by Donia Bijan
The girl from Iran was a quick study. She may not have known it then, but she was predisposed to the British brand of feminism, self-reliant and matter-of-fact, which had taken root in her. In Iran, despite her father’s mild protest, she had walked every morning to tennis courts and swimming pools miles from her home. Not wanting the whole town gossiping about his daughter alone in the streets, he required that she be accompanied by one of her brothers. To this day, my uncle complains about how she used to shake him out of sleep at five thirty and stick a toothbrush in his mouth: Wake up! Wake up! Brush your teeth! Wash your face! I’m going to be late! She dragged him half-asleep and whimpering through dark streets for the hour-and-a-half walk across town, cutting off his slightest whine with, Nonsense! A bit of fresh air and a brisk walk never killed anyone!
Once she could speak the language, she didn’t hesitate to find ways to do what she wanted to do in England, like learning to drive and acquiring her driver’s license, and cycling all over Europe on her school holidays, oblivious to the fleets of men who followed her. She boasted of one suitor who inquired about her favorite flower, then went to Holland to bring her a small, exquisite bouquet of lily of the valley. She dismissed him simply as daft. On a very tight budget, she managed to satisfy her passion for classical music by skipping meals to attend concerts, swaying in the standing room. I doubt she would have sat down even if she’d had orchestra seats. Years later, at the symphony in Tehran, I watched her perched on the very edge of her seat while my father’s chin sunk further into his chest. How can you possibly sleep through Beethoven? she chided him.
As a child I used to stare at the black-and-white photos from her years in England: A slim girl in a fitted white nurse’s smock, a dark wool cape clasped with a metal brooch at the base of her long neck, and dark curls tucked beneath a white cap. Resting her hands on the bicycle handlebars, she is beaming. In other photos with classmates, turning to the camera, she is the only one smiling, compensating for the joylessness of the others. She would never squander this abundance of liberty.
She returned home seven years later, a stunning woman who spoke the Queen’s English, listened to classical music turned up very loud on her little hi-fi, smoked Winston cigarettes, kept a bust of Beethoven on her dresser, and carried a British driver’s license in her purse. Soon after her return, she was working in a university hospital when she ran into my father in the elevator. He stood behind her, inches away from the slender curve of her shoulders, her dark hair gathered in a braided bun under her crisp nursing cap. My father was smitten. My mother soon charmed him with her no-nonsense disposition, her rapid one-two step down the hospital corridors, and her cool indifference to men. Within days he was knocking on my grandfather’s door, asking for her hand.
The usual custom in Iran requires a suitor to send his parents to make a formal request for marriage, khastegari. My father, however, was never one to abide by custom. He considered himself independent of convention. Besides, if he had confided in his family and friends that he planned to ask for my mother’s hand, they would have mocked his rash judgment and discouraged him from pursuing a girl from a family so far out of his league. But my grandfather, wary of another suitor he did not approve of, hovering in the wings, received my father kindly. He was invited to dinner and encouraged to bring his family elders.
Not wanting his family to speak on his behalf, since his father had passed away and his mother lived in northern Iran, he arrived without elders, dapper in a gray tailor-made suit and polished black patent leather shoes, a white satin handkerchief in his breast pocket. His trim mustache and sparkling blue eyes under the awning of thick eyebrows gave the impression of amusement. He charmed my grandmother, who was warm and lovely and an excellent cook. She, in turn, prepared a feast, as she often did for guests, and made one of his favorite dishes, mirza ghasemi, a rich eggplant appetizer she served with yogurt and fresh herbs. My grandparents welcomed his confidence, and my mother’s youngest brother quickly fell under his spell, leaving only my mother’s heart to conquer.
