by Sara Jafari
Being an older sibling, Neda was aware that all her life she had been made to look after others. She was seeing the effect of this in her relationship with her husband. Objectively, she knew they were equals, that he shouldn’t need her, much as she didn’t need him. And yet she found herself mothering him, putting his needs above hers. It was in realizing this that she finally accepted the life before her. It was hard, but she knew what she had to do, knew what her role was to be, and how somewhere inside herself she even enjoyed it. Enjoyed carrying the load because without it what would she do? There would be emptiness, and what was more frightening than the unknown?
Their new life soon had a rhythm. Yes, Hossein was an absentee husband and father, but sometimes, sometimes, he showed he still cared. He watched television with the children and seemed absorbed in their interests; he even took them to school every morning on the way to the pharmacy to collect his medication. He occasionally bought Neda bouquets of flowers, saying, “But you’re the most beautiful flower,” which made her smile.
It was when his mother died suddenly in 1990 from a brain tumor that he entered the pit of depression. He did not cry when he found out. He simply went straight to bed and stayed there for twenty-four hours.
The entire family went to Iran for the first time in thirteen years.
Humid air greeted Neda as she stepped off the plane; it felt like home.
At the airport they were met by their family, holding red roses and signs that read “The Nazari Family.” Her own maman and baba were there, at one in the morning. Her usually stony-eyed father had tears in his eyes instead as he hugged her and whispered in her ear, “Don’t be gone for so long next time, eh?”
Both Amir and Parvin sat on her lap on the car journey home and seemed to marvel at the fact that in Iran it was acceptable to have more than five people in a car.
“Isn’t this…illegal?” Laleh said. She was sitting on her father’s lap.
“She looks so worried!” Baba said to Neda. “Tell her it’s OK, everyone does this here.” He chuckled.
Neda translated for her baba.
“She does know a bit of Farsi, she’s just shy,” she added quickly to her family.
Hossein said nothing, his gaze focused on the outside. He had been like this since he found out about his mother: silent. Neda herself hadn’t yet experienced such a grief, so could only imagine what he was feeling. She wondered whether if he wasn’t on drugs his reaction would be different, whether it would be something she could understand better.
Neither family was told about his addiction.
The country they once knew had become alien to Hossein and Neda. The shops and restaurants they remembered vividly had closed down, and the streets were full of women in black chadors. Gone were the days of the miniskirt. Neda remembered when wearing a small hijab was considered unusual, black chadors expensive and rare.
Tehran was run-down; its former brightness seemed to have dulled. The coffeehouse where Hossein had proposed to Neda was now boarded up, and Baba said it would be renovated into a takeaway soon.
The funeral was a blur of wailing, with Hossein’s sisters pounding their hands on their mother’s grave. Amir and Parvin hid behind Laleh’s leg. Hossein remained dry-eyed.
During the will reading, he was given the entirety of his mother’s savings and the family house as he was the only man. He distributed the money evenly among his sisters, keeping enough for his own family to buy a five-bedroom house in Brighton. Somewhere along the way he must have resigned himself to the fact that they would stay in England forever. Perhaps seeing the changed Iran made him realize his memories of a life he would return to were just that: memories. Life would never be the same for him, not now his mother had died, not since he had become an addict.
Christmas was always a confusing time for the Nazari family. Soraya had spent her childhood trying to get them into the Western spirit, to conform and for the sake of the presents. But each year was different. One year they would have a Christmas tree, another year they would get presents or else make a big feast, but it was never quite in sync, all the traditions observed together in harmony.
It was only when she was eighteen that Soraya gave up. This was also in part because at university she finally met people who didn’t celebrate Christmas at all, and for once wasn’t regarded with wonder because her Muslim Iranian family didn’t fully celebrate the holiday.
So Christmas for the Nazaris was like any other day, except they did have one special meal that they ate together, including her dad. And they watched the EastEnders and Coronation Street Christmas specials.
When Soraya returned home there were subtle signs acknowledging something serious had happened: her mum was attentive, bordering on clingy. Parvin was formal; she said hello and goodbye to Soraya when Amir was nearby, but if they were alone together was stony in her silence. Soraya wasn’t sure why her sister was annoyed with her—Parvin was the one who’d always told her to date. Then, when her dad hit Soraya, her sister just stood there, as though it was all Soraya’s fault for getting caught. She should be the one to be ignoring Parvin, but she didn’t have the energy to retaliate. Her sister’s lack of empathy had become the topic of many rants delivered to Oliver. So she avoided Parvin around the house.
Her dad, however, didn’t engage with Soraya on any level, pretending she was invisible. This she preferred. Amir was the only one who acted normally with her, because no one had told him what his father had done.
She messaged Oliver and Priya to organize a meetup to plan their literary journal idea once and for all. She needed something to look forward to. If Magnus was thriving, she needed to do something as well.
It was on Christmas Eve that she realized why her mum seemed to have moved on so quickly from the event that had shaken Soraya. She had a new reason to hate her husband.
It all began to unravel in the early evening, when Soraya heard a light tap on her door. She was binge-watching Sex and the City on her laptop, relating to Carrie during one of her frequent breakups with Mr. Big. Oliver had lent her the sixth-season box set as a holiday parting gift.
