of colored pencils from Switzerland, the tubes of tempting oil paints stacked in rows, all the colors dizzying and delicious in that shop.

  THAT DAY TURNED OUT TO BE Mina’s last trip to Book City. A fortnight later, they couldn’t go downtown anymore.

  “Please?” Mina pleaded with Darya on a rainy Friday. She held her Snoopy handbag in one hand and the keys to the car in another.

  “No.”

  “But why?”

  “Because there are demonstrations going on, Mina. It’s not safe.”

  Just then Hooman and Kayvon marched through the living room, their fists in the air. “Death to the Shah!” they yelled. “No more king!”

  Mina’s stomach started to feel strange.

  “Boys, did you finish your homework? Stop this nonsense and focus,” Baba said.

  “We will not talk about kings or politics in this home,” Darya said.

  Her brothers stopped reluctantly. Baba collapsed into a chair, looking exhausted. Darya looked out the window, her eyes glassy and distant.

  FOR MONTHS THE DEMONSTRATIONS IN the streets continued. Baba would come home bewildered and mention that a cinema or a bank had been set on fire. Darya would receive the news in silence. Hooman and Kayvon sometimes cheered. They were slowly becoming prisoners in their own home, unable to venture too far outside.

  It was Darya who said the word first. She said it at dinner, right after she passed a bowl of sautéed eggplants and smashed tomatoes to Mina. “There is a revolution going on. Enghelab.” Mina hadn’t heard that word before. Enghelab. It sounded so powerful. Hooman had to explain to her what it meant: a rotation that could turn the world upside down. This “revolution” was going on outside the walls of their house and yet, to Mina’s disappointment, her parents were doing nothing to stop it. In fact, sometimes she even thought they liked it. Baba listened to the BBC on his radio constantly. Darya called her sister and asked where the demonstrations were taking place and how many people had shown up. Darya seemed torn, as if she didn’t know whether the demonstrations would result in something wonderful or something horrendous.

  Later that night, Mina scolded Hooman and Kayvon for yelling bad things about the Shah. She hated that they liked to imitate the demonstrators. Hooman and Kayvon ignored her and continued to repeat slogans as if they were in a pretend parade in the living room. Mina started to hit them and soon the three of them were on the floor wrestling. Baba and Darya stood there motionless watching the three kids fighting on the floor.

  “Enough!” Baba yelled.

  “They’re saying bad things about the Shah,” Mina said in a small voice.

  “Look at that!” Hooman got up slowly. “Look how they’ve brainwashed her!”

  Kayvon wiped his nose. A trail of blood trickled from his nostril, over his lips, and down his chin.

  “Into the bathroom, now!” Baba said. “Both of you, now!”

  From the living room, Mina heard the bathroom faucet turn on and could make out some of Baba’s furious lecture. She heard him say “brothers,” “fighting,” “absurd,” and “gentlemen.” She heard Hooman mumbling. She could imagine Baba washing the blood from Kayvon’s nose with Darya’s yellow washcloth.

  Darya turned to Mina. “There’s absolutely no need . . .” She trail
ed off. “For you to worry. About this . . . stuff.”

  “Bita says the youth are going to kick the Shah out. Kick him out of the country and bring in a new leader for the people.” Mina wasn’t sure what a new leader meant, but she assumed it meant an evil king.

  “Never mind, Mina,” Darya said. “This king is far from perfect. He’s done some horrible things.”

  Mina froze. Her own mother was like one of those demonstrators in the street. If the authorities heard her, they would accuse her of being a criminal woman. Mina’s hands felt clammy as she remembered all the things that happened to people who spoke against the king. Torture. Execution. They had been taught in school about all he had done for the country—brought them wealth, created reform, made them modern and Western. The textbooks were filled with his accomplishments. One did not speak against him. But Darya had.

  Baba returned with a glum-looking Hooman and Kayvon behind him.

  “She said very, very bad things about the Shah,” Mina whispered. She needed Baba to set her mother straight.

  “She’s right.” Baba shrugged.