My mother found him terribly handsome with his bright blue eyes, uncommon for an Iranian, and she admired his mad independence from custom. She had grown impatient with her childhood sweetheart, who was afraid of her father and had postponed a proposal indefinitely. My father’s persistence, and the courageous plans he had drawn up for their future to work as a team, disarmed her. I imagine he conjured images of precocious sons with blue eyes, a hospital where they would live and work side by side, and a garden with mulberry trees for his children to climb. Not long after the dinner with my grandparents, he called one afternoon to get her final answer to his proposal. My mother hesitated a moment too long and he took her silence as a yes. Within minutes, the doorbell rang and a young boy he had dispatched carried in a magnificent bouquet of white lilies and roses so large that his knees buckled under its weight. Years later, whenever my mother and father argued, she would always remind him that she had never actually said yes. My grandparents made elaborate wedding plans, booking the Officers’ Club, ordering a seven-tiered wedding cake, buying new suits for my uncles. While the guest list soared to over a thousand, my mother found herself caught in a whirlwind with very little say. So when she went for the final fitting of her wedding dress, she insisted on just one thing, to wear her nursing cap under her veil.
By the time the hospital was built in 1960, my parents were teamed up, working feverishly delivering babies, and had two daughters of their own. The Bijan Hospital was a four-story building at the end of a nameless dirt road. When the street was finally paved, the city named it after my father. Years later, a Sheraton was built down the street, and slowly this road that butted up against a barren landscape became a coveted address.
It was on the penthouse floor of the Bijan Hospital that my sisters and I grew up. I was born three stories below, in the same operating room where many of my cousins and friends were delivered—a room my father urged us to visit. He had great hopes that we would be inspired to follow his path, but I was terrified by the wailing of women in labor.
In the penthouse, our bedrooms were side by side along a white corridor with bleached terrazzo floors and fluorescent lights. At the far end of the corridor was our living and dining room. We didn’t find it odd that muffled moans and the smell of formaldehyde would drift through the vents, but my friends who came to play would gawk at the patients walking the grounds of our home in their hospital gowns. At the urging of my mother, the patients even joined us for cake at our birthday parties. One friend was eventually forbidden to come to our house because his mother worried he might catch something.
The nurses doubled as our babysitters. Nurse Aghdas was our favorite, a quasi Mary Poppins with a chipped front tooth. She organized relay races in the corridors, dressed us up as doctors and nurses, taught us first aid, and dispensed bandages and cough lozenges with abandon. And when, at thirteen, I decided to pluck my eyebrows without my mother’s consent, she supplied me with the pair of tweezers that I still use today, although she bore my mother’s wrath for the gift.
All the bedrooms opened to a long, narrow balcony that faced the hospital gardens. The first day of summer, we moved our beds to the balcony and slept there until the first day of fall. We hauled out the dining room table as well, allowing us to eat summer meals outside. I loved sleeping outdoors, where the sheets on my sunburned shoulders were cool from the night air, where we woke to the sound of Baba the gardener’s hacking cough and the spray of his garden hose. I loved the hospital grounds, where I learned to swim in a shallow green pool by tiptoeing farther and farther along its kidney-shaped rim. In the winter when the pool froze, I begged my mother to allow me to go ice-skating, to no avail. Nevertheless, I sat on the edge to let my feet shuffle and glide, gathering the shaved ice with mittened hands for pretend ice cream cones. In spring I scooped up tadpoles in jam jars from its green, murky mush. In early summer, when the pool was drained to be cleaned, Baba hopped in, wearing tall rubber boo
ts. I watched and counted the strokes of his deck brush, listening to the back-and-forth scrape, scrape. It would take him all day to scrub the walls, and by early evening he would climb out, throw a hose over the side, and turn it on full blast. The slow rise and sound of the water continued through my bedtime. I would wake up and lean over the balcony to be the first to see it in the morning light, longing to go for a swim, annoyed by the one or two leaves that already marred its sparkling surface. When my father took the training wheels off my bike, it was around that pool that I rode, with him running alongside.