Her body tensed at the noise, and she felt like a caged animal once more. One that kept willingly returning to the same cage despite knowing the dangers. She clutched her blanket tight around her, as though it could protect her from whatever awaited her. It wasn’t that she thought her dad would come in for round two, but behind that door could be any member of her family, each with the ability to derail her already delicate mental state. She was fragile, that much was obvious, or so she thought, and one further push could break her.
The door inched open and her mum appeared. She was wearing floral trousers and a baggy T-shirt. Her expression was of excitement tinged with sadness.
“Are you up?” she said, stepping into the room, closing the door softly behind her.
“No, I’m asleep.” Soraya rolled her eyes and sat up straighter.
“You’re a funny girl, ey?” her mum said before sitting down on the side of the bed. In her hand she held One Day, a book Soraya had lent her, which she put down on the bedside table. “The ending was so sad, I’m not sure I’d want to read it again.”
Soraya made a small sound in response, despite the fact that One Day was one of her favorite books. She didn’t want to discuss it now, or defend it against her mum, who wanted a happy ending in every book she read.
She noticed her mum peering at her, a forlorn look on her face. “What’s up?”
“Why are you so moody?” her mum asked, placing a hand against Soraya’s cheek.
Soraya moved away.
“Have you forgotten what happened when I was last here?”
“Of course I haven’t. What can we do? Your dad is…you know how I feel about him. We’re stuck with him.” Her mum shrugged as though she had just said something mundane, and not heartbreaking. “You’r
e a good girl, OK? Don’t let him get you down.”
Something about the sadness in her mum’s eyes made Soraya soften beneath her touch.
Her mum smiled briefly before saying, “What do you know about this Match website?”
She’d expected her mum to say many things, but inquiring about a dating site was not one of them. “Why?” Soraya tried to keep her voice neutral, but a smile threatened her composure. Despite her mum’s old-fashioned ways, she would ask about the most random things.
“I think he’s on there!” she said.
“Oh,” Soraya said. “I thought he was seeing that girl?” She didn’t add that Amir was most likely seeing many different girls anyway.
“Not your brother,” her mum said quickly. “Your dad!”
She explained that she had been suspicious of her husband’s increase in Internet activity, the blue glow of his laptop screen always shining on his face in the middle of the night. So when he had gone into town she’d checked—a task that disgusted her. His laptop was always sticky, and there were crumbs between the letters on his keyboard. Usually her mum resolutely refused to touch it. On the odd occasion she had to move it from the sofa, she wore gloves.
“And open on his laptop was Match.com,” she said, leaning closer to Soraya for dramatic effect. “Your dad is talking to women on Match.com!”
Soraya took a moment to process these words. She wasn’t quite sure what she could say in response. “Right,” she said, pausing again. Then, “Are you sure?”
Her mum tsked impatiently. “If I bring you his laptop, will you find his messages?” In some ways, her mother was the most intelligent person Soraya knew, having mastered subjects Soraya couldn’t even begin to understand, but like many people of her generation, her mum was not particularly tech-savvy; she was completely naïve about how expansive the Internet was.
“I guess so.”
Soraya had never seen her mum move so quickly. She returned minutes later with the laptop. She held it away from her body, careful not to let it touch her clothes. Under her armpit was a pack of Dettol wipes. She put it on the floor and gave the interior and exterior a wipe before placing the laptop on Soraya’s bed.
Her dad didn’t have a password on his computer. Perhaps he thought his lack of hygiene was a big enough deterrent to his wife and children, and until now it had worked. Soraya opened the website and it automatically logged in to his account. She clicked the mailbox button at the top, and her heart dropped at what she saw.
There were at least thirty messages from her dad to other women.
“Maybe it’s not actually him,” she muttered to herself. She clicked on his profile. What she saw made her do a triple take. “Oh, God,” she said, smirking and grimacing at the same time. “He’s using Amir’s pictures! And has his name down as Hamid Nazari.”
“That bastard,” her mum said, standing up, hand on hip. They both knew it wasn’t Amir on the site, the bio section screamed her dad. The bad grammar, the pictures chosen (family photos in which he cut out everyone but Amir), and the fact that it was his computer made that clear. But it left one question.
“Why, though?” Soraya said. “What’s he hoping to achieve? It’s not like he could actually meet them.”
“He’s a dirty, dirty man,” her mum said, sitting back down on the bed. Her fingers laced together, she looked at the wall. “This isn’t the first time he’s done something like this, you know. I’ve always told you, men are bastards.”
Soraya had been told about her dad’s past exploits many times before. The same stories were repeated, changed slightly, exaggerated in different places each time.
She wished her mum told her friends about her problems, was less fearful of their judgment, instead of always off-loading onto her children.
It was this fear of telling other people about your problems, your flaws, that her mum had passed down to Soraya. Magnus had tried to shake Soraya out of that way of thinking, but the damage had already been done.
She couldn’t imagine a world in which her parents liked each other consistently—or rather, a world in which her mum liked her dad. And yet, despite all this, the hurt on her mum’s face was palpable.