  And Mina was left feeling suddenly alone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Pumpkin Stew

  It wasn’t easy leaving. They waited longer than most. Some families left when the Shah’s tanks entered central Tehran. But Mina’s parents said the upheaval might turn out to be a good thing. It could bring democracy. Freedom. Mina detected in her parents an actual desire for the monarchy to end, which she found blasphemous. Mina loved to watch the parades on TV celebrating the Shah and his wife, Farah. The king and queen looked absolutely fabulous—dressed in burgundy velvet cloaks draped over intricately embroidered silver coats, golden crowns encrusted with diamonds and rubies balanced on their heads. Their jewels sparkled. At the sound of trumpets, hundreds of men saluted. The music was majestic. Mina would leap up off the Persian rug to salute the Shah along with the masses. She couldn’t help it.

  Hooman bought posters of the new revolutionary leaders. He listened to their speeches and tried to grow a beard. He put away his fancy polo shirts and wore simple peasant-style cotton shirts and baggy pants. Girls whom Mina used to see walking home from the university in their platform shoes and miniskirts, their long hair swaying seductively down their backs, began to don headscarves and stopped wearing makeup. Everywhere she looked, Islam was in, and anything that reminded people of the Shah or his Western ways was considered old, outdated, and plain uncool.

  One day the Shah left and the world changed. The revolution’s new religious leaders took over. People spray-painted the words “FREEDOM,” “REVOLUTION,” “ISLAMIC REPUBLIC” on street walls. People whom Mina had never seen observing the Muslim faith before started to become religious. Aunt Nikki’s daughter, Maryam, emptied out her drawer of makeup and lipstick and filled it instead with prayer beads and prayer stones. Maryam threw out her skimpy dresses and tight tops and went to the bazaar and bought simple headscarves and Islamic uniforms.

  It was hard to keep up with who was on which side. Revolutionary or anti-revolutionary? When Mina and her family went to people’s homes, sometimes wine was served and other times sermons were given on the evils of alcohol. Sometimes one spouse served wine while the other angrily denounced it as it was being poured. Families were divided.

  Every afternoon Baba used a stepladder to remove the pictures of the new leader that Hooman had put up in the house. With increasing fervor, Hooman climbed on top of bookshelves and furniture to tack the pictures back up.

  “We have gotten rid of the dictator,” Hooman said in his changing voice. “We have freed the country of his contamination.”

  IN THE KITCHEN, AUNT NIKKI WHISPERED to Darya while Mina eavesdropped.

  “My kids are slipping away from me,” Aunt Nikki said. “My kids tell me I’m wrong, old-fashioned, too Westernized. Sometimes it feels like my children aren’t even mine anymore. It’s become like they’re theirs. Children of their propaganda.”

  Darya leaned against the kitchen counter, thinking. Then her face lit up. “Invite them over. They can’t resist my pumpkin stew. I’ll talk to Maryam. Parviz will talk to Reza. We’ll talk some sense into their fanatic teenage skulls.”

  Aunt Nikki frowned at first, but then she thanked her younger sister. A time for the dinner was set. For the first time in weeks, Mina saw Aunt Nikki relax again. Darya said no need to thank her, they’d do their best.

  Mina pretended Aunt Nikki was right to be so hopeful. Never mind that Darya hadn’t been able to talk sense into Hooman’s skull.

  MINA AND KAYVON RAN TO OPEN the door to find Uncle Hamed standing there, hat in hand, his face weary. Aunt Nikki was still by the car, talking to the closed windows in a coaxing voice. After several minutes, Cousin Reza came out of the car. He looked taller than when Mina had seen him last. Though he was only sixteen, a little stubble had grown on his chin.

  “Come, let me see you!” Darya rushed to give her nephew a kiss. But he shrank away from her.

  A woman in a black chador followed Reza into the house.

  “Say hello, Maryam,” Aunt Nikki said.

  Mina and Kayvon nudged each other. This was their glamorous eighteen-year-old cousin who only a few months ago had been giggling and flirting with the greengrocer’s son? This was the Maryam who had worn high heels and tight blue jeans, her eyelids green from sparkly eye shadow? Mina stared at the new cousin in front of her.

  “Tea?” Darya almost shouted, as though Maryam were hard of hearing because of her cover-up.

  Mina and Kayvon scrambled to go help in the kitchen. When Mina came back balancing a tray of hourglass-shaped estekan filled with dark chai, she saw that Darya had plopped herself next to Maryam and was talking and laughing and gesturing wildly. Maryam was nodding politely, the way one nods at an older person who is losing her mind.