My father managed to balance his work and family life. The hospital grounds provided us with endless hours of exploration and entertainment. Coming home one day from visiting a patient, he had seen a peddler beating his donkey with a stick. He stopped to reason with the man, but offering to buy the donkey seemed to be the only way to stop the man from abusing it. So he gave him directions to the hospital and drove away, pleased with himself for rescuing the animal and providing his children with a pet that they could ride and feed and whose mane they could braid with their mother’s knitting yarn. That afternoon, Baba opened the gate to find the peddler and his battered donkey asking for my father. Baba explained that Doktor was not a veterinarian, but agreed to call him. By then my father had laid the groundwork for introducing my mother to our new pet: I couldn’t very well stand by and watch an innocent beast beaten, could I? After paying the peddler, Baba pulled the donkey by the rope around its neck to the garden, where my father lined us up for our surprise. No sooner had Baba shut the gate than the donkey jerked back on the makeshift bridle and snapped at his arm, then turned and bucked, knocking Baba, a lean, six-foot-three man, to the ground. Those two never got along after that. In fact, none of us could go near the ornery animal. My father had rescued him too late. Can I have a horse instead? I asked my mother that night. Thus he became my father’s pet and was simply named Khar, which means “donkey” in Farsi. For weeks, my father stopped at the greengrocer for wilted heads of lettuce for Khar, prompting satire on social inequality in the local paper by a columnist who had overheard their exchange. The article began, Ah, to be the pampered ass of Dr. Bijan, with a daily menu of butter lettuce hearts and sugar beet tops, hand-selected by the good doctor himself, and so on. My mother had had enough. She donated Khar to a park, where the groundskeeper managed to put a saddle on him and offer rides to children for a nickel. A few weeks later, we got a tamer pet: a big black poodle named Sasha. And in winter, my mother knitted him a red turtleneck.
I spent most summer afternoons perched on the branches of the tall sour cherry trees that grew along the garden fence, with my feet dangling, my lips stained red, and a mess of cherry pits below. I hopped down when my mother threatened me with a hospital stay downstairs. If I managed to save any cherries for her, she would make sour cherry preserves, syrup to flavor our summer drinks, or, best of all, albalu polo, saffron rice with sour cherries, pistachios, and braised game hens. My father kept a vegetable patch tucked in a corner of the garden, where I chased geese and chickens and pulled up turnips and carrots. Under a walnut tree he hung an enormous canopy swing with paisley cushions that had room for all of us. In the summer my mother would serve afternoon tea there with cream puffs or custard-filled doughnuts. She would get up to shake the mulberry tree and we would dance underneath, holding the corners of our skirts, catching the creamy white berries, sweeter than sugar cubes.
My parents threw elaborate parties in the garden, with lambs roasting over fire pits, classical Persian musicians, and tents lined with Persian carpets and lit by lanterns. My mother was famous for her theme parties. For years everyone talked about the fishing party for which she bought live trout and threw them in the pool. Each guest was given a net, and several cleaning and grilling stations were set up. Around the candlelit pool, ladies in evening gowns shimmered like mermaids, all huddled together and giggling over their slippery catch. Their husbands, awkward in rolled-up sleeves, worried about their patent leather shoes and whether they would ever get any dinner. The less lighthearted smoked in the background and nursed their glasses of scotch. I loved these parties. Other than my having to wear a party dress and tame my curls, they were moments of wild independence. I roamed freely among the guests, sampled the éclairs I had longed for all day, eavesdropped, and stole cigarettes from silver trays that accompanied ashtrays like bowls of fancy mixed nuts.
On occasion, my cousin Roya would be at these parties. We were only a year apart, but she was clever and full of ruses, whereas I was far more timid. So she had no choice but to concoct a courage serum for me. She filled my mother’s empty bottle of Joy perfume with water and made me take a few swigs before embarking on one of our missions. The serum worked remarkably well. I followed her willingly through cobwebs to the toolshed or the basement in search of clues. We kept our equipment—a compass/nail clipper, a ruler, matches, a notepad and pencil—in a red vinyl drawstring bag. My parents’ parties set the perfect stage for our escapades, and with the serum running through my veins, I was a bold inspector and everyone was suspect, including the cook and the gardener.
In the afterglow of these parties—for they really were fairy-tale events—the tents and chairs were folded away, the grounds swept, and the hospital resumed its day-to-day business. The everyday meals at the hospital were prepared by my mother and our cook. The maternity ward was a haven for new mothers, who were encouraged to stay and rest at least a week. My mother coddled them, coaching them through breastfeeding and baby care before sending them home. She would write weekly menus, creating special meals for patients with dietary restrictions, using ingredients that were bought daily at the market or harvested from our garden. The same dishes served to the patients on trays lined with starched white linen and garden roses, we ate upstairs on our dining room table, family-style.
My mother also brought her stringent medical training to the kitchen, dismissing cooks who lacked organizational skills, were messy, or simply weren’t liked by her children. One ill-fated cook, Ahmed Agha, came from the Hilton Hotel with excellent references. He prepared a trial meal for my parents that ended with a pomegranate sorbet, which sent my mother into raptures. She hired him on the spot. In the weeks that followed, my sisters launched a campaign to bring poor Ahmed Agha down simply because he forbade us access to the kitchen. Even my mother prefaced her forays into the kitchen with apologies and compliments. Days after his arrival, pebbles appeared in my sisters’ meals. At first my parents hesitated to mention anything to their new chef, but by the third night, when my sisters were lining up rocks on the edge of their plates, my father called him upstairs to explain his oversight. Ahmed turned purple and apologized, promising to be more careful when washing and sorting the vegetables and legumes. My sisters claimed round one. By the next evening, two screaming girls were dragged upstairs to the dining room. Ahmed Agha held my sisters by the back of their frocks and roared, Madam, I have caught the saboteurs! He had suspected mischief and followed them to the garden before dinner, where he watched them load their pockets with pebbles en route to the table. My parents stared in disbelief as he ordered their daughters to empty their pockets. Once the pebbles started hitting the ground, he untied his apron and draped it over the back of a chair with great flourish. He announced his resignation, though he alerted my mother to a cauliflower soufflé in the oven. My sisters hung their heads and stared at their shoes. They had still won.
Until a new cook was found, my mother did double duty, and once again the kitchen door remained open. One minute she would be stirring a pot of stew, and the next she was being called to the ER. She made this transition smoothly, turning the stove off, securing her nursing cap with hairpins, and washing up before jogging down the corridors to join my father.
When I wandered into the kitchen, I would hover around my mother until she gave me a task, washing the fruit she had bought at the market, arranging the patient trays, peeling, chopping. My mother never waved me away to go play out
side, but rather expected me to keep in step, giving me patient instructions with the confidence that I would carry them through. We enjoyed each other’s company while we sorted through a sack of lentils or shucked beans. When I did my homework, I liked nothing better than to work quietly at the kitchen table as she moved from pantry to sink to stove, breaking the silence only to ask her a question I already knew the answer to, just to hear her voice and feel connected to her task.
When it was time to set the table, my mother would remind us about the particularities of my father’s place setting. He required his own mise en place—a tomato, a cucumber, a tender lettuce heart, a lemon, salt, a pepper mill, and olive oil. He preferred to make a salad for one at the table, where he could slice and season à la minute. We watched him every night peeling his cucumber, dicing his tomato, dressing his salad, and puckering with the first taste, which convinced us that what he had was better than the salad my mother had made. We gladly accepted his offer of lemony bites. My parents nourished us with lavash bread from the oven wrapped around sheep’s-milk cheese with fresh walnuts and just-picked tarragon, figs in season, buttery lamb shanks with fava beans and saffron-scented rice, cantaloupes spooned into chilled bowls and drizzled with rose water. They brought these to us as if for the first time. At times quarrelsome or tired, they were all enthusiasm when we were hungry.
Our routine would change with the seasons. In the summer we began our meals with a chilled, minty cucumber and yogurt soup. To my delight, my mother left me in charge of this soup the summer I turned eight. I loved the little variations I could make, substituting torn rose petals for mint, adding raisins and crushed walnuts, or ice cubes with mint leaves frozen inside on particularly hot, dusty Tehran days.