“What are you going to do?” Soraya asked.
Her mum collected the laptop and left the room without saying a word. Soraya scrambled out of bed, put on her dressing gown, and tentatively followed her down the stairs.
But instead of going towards her dad’s, or rather Laleh’s, room, her mum walked down another flight of stairs, towards Amir’s room. She tapped on the door twice sharply before entering. Amir was playing his Xbox. He was smiling until he saw the looks on their faces.
“What’s going on?” He sat up straighter in bed. In one swift move, his mum turned off the TV, silencing the sound of gunfire. Amir made a noise of disapproval, but she shut the door and brandished the laptop in his face.
“Your father is pretending to be you on a dating site! Astaghfirullah.” She muttered the last word.
She paused, and Soraya knew what she was thinking. That it was preposterous she had been reduced to this; Dr. Neda Nazari, a biomedicine lecturer who had written numerous notable research papers, a woman highly respected in her field, was sneaking around spying on her husband’s laptop. Did she ever dream it would come to this? That this would be the life she led in England, surrounded by transgression, including that of her cheating husband?
In that moment, Soraya felt deeply sorry for her mother.
At first Amir was in denial. “You’re being paranoid, Mum,” he said, but then when he clicked through the website, like Soraya he realized the extent of his dad’s disrespect. He, too, saw the messages. Messages they knew they couldn’t show their mum.
And it made Amir even angrier to see the filth his dad was spouting to these unsuspecting women under his son’s picture. Amir could actually have bumped into one of them in person, unaware that online his image was being used to ask them if they “wanted a bit of fun”…and both Soraya and he wanted to projectile-vomit when they read the explicit “fun” their dad was detailing. No one wanted to know about their parents having sex—or, even worse, their failed sexts to other people. And because their mum was so pure, one thing was clear to all: she deserved better.
These thoughts must have been swimming around Amir’s mind as well until he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Fuck this!” He scrambled out of bed, laptop in hand. Despite being in just his boxer shorts, a sight Soraya didn’t want to see, he left his room without a care and stomped up the stairs. Her mum trailed behind him while Soraya lingered in the hallway. Resounding in her head was the question she often asked herself: Why is my family such a circus show? She had planned to talk to her mum about Laleh, but this news overshadowed everything.
Amir ripped open the door to their dad’s room. He turned on the light, waking up their always-sleeping father, with their mum hot on his trail. Soraya now followed close behind, reasoning that the shouting would be worse if she couldn’t see the action.
Their dad had been asleep on the single bed and was now squinting at the crowd of people around him. The depths of sleep didn’t soften his facial expression.
The bedroom still held hints of Laleh. There was the floral bedspread and teddies in the corner, even a stack of girls’ magazines, featuring the Friends cast, and Justin and Britney. Why hadn’t her parents thrown them out? Why had they kept these reminders of the child they’d disowned?
Laleh’s basic cream wardrobe still had her clothes hanging inside. Every so often when Soraya was a teenager she would secretly go and try on these clothes that screamed of the nineties and imagine what her sister had been thinking when she left without them.
“What are you doing, idiot? I’m sleeping,” her dad hissed, mostly to Amir.
His son’s hairy chest rose and fell rapidly. “Why are
you using my picture on a dating website?” He thrust the laptop in his dad’s face, holding it by the screen, the movement awkward, mirroring his mum’s earlier.
Soraya hid behind them both. She could feel her insides knotting. Amir was not exempt from a beating from their dad; if anything he would go harder on him, though it was rare. When Amir got expelled from school for a week for punching a bully who called him a “Paki,” their dad had thrown the coffee table at him and kicked him out.
Their mum had smuggled him back into the house in the middle of the night.
“You’re talking stupid, that wasn’t me,” their dad replied, turning away from the family to continue sleeping. His reaction wasn’t surprising; it was confirmation that he knew he had done wrong. But, of course, he wouldn’t admit that. He was burying his head in the sand, or rather in his duvet.
Amir put a hand on their dad’s shoulder.
“Eh!” he said, slapping it away.
“Why are you trying to deny it?” he said.
“Don’t talk back at me.”
Amir sighed. “I’m not, Dad. I don’t want to. It’s just you’ve really upset Mum, and you’ve used my picture. Accept you’ve done something wrong—”
He was cut off when their dad pushed him. Despite the disadvantage of being in bed at the time, he gave his son a shove so hard it caused Amir to stumble against the wardrobe behind him.
The room was fairly small, all four of them in the space was a squeeze. Due to Amir’s size, the impact of his back hitting the wardrobe made it shudder, a tremendous sound echoing round the house—or maybe Soraya imagined that. The impact her dad made on his victims always felt disproportionate to what actually happened.
“You shut up! Fuck off out of this house if you think you can talk to me like that.”
Their mum stepped in then. She brought herself closer to her husband, a look of disgust on her face. Her index finger was raised, shakily, in front of her. It was a very Iranian movement, Soraya thought. She had only ever seen such passionate gestures from her parents or relatives. Her mother’s bent finger, the power in it, the tension palpable. She wasn’t just pointing at her husband, she was finally emancipating herself from him.