Rachlin, Nahid 1944–
Rachlin, Nahid 1944–
PERSONAL:
Born June 6, 1944, in Abadan, Iran; immigrated to United States, 1962, naturalized citizen, 1969; daughter of Manoochehr (a lawyer) and Mohtaram Bozorgmehri; married Howard Rachlin (a professor of psychology); children: Leia. Education: Lindenwood College, B.A.; attended Columbia University.
ADDRESSES:
Home—New York, NY. Agent—Harriet Wasserman, 230 E. 48th St., New York, NY 10017. E-mail—[email protected].
CAREER:
Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, research assistant, 1968-69; New York University Continuing Education Division, New York, NY, adjunct assistant professor of creative writing, 1979-90; Barnard College, New York, NY, creative writing instructor, beginning 1991; New School University, New York, NY, writing instructor; Unterberg Poetry Center, New York, NY, writing instructor. Yale University, New Haven, CT, associate fellow. Presenter at conferences and at colleges and universities, including Marymount Manhattan College, Hofstra University, Yale University, Hunter College, University of Iowa, and Southampton College.
AWARDS, HONORS:
Bennett Cerf Award, Columbia University, 1974, for short story "Ruins"; Doubleday-Columbia fellowship for creative writing, 1974-75; Wallace Stegner fellowship, Stanford University, 1975-76; National Endowment for the Arts fiction grant, 1979; PEN syndicated fiction project prize, 1983.
WRITINGS:
NOVELS
Foreigner, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1978.
Married to a Stranger, Dutton (New York, NY), 1983.
The Heart's Desire, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 1995.
Jumping over Fire, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 2006.
OTHER
Veils: Short Stories, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 1992.
Persian Girls: A Memoir, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin (New York, NY), 2006.
Contributor to books, including Elements of Fiction, edited by Jack Carpenter, W.M.C. Brown (Dubuque, IA), 1979; A Writer's Workbook, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1987; The Uncommon Touch, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1989; Stories from the American Mosaic, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1990; The Confidence Woman, edited by Eve Shelnutt, Longstreet Press (Marietta, GA), 1991; and Lovers, Crossing Press (Santa Cruz, CA), 1992. Contributor of stories to periodicals and literary journals, including Crazy Horse, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Literary Review, Milkwood Review, North Atlantic Review, Redbook, Shenandoah, Four Quarters, Minnesota Review, Fiction, Confrontation, and Ararat. Contributor of essays to periodicals, including Natural History and New York Times Magazine. Contributor of book reviews to Newsday and New York Times.
Rachlin's work has been translated into Arabic, Dutch, Farsi, Portuguese, and Italian.
SIDELIGHTS:
Nahid Rachlin, perhaps the most published Iranian author in the United States, was born in Abadan, Iran, but spent the early years of her life in Tehran. Raised in a loving home by her mother's sister until age seven, she was abruptly returned to the home of her parents at age seven and spent the rest of her childhood unhappily, buoyed only by the close relationship she developed with her older sister, Pari. This relationship, which ended in tragedy, weaves throughout Rachlin's body of work, which includes the novels Foreigner, Married to a Stranger and Jumping over Fire, as well as Veils: Short Stories and her poignant autobiography Persian Girls: A Memoir.
During high school, Rachlin became an avid reader and writer, allowing fiction to transport her into other people's lives through their emotions. Fiction also served as an escape from her own life, with its arranged marriage right out of high school. This type of life would eventually cause her beloved Pari to slip into the manic-depression that ultimately resulted in divorce, loss of custody of her only child, and regular stays in a psychiatric institution.
Aided by her older brothers, Rachlin managed to escape this same destiny, traveling to the United States to do so. She obtained a scholarship to Lindenwood College, where she studied psychology and continued to work on her writing. Following marriage and the birth of her daughter, she decided to seriously work on writing fiction. In the writing courses she took at Columbia University, Rachlin was inspired to write several short vignettes based on her Iranian childhood that were eventually published in a small literary magazine.
Rachlin's return to Iran, twelve years after she had left, inspired her first novel, Foreigner. Written while its author was on a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University, Foreigner was published in 1978, a year before the Western-leaning Shah of Iran was overthrown and a radical fundamentalist regime evolved to take his place. Drawing on Rachlin's experiences, the novel focuses on Iranian-born Feri McIntosh as she escapes from a controlling family by moving to the United States, earns a degree in biology, and marries an American. Still haunted by her birth culture, Feri returns to Iran but finds the same problems she sought to escape. Feeling out of step with life America, she finds a home in Islam, the same fundamentalist version that holds sway in Iran. In Foreigner, Rachlin explores the emotions that draw individuals to fundamentalist faiths, particularly the disconnect with Modernism that sometimes prompts extreme religious views. As Anne Tyler noted in her review of the novel for the New York Times Book Review, Foreigner provides readers with "a rare intimate look at Iranians who are poorer and less educated…. [Rachlin's] voice is cool and pure. Bleak is the right word, if you will understand that bleakness can have a startling beauty."