  Baba methodically asked Reza about his studies. “I remember,” Baba said, “when you were four years old and you’d beg me to put you up on my shoulders. Remember that? Remember we’d play hide-and-seek outside?”

  Reza scowled.

  At dinner, Maryam ate with one hand, grasping her chador tightly with the other.

  “Maryam Joon, I told you already, while I respect that you are now a devout follower, we’re all family here, you really don’t need to cover your hair from family. You know that, don’t you?” Darya’s façade of good cheer was disappearing.

  Aunt Nikki looked as if she might cry. Maryam loosened her chador a tiny bit. Reza growled about the deaths caused in prisons by the Shah. Hooman listened raptly to Reza’s words. Darya’s vein throbbed in her forehead. Baba kept asking Uncle Hamed if he wanted more wine, but in a half-whisper, when Reza wasn’t looking.

  When it was time to kiss the guests good-bye, Maryam hugged them all, but Reza didn’t want to be touched. “But we’re family,” Darya insisted. Reza angrily said good-bye and then marched off to the car.

  From behind the living room curtains, Mina saw Maryam walk to the car door and lift the bottom of her chador ever so slightly before climbing in, like Cinderella with her ball gown. Uncle Hamed and Aunt Nikki waved from the front seat with apologetic smiles. They drove off with Maryam and Reza expressionless in the backseat.

  Mina and her family stood in the doorway, waving as the car drove away.

  “That was . . .” Baba sighed. “A pumpkin stew I won’t forget.”

  Hooman continued to look at the street, spellbound. “Reza said that if we are relentless in our demands, we can get revenge on . . .”

  Suddenly Darya took Hooman’s face in both her hands. “Listen. Khoob goosh kon. Listen well. I am your mother. You got that? You listen to me. The picture comes down. Basseh! Enough! Go brush your teeth. Go put on your pajamas. Go on, then!”

  Hooman was quiet. Mina thought he almost looked scared.

  “Go!”

  Hooman walked
toward his bedroom.

  “Put your pajamas on and brush your teeth!” Darya yelled out after him.

  Hooman pulled off his sweater as he walked.

  “That’s right! Go get ready for bed! I am your mother!! I’m sick of this chart-o-part nonsense!”

  Mina heard the faucet turn on in the bathroom.

  Darya turned to Mina and Kayvon. “You two as well. Go on! Get ready for bed. Nobody tells you what to do except your father and me. You got that?”

  “Darya Joon, it’s time for all of us to rest.” Baba pulled Darya away.

  Darya shook his hand off her. She continued to yell at Mina and Kayvon, “I am your mother. You don’t follow anybody else’s stupidity, EVER!”

  “Come on, Darya Joon, come on.” Baba led Darya away.

  “They’re not going to take them over, Parviz,” Darya said. “They’re just children.”

  That night Mina lay in bed thinking of Maryam and Reza. The cousins she once had were no longer there. Maryam and Reza behaved entirely differently now. While it was uncomfortable to think of how they had changed, what scared her more was seeing her mother yell like that. Ranting and raving, forehead vein throbbing; slowly morphing, it seemed these days, into a mother entirely new and strange.

  MUCH TO EVERYONE’S RELIEF, HOOMAN’S revolutionary zeal was, in fact, a passing phase. But by then, the zeal of the other teenagers and men and women who had marched the streets to end the Shah’s dictatorship had brought about a change of regime. And the smallest corners of Darya’s and Mina’s lives began to feel the weight of that change.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mamani and Rumi

  When Mina woke up, it was cold, and the snow outside looked like ice cream, the kind Darya drizzled with rose water. Darya was quiet in the car on the way to school. She drove Mina and her brothers now. It was no longer safe to walk. Even the fighting had stopped. There was silence in the streets, no more shouting. No more bloodshed. The Shah was trying to get to a place called America. Mina thought of him there. Would they treat him like a king? Would he go to Disneyland? Kayvon had once shown her pictures of that magical land. People were sitting in teacups. Enormous teacups that were pastel blue and pale pink and light green. In the pictures the Americans were laughing. “It’s the Land of the Teacups,” Mina had said in wonder. And Darya had smiled and in their family after that they always called America “the Land of the Teacups.”