Rachlin's second novel, Married to a Stranger, recalls the deteriorating marriage of her second sister, Manijeh, and her own adolescent dreams. Reviewing the book for Belles Lettres, Saideh Pakravan noted that Rachlin is the direct descendent of people living in a culture where telling stories at home in the family set- ting was a way of life. These storytellers, often a parent or a nanny, engaged their rapt audiences with fascinating sagas about events that shaped people's lives and destinies. "Reading anything Rachlin writes is like sitting at the foot of a storyteller of yore," commented Pakravan. "Except, having lost the innocent rapture with which children listen, we also observe the sleight of hand, and wonder how Rachlin manages to hold us, how her restrained writing can exercise such pull. There is no answer, unless it lies in the very lack of artifice."
According to Barbara Thompson in the New York Times Book Review, in Married to a Stranger "Rachlin captures the range of forces that were brought to bear on personal relationships in the changing political and social setting of the last years of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's reign. She shows us not only the tranquil inner courtyards with sweets and gossip exchanged by the fishpond, the flower bedecked bridal chamber, but also the political, social and religious factions contending for primacy in the streets outside." Carolyn See described the work as "a woman's novel in a very particular sense," in her Los Angeles Times appraisal. "The reader has the feeling that these are the facts, ma'am," See added; "perhaps the real facts of one ordinary relationship, matter-of-factly described against the larger background of a country ripped by war and revolution. But it's the single human beings who are important here; that is, perhaps, what makes it a woman's novel."
The Heart's Desire also draws from Rachlin's personal experiences and centers on an Iranian American couple dealing with cultural issues in postrevolutionary Iran. According to a reviewer for Iranian.com, the author's uncomplicated style is a "blessing" to readers unfamiliar with this period of Iranian history. "Instead of trying to solve literary riddles and metaphors and hallucinating in magical realism, the reader is left free with a clear head to grasp complicated human and cultural issues," the critic added.
Jumping over Fire is also set in the 1970s during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The narrator is Noor Ellahi, daughter of an American mother and Iranian father. A blonde, Noor uses the name Nora and favors American culture. She lives with her parents and adopted brother Jahan, who enjoys the freedom Islam gives to males, in a compound that was constructed in southern Iran by the Iranian American Oil Company for employees like Nora's father, a radiologist at the company hospital. The streets of the enclave are named as though they were part of an American suburb, the theater plays classic American films, and many compound residents are American or British. The Ellahis, who follow no religion, live a privileged life, cared for by servants, until revolution threatens and they flee to America. Meanwhile, Nora and Jahan have become lovers, and they intend to live together in the United States. Ultimately, Jahan is unable to adjust culturally, and the two go their separate ways. "A deeply flawed family, and the people of many nationalities who touch their lives, is seen with a clear but forgiving eye," noted School Library Journal contributor Christine C. Menefee in her review of Jumping over Fire.
In Persian Girls, Rachlin recalls the details of her early childhood, the years spent with her aunt, her return to her family, and the loving support she received from older sister Pari, even after Rachlin immigrated to the United States at age seventeen. Spanning several decades, Persian Girls places the events in Rachlin's family within the wider context of current events. Reviewing the book for Publishers Weekly, a contributor wrote that Rachlin's "memoir gives American readers rare insight into Iranians' ambivalence toward the United States."
Rachlin once told CA: "Ever since I was a teenager I found that writing, giving shape to some of the events of my own life and of those around me, created a sense of peace in me. I hope that my books will make people aware that important human emotions and desires are universal. I hope to alleviate some of the stereotypical pictures people have of cultures like Iran.
"I have always written fiction rather than nonfiction because I feel that only fiction can convey the complexity of character and situation that I see around me. I think that the purpose of fiction in society is to provide models for alternate courses of life—not so much as a guide for action but as a vehicle for understanding people. Foreigner, … for instance, seems autobiographical because of many parallels in the protagonist's life and my own life (a young woman coming to the U.S., marrying an American and then returning home for a visit). "The same with … Married to a Stranger, which is about a young woman in Iran, yearning to break through the rigid traditions around her."
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:
Rachlin contributed the following autobiographical essay to CA:
MY AUNT—MY MOTHER
As I sit in a room in my apartment in Manhattan I see myself clearly coming back from high school in Ahvaz, a town in southern Iran. I am looking for my older sister Pari, so that I can read to her a story I had written during history class, instead of listening to the lecture. "I wrote a story today," I would say as soon as I found her in one of the many rooms in our large, outlandish house. I would sit next to her on the rug and read to her, about the rigidities at school, or some shocking scene I had encountered on the street. (Walking by the lettuce fields one early morning I saw a half-naked woman lying among the bushes, her blouse torn; blood flowing out of her face which was so badly beaten that it was barely recognizable, and then police appearing on the scene.)
Pari always responded not to the story itself but to the anguish that the story expressed. She listened not so much to my story as to me. I remember the intensity of my desire to express my feelings and reactions to what went on around me, and equally matched eagerness to hear her reassuring voice. I was also an avid reader. I would read some of the passages to her and she would say, "You could do that."
She loved movies and the two of us would go to see whatever was shown in the two movie houses in town, mostly American and European movies dubbed into Farsi. She had vague aspirations to one day become an actress. We would stop on the main street at a shop that carried photographs of actors and actresses and she would buy a few—of Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck—to add to an album she kept. If I close my eyes I can still vividly see her standing on the stage of our high school's auditorium (a school for girls only—a similar high school for boys stood in another part of the town), wearing striped pajamas, a mustache, and dancing and singing along with other girls dressed similarly, doing an imitation of an American musical. I would watch her and dream about writing something myself that one day would be put on a stage, with her acting in it.
I can hear my father's voice saying to her scornfully, "Don't you have any sense? An actress is a whore." (About my writing he would say, more respectfully, "You're just a dreamer.") In those days I wrote about my immediate experiences; now, as an adult, I find myself mostly writing obsessively about the faraway past, people, cities I knew growing up. It is as if that period of struggle has much more meaning for me than what is occurring at the present. How could my stable, predictable married life (I have been married to the same man for thirty years and we have one daughter who is now a lawyer and has a clear vision of her own goals) compete with the turmoil of those days? Though I have been writing various versions of the same events, so many times, I still have not managed to diminish the feelings raging behind them….
*When I was nine months old my grandmother took me away from my mother, who already had six children before me (two had died), to be raised by my aunt, my mother's older sister. My aunt had been unable to have children herself even though she had been trying for years. My mother had promised her, before I was born, that the next child would go to her. This was in response to my aunt repeatedly begging my mother to let her raise one of her children. "God has enabled you to have so many of them, so easily," she had kept saying to my mother. So early one morning my grandmother bundled me up, and carrying a bottle of my mother's milk with us she took the ferry from Abadan (where my father was a judge) and then the old sooty train to my aunt's house in Teheran. My aunt had been married to a man twice her age who had died not long before I was taken to her.
My grandmother described to me so many times how she took me to my aunt that it is like my own memory. "As I was about to leave, your mother was upset, hesitant. I just grabbed you out of her arms and practically ran away." (In an old, faded photograph my mother is holding me, an infant then, on her lap. She is wearing a long, surprisingly fashionable dress, her hair is cut to the nape of her neck; I am wrapped in a thin, lacy blanket and have a cotton hat on my head. She is looking at my face while my eyes are focused on the camera. I am waving my clenched hands in the air—my face, posture reflecting, what is it, fright?)
The train ride to Teheran was long and bumpy and I cried a great deal. After the milk from my mother's breast ran out, my grandmother bought milk for me at
the little stations where we stopped at various intervals. Other families in the compartment asked her questions about me, were amazed at the task she had taken on herself. I would stop crying for periods of time and gaze at the faces of the other women with curiosity—who were they, where was I going? The women tried to help my grandmother, holding me so that she could sleep a little. We arrived at my aunt's house at dawn. She was sitting outside the door of her house at the end of a narrow lane, her chador wrapped around her, waiting for us. It was a mild spring day with a mellow breeze blowing through the sycamore trees lining the lane. "Here, I brought you the baby," my grandmother said, putting me in my aunt's arms. My aunt began to cry as she held me tightly. "Oh, I'm so happy, God has finally fulfilled my wishes," she said over and over.
She had a wooden cradle set up for me in a large room, where she slept herself. Before putting me to bed she gave me a bottle of milk she had warmed up for me. I stared at her but did not protest. "I held you to myself so tightly, loved you so much, that you didn't miss your mother," my aunt told me when I was older. "Do you know how much you've added to my life?" My grandmother left a few days later to go back to Ahvaz to help my mother with her other children.
My aunt lived in a house connected to two other houses, all of which she had inherited from her husband. She rented the row of rooms on the other side of the courtyard of the house she lived in to two widowed women and the other two houses to families with children. For days neighbors and relatives dropped in to my aunt's house to bring baby presents, to congratulate her.
The other two women living in my aunt's house—soft-spoken, gentle women—helped my aunt to take care of me. They watched me grow, shared impressions of
me, talked about every one of my movements and gestures, childhood pains and illnesses. When I was sleepless because of a tooth coming out, when I had gotten fever and kept talking all night deliriously, my aunt lay on a mattress next to my crib, getting up periodically to check on me. I would open my eyes and, in the dim glimmer of an oil lamp set on the mantel, could see her bending over me, her eyes riveted on my face, concerned.
She took me everywhere with her, to the public baths, to the market to shop, to visit a neighbor. On hot summer nights we slept on the roof under mosquito nettings and she told me stories about the stars, the moon, old kings, and mythical figures. We ate breakfast in the courtyard, where a breeze blew through the pomegranate and plum trees, and rose bushes gave out a steady fragrance. She would heat milk for me the way I liked it and serve me my favorite bread, thick with sesame seeds on it. She was indulgent with me. I went to bed when I wanted, threw my toys around, roamed through the courtyards freely. She took me to the pastry store on Ghanat Abad Avenue running perpendicular to the alley and let me choose what I wanted, took me to the little bazaar at the end of the alley and bought a piece of jewelry for me, to the tailor to have a dress made for me. I had many rag dolls which I had arranged against a wall in my room. On the mantel I had put brightly painted clay animals and marbles. I had covered one wall with collages I made from cuttings in a magazine I bought on the newsstand as soon as it came out.
The house we lived in was the biggest of the three with four flower beds, a large, shallow pool at its center. A porch extended from the rooms my aunt and I shared and protruded into the courtyard. There were columns on the porch with friezes at the top, with the same animal and floral patterns on them that decorated the fireplace in the living room. I particularly remember stained glass on several of the windows of the living room, all the colorful light cast on everything.
In the spring, the fruit trees were filled with flocks of birds that whistled and sang continuously, flew out of the branches together. Butterflies flitted around the four red and pink rose bushes and fish always tumbled in the pool. I sat on the porch, completely immersed in all that joyous activity. Sometimes vendors would shout in the street, "Come and buy the best and sweetest white strawberries anywhere," and, "I have the most fragrant pears and reddest pomegranates." If my aunt was busy washing dishes or sweeping the ground, she would send me to the door to buy some. The vendor would lower the wooden tray from his head for me to choose the fruit.
Still I would ask my aunt over and over, "Do you love me, do you want me here?"
"Of course I do. What would I do without you?"
*Once a year, my mother came to Teheran to visit her relatives, all my uncles and aunts, and stayed with us part of the time. She usually left her children with my grandmother. Sometimes she held me on her lap, kissed me, but there was no particular bond between us. I called my aunt Mother and my own mother Aunt Mohtaram or nothing at all. On one visit my mother brought my sisters Manijeh and Pari with her. Pari took a special interest in me. "Oh, look at those large alert eyes," she said. She picked a rose and put it in my hair. "You ought to come and live with us. Do you want to?" she asked. "No," I said. Another time my mother came with the whole family, including my brothers and father. My father and brothers, though, did not stay with my aunt. After a brief visit they left to stay with my father's bachelor brother. That was the extent to which I saw my own family. My mother always cried as she was about to leave. "You're so lucky to be together like this," she would say to the aunts and uncles. "I feel like an exile."
"We'll come and visit," they promised, though they rarely ever did. The trip to Ahvaz (where my parents had moved for my father to set up a private practice as a lawyer) was long and arduous and, the truth was, they all agreed, it made more sense for my mother to visit—when she came to Teheran she saw everybody at once. The fact that she was my biological mother did not have much relevance for me, did not register anything significant.
Once I asked one of my cousins, "Which one of your aunts do you love the most?
"Aunt Mohtaram," she said, naming my mother.
"Not Aunt Maryam?" I asked, astounded, hurt.
"No, Aunt Mohtaram has all those children."
"But Aunt Maryam is prettier," I said, trying to find something to say in her favor. "That beautiful wavy hair."
My cousin shrugged casually, not aware of my feelings.
My other two aunts and my two uncles lived nearby and their children came over all the time and the pack of us would carry on, playing loud games, going on a spree through the neighborhood, telling horror stories to each other. Aroused by the stories, we would begin to run, holding hands for protection, through the back, narrow, cobblestoned streets lined with ancient houses in different conditions, some half-dilapidated. We would come out into the small bazaar, where each store carried a different kind of merchandise, from dairy to produce to clothing and jewelry, pause by our uncle's shop (the uncle married to our oldest aunt) and be served ice cream by him. Then we would enter Ghanat Abad, a wide avenue full of banks, carpet shops, stationery stores, more expensive jewelry stores and then go home through another set of streets. It was as if the group of us was enchanted by something beyond our understanding. After supper we slept on mattresses spread on the floor or inside mosquito nettings and talked late into the night.
In the month of Ramadan my aunts and uncles and their children all living nearby spent a lot of time in Aunt Maryam's house for the adults to fast together. I would wake at midnight to the bustle of their activities, cooking food in large pots on gas stoves in the courtyard for them to break their fasts. One by one we children would wander into the courtyard. Karim, a male cousin who was my own age, and I would go into the room adjacent to mine opening into the entrance hallway and walk out quietly into the street, lit now by moonlight and stars, the water in the joob running more clear and without obstructions. Through the half-open doors of other houses we would see flames of food being cooked and hear the hum of conversation. Ghanat Abad Avenue at this hour had a different feel to it, with no cars going by and the storefronts shut. The ancient caravansary and mosque standing next to each other in the middle of the avenue, glowing with dim lights inside, had a mysterious aura at that hour. Then we would walk back and slip into the house, into the room, triumphant that our absence had not been noticed.
*I was seven years old when Rahbar appeared in my aunt's life. I remember vividly the first time I met him. One afternoon, coming home from school, I found a man with her in the living room. She was wearing her chador and sitting on a chair, something she rarely ever did, and he was sitting on another chair across from her, drinking tea.
She blushed when I came into the room. Then she introduced us to each other. He seemed to be about my aunt's age, thirty-five or so. He was wearing a blue
suit and a red bow tie. He had ruddy skin, light brown hair neatly combed and parted, and large blue eyes, very unusual. I smiled and then went into the adjacent room.
In a few moments I heard him saying good-bye. Then my aunt came over to me and said, softly, shyly, "He was sent here by a matchmaker. Why would someone like him want me?"
Clear changes came over her. She became more conscious of her appearance. She started wearing well-fitting dresses in bright prints. She splashed rosewater on herself. Her hips swung as she walked and her black wavy hair swayed over the fabric of her clothes. She made improvements in the house too. She restored the chipping friezes of animals and fruit on the porch columns and above the fireplace, put blue tiles on the bathroom floor, replacing the old brown ones. She filled the flower beds around the pool with bright asters, morning glory vines, black-eyed susans.
Within three months she was married to Rahbar. It was a quiet wedding, amounting to an aghound coming over and performing the ceremony in the living room. Only her two sisters and brothers and some of us children were present at the ceremony.
I liked Rahbar. He worked in an import-export company and brought me unusual presents: an onyx box he said he had bought in one of his travels in which I could keep my pens and pencils, a music box with a dancing girl coming out of it when opened. He took me to the rose garden at the edge of Teheran. Another time we climbed the hills in Shemiran together. It was a hot, dusty walk but when we got on the top of the hills we had the view of a huge expanse of the city. We stood there until stars came out one by one and lights went on in houses underneath. He told me about his own growing up with his mother and three sisters in Mashad, about all his traveling. He had worked for a while on a ship going from the Caspian Sea to many other countries. He made everything he had done sound adventurous and exciting. I had a feeling that evening that he could see right through my thoughts as if they were transparent, an odd sensation that there were no barriers between us. He asked me to call him Rahbar rather than Uncle.
He had his bad moods when he became withdrawn, looking lonely, as if he were totally on his own, not blending in with anything or anyone around him, even my aunt or myself. He mumbled when my aunt asked him questions and seemed intolerant of my presence. My aunt would say to me then, "It's time for you to go to bed now, you have school in the morning."
Then for several nights Rahbar did not come home. Every night my aunt stayed up late waiting for him. She would sweep the floors, dust everything, bake bread to pass time, her face looking cloudy and preoccupied. Loneliness emanated from her even when I was by her side. When he returned he said an old friend of his was in a fatal car accident and he had gone there to help. A few weeks later he stayed away again and when he returned he said he had been sent out of town by his company to meet a customer. Looking downward he said, "I don't know if I'm going to last at the company. They don't like my ideas." A strange grimace hovered on his face.
His bad moods took over more frequently and I was no longer at ease in his company.
"He isn't going to stay with me much longer," my aunt told me. "I know it.
He continued with that pattern of disappearing and then returning. Once he came home late at night with a young boy and they stayed in a room together. He said the boy was a nephew visiting him from his village. The same thing happened again on another night. I saw my aunt standing outside of the door behind which Rahbar and his companion had vanished. I joined her and held her hand. It was shaking with a faint tremor.
The next day I heard her whispering to my other aunts, "He likes boys."
"You must get a divorce from him," my older aunt said.
"Yes, it's a sin for you to live with him," my younger aunt said. "And neighbors are going to begin to talk."
Tears streamed from my aunt's eyes. "I can't just divorce him."
She kept pushing aside the idea. She always looked despondent now. And Rahbar's coming and going became even more erratic, with him spending many more nights away.
Then my own life changed suddenly. I remember that day vividly. It was an autumn day with a pale, cool sunlight shining on everything. I was playing with a friend in the yard of our elementary school when I saw a man standing on the steps of a hallway, looking for someone. I recognized my own father, a thin, short man, with a pockmarked face and a brush mustache but giving the impression somehow of being strong, powerful. My heart gave a lurch. What was he doing there?
"Let's go home," he said as he approached me.
I looked at him for an explanation. He was so alien, I hardly knew him.
He picked me up and held me against him. "I'll tell you on the way." He kissed me and then put me down.
I said good-bye to my friend and followed my father outside.
"I have already spoken to your teachers, you aren't coming back here anymore."
"What?"
He held my hand in his and said, "I'm taking you back to live with us. You're reaching an age that you need me to look after you. Your aunt's house isn't right for you anymore."
I did not reply. A knot had formed in my throat, preventing me from speaking. I was on the verge of crying. But it was not until I saw my aunt, her chador wrapped around her, her face wet with tears, that the reality of what was happening hit me full force.
She went to the adjacent room to get my suitcase and I followed her. I clung to her, "I don't want to go," I said.
"I don't want you to go," she whispered to me. "But what can I do if your father insists on taking you back?" I could see, from her tears and the hunched way she stood, that she was feeling helpless. Her soft, fleshy body seemed without strength. I suddenly understood the meaning of her actions in the last few days. She had become exceptionally attentive to me, taking me to the bazaar to buy a new pair of earrings for me, in general always hovering around me and touching me a lot. Once she said, "You know how much I care for you, don't you? You mean much more to me than Rahbar. If he leaves one day, I'll manage to survive it, but you…." She pulled me to herself and kissed me hard on my forehead, cheeks.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I said through constricted throat.
"I was still hoping he wouldn't come, that my prayers would be answered. How else could I stop him?" she whispered. (What she was telling me was true, she had no legal right to me. But I have often wondered if she had not been so afraid of men or so passive, whether she would have been able to persuade my father to let her keep me.)
"We have to go," my father called to us. "The plane will be leaving in less than two hours."
As we were leaving he said, "Your aunt will visit you all the time." He turned to her. "Won't you?"
She nodded.
"I haven't said good-bye to anyone," I said, a wave of pain shaking me.
"You can write to them," my father commanded.
My aunt saw us to the door and stood there in the alley until we disappeared into Ghanat Abad Avenue—I took a glance at her then, before we turned.
It was all so quick—we took a taxi to the airport and then were on the plane.
As we sat on the airplane, my father repeated again, "You need a father to look after you." I nodded shyly, trying to fight back my tears. I was in a daze as we got off the plane and went through the dusty streets that were lined with palm trees, the air smelling like the oil from the refineries. When we entered our house, my mother was sitting at the edge of the pool in the middle of the arid courtyard, talking to the old, live-in servant. My mother was wearing a jersey dress, her hair was set in a permanent, and her lips were red with lipstick. (I already missed my aunt's face, free from make-up, and her long, naturally wavy hair.)
"Oh, you're here," my mother said, getting up and coming over to me. She leaned over and embraced me—I was keenly aware of how tentative her touch was, compared to my aunt's firm, sturdy arms around me. My mother stepped back and, scrutinizing me, said, "That dress is loose on you."
I blushed. I was wearing a checked orange and yellow dress that my aunt and I had carefully picked out in a shop near her house. Then my mother quickly went back to talking to the servant in an agitated tone, instructing him about his chores for the day—how much fish to buy, which rooms to clean, and the need for new mosquito repellent.
I remained in my spot, waiting for something to happen. Someone was coming down the steep stairway from the second floor.
"Come with me, I'll take you to your room." It was my sister Pari. On the few occasions I had met my family I had always felt the most connected to Pari though there was a five-year gap between us.
"Go ahead," my father said to me.
"Your room is next to mine, I asked them to put you in that one. I'll show you the whole house," Pari said.
I followed her through the house in a daze. Many of the doors had holes, eaten by termites, and the windows were covered with dust. Grasshoppers and pigeons rested on the railway of the balcony. The house had more than a dozen rooms, set on two floors. All the children had their rooms upstairs, but there was nothing about the rooms to indicate that they belonged to children or teenagers—no toys, no posters on the walls, no color in the furniture. It was as if we were not allowed to be young, indulge in whimsical or frivolous activities or tastes.
"Mother is absorbed in too many things," she said, attempting to comfort me against my mother's cool greeting. Then we sat in her room and she told me about the movie house across the street we could go to, the park we could walk around in, and the schools we would be going to. (School started a month later in Ahvaz than in Teheran because of the heat, so I had not missed any of it.) From her intense focus on me, it seemed she had been lonely in the middle of her own family.
I ate with my mother and two sisters that night, while my father and brothers stayed out late. My older brother was already working in an oil refinery company and waiting for his papers so that he could go to the United States to study engineering. My younger brother was finishing up high school and also planned to go to the United States. After supper, my mother just said, "You know where your room is," and then she vanished somewhere in the house.
I lay in bed listening to the sounds from the outside, cars going by, stray dogs barking, some one whistling a tune. I missed my aunt. So many evenings I had sat by her and watched her work, black strands of her hair hanging over her forehead. I missed Karim—doing homework together, having lunch together, walking together, and that spark between us that kept flaring up and subsiding—and my other cousins and aunts and friends, as if I had been away from them for a long time. I missed the three houses, the mourning doves cooing softly in the afternoon in the courtyards, the alley cat mewing by the pool as it stared at the fish. I missed the streets, my school, the objects belonging to my aunt—the red velveteen trunk she kept her good clothes in, the black and white cloth she spread on the floor to pray on, her white chador with green leaves scattered on it, smelling of rosewater. The picture of my room in my aunt's house stood in front of my eyes—a sunny, corner room with gauzy curtains on its windows blowing with a breeze. Everything was so bright and shiny there from this distance. I could almost see my aunt coming to the porch and saying, "How about some lunch now?" Tears began to seep out of my eyes. I got out of the bed and, from my suitcase which I had not completely unpacked yet, took out the green scarf with gold leaf designs on it that my aunt had brought back for me from a trip to Qom. I carried it to bed with me. I kept rubbing my face against it. I could smell the rosewater my aunt had dabbed on it….
I woke at dawn, disoriented, not knowing for a moment where I was. Then I remembered. I got out of the bed and looked out of the window at the busy Pahlavi Avenue. The shops were just opening and horse carriages and taxis transported people to their destinations. Rows of women were carrying milk in large pots on their heads. Stalls selling cooked beets and milk products were already busy with customers. But there seemed to be a slow motion to everything. The air was already hot and damp, very different from the cool, crisp, autumn mornings in Teheran, and it smelled of oil from the oil fields. The sights and sounds were so different from what I was used to in my aunt's house, neighborhood. Loneliness hit me again so intensely that I thought I would faint. Then there was a knock on the door and my sister Pari walked in. It was always she who came to my aid.
*After breakfast my mother handed me a gray uniform with a white collar on it and said, "Here, wear this for now until we get you your own. It's Manijeh's from last year."
I tried it on. It fit well enough but I was aware of a rebellion inside me. "I don't want to wear this."
"You have to, it's the schools' rule here in Ahvaz." Then she walked away, clearly not wanting any arguments.
My father took me to school. I walked with him through the streets, this time smaller back streets. The river, mud-colored, with rowboats gliding on it, was visible in the distance.
"Don't be upset with your mother, she works so hard, sacrifices so much for all of you," my father said suddenly. "It's hard enough to have carried each one of you for nine months in her womb and then the difficult labor, and the responsibilities following. She had a very difficult pregnancy with you. You kicked hard, she had sickness all day long. She was in labor for more than twenty-four hours. When you were finally born you sucked at her breasts so hard they almost bled. But then there was that promise. Your grandmother insisted it should be carried out. I was never happy with it; neither was your mother really. I want you to start calling her Mother. She is your real mother, she always has been."
We were practically at the school when he said, "One day you'll be able to understand all this." He patted my arm. "I couldn't bear anymore to hear about how you were being raised in that household. I had to take you back."
I was silent, with a strange feeling of shame.
"There was no one to be a father to you. That man Rahbar sounds very shifty." I was shocked that he had kept track of what was going on in my aunt's household. "Anyway the whole neighborhood where she lives breeds ignorance."
We were approaching the school. Other young girls in gray uniforms swarmed through the street, some walking, some dropped off by cars. They greeted each other and went in bouncily, heedlessly. I was full of dread.
We went through the cement-covered courtyard of the school toward the principal's office. "I have given them large donations, they should be nice to you," my father told me.
He knocked on the office door and we went in. The principal, a tall, hefty woman with her hair tied in a knot at the back of her head, greeted my father and then turned to me. "This is your daughter, how nice."
"Yes." Then as if I were not there, he said, "She's a little shy right now, but she'll do fine."
"I'm sure she will. I'll see to it myself."
"I'm leaving her to you then," my father said and started to leave the office. By the door he asked me, "You know the way back now, don't you?"
I nodded.
"Follow me," the principal said, after my father was out of the door.
I followed her to the classrooms on the other side of the courtyard. "This is the fourth grade," she said, pointing to a room with a cluster of girls standing by it.
"I want you to show her around, our new student, Nahid, make her welcome," the principal told the students who were now staring at me.
"We sure will," one of them said. A soon as the principal left they went back talking among themselves, ignoring me.
A man walked over to the large bell hanging from the ceiling of the porch and banged it with a brass pole a few times. Students began to line up in front of classes. I joined the line in front of the fourth grade. The bell rang again and everyone began to sing the national anthem. "Iran, oh, land full of jewels." After we finished singing that, we were inspected by a truant officer, a middle-aged woman with a saturnine, bitter face, to make sure our nails were not too long and our uniforms were properly buttoned up and had our white collars on them. I stood there stiffly, giving in to the inspection. Then we all went inside. I was among the shortest in the class and I sat close to the front, staring at the board. A young, stern-looking man, the teacher, walked in and after calling everyone's names and checking them off in a notebook he began to write
some numbers on the blackboard. The numbers, everything, swam before my eyes. Why did this have to happen to me, given away and then taken back? It isn't fair, I thought, in utter misery.
At the lunch recess I immediately left the school. As soon as I got outside I saw Pari standing by the steps. "Oh, here you are," she said. "I thought I would walk you home." Her presence made me feel a little lighter.
"Let's go to the ice-cream parlor," she said.
We stopped in a park and sat in a café under trees and ordered ice cream. Scrawny, dusty palm trees with dates hanging on them in clusters and wilted-looking flowers filled the park. We talked again like we had the day before.
The first time my aunt visited after a year of separation, I skipped school all day to be with her. She had come with my grandmother, who was now living with her at her house. She had finally gotten a divorce from Rahbar to which he had readily conceded. I stayed close to my aunt, basking in the warmth of her presence. I could see clearly how upset she was. She would sit in dark corners, her hands clenched on her lap, her head lowered, and would say, "My life has no meaning." I would say, "Take me back with you." "How can I?" At night we slept in the same room and I would keep her up and ask her question after question, or ask her to tell me stories like she used to do. Legends, fairy tales, and the true stories of our neighbors' lives were all told to me by my aunt in the same slow, formal way with beginnings—climaxes and morals at the end. And all were equally riveting, equally believable.
*So I had to adjust to a new set of parents with very different values from my aunt's. My parents, having lived in Ahvaz and Abadan, cities filled with foreigners employed by the oil refineries, were in some ways Westernized, did not practice any religion, whereas my aunt was old-fashioned and staunchly religious. I had to learn to live with siblings, all the rivalry. I can see us sitting at the dining table in the kitchen. It is eight o'clock in the morning but harsh sunlight is streaming into the dining room as we sit around the long wooden table to eat breakfast. I sit between Manijeh and Pari, my mother and father at the two ends of the table, my two brothers on each side of my father. I am feeling vulnerable, cut off, neglected. My mother has not looked at me or addressed me once since we sat down. Everyone is eating quickly, ravenously. Ali comes in and refills our cups with more tea.
My mother's face lights tip as she turns to Manijeh. "How did you end up looking like an angel? How did you get those beautiful hazel-green eyes, those waves in your hair?" Manijeh smiles and rubs her head against my mother's arm.
Pari's loneliness mingles with my own. I stare at her, assessing her looks. She is very pretty, though in a different way from Manijeh. She is robust with distinctive though not quite so delicate and well-proportioned features as Manijeh's. Where do I stand compared to them, I wonder?
My mother adds more food to Manijeh's plate. "You need to eat more." Then addressing no one in particular, as if to excuse the extra attention she is paying to this one child, she says, "She's weak, she needs more nourishment."
"Mohtaram, I'm full," Manijeh says. She is the only one among us sisters and brothers who calls our mother by her name.
"Eat just a little more," my mother says to her.
My father gets up and pulls the shades over the windows to cut out the light pouring in mercilessly, making the ceiling fan going around slowly seem lame, useless. When he sits down again he looks very serious as if about to give a lecture. At any rate a hush falls over the table. There is something forbidding about his aura—from his expression you never know what he is about to say or do. The fear that has silenced everyone, that clutches at me, passes as he says, "We have to change a lot of things in this house after we're finished with all you children's expenses, after you're all settled down in your own lives."
"Some families don't care about their children's futures as your father and I do," my mother says.
After we finish eating, my father rises. "I have to get ready, I had to schedule a client early."
The early-morning havoc follows—with all the children flitting around the house, looking for something or the other, a misplaced shoe, an iron to press the collar of a school uniform. My mother tends singularly to Manijeh—"Here take this orange with you" or "Let me braid your hair for you today." After I get into my gray school uniform, I stand by the old mirror hanging on the wall of my room and examine my face. Would I look better if I had a different hairstyle, shorter to the nape of my neck? I press one finger into my cheek and remove it quickly to see the dimple formed. I wish I had dimples. I wish my breasts would begin to grow like Pari and Manijeh's. Manijeh is only two years older and her breasts are already full.
My mother was always trying to indoctrinate everyone to see how wonderful Manijeh was. I once heard her say to a friend of hers while they were having tea, "My Manijeh is so sweet to me, none of my other children are like her." The woman said, "She's like an angel, in
looks and personality." And how many times had I seen my mother give in to her whims at the expense of Pari and me? For instance, close to the time we were leaving to go and see a movie together, Manijeh said, "I'm not feeling good, I don't want to go." Pari suggested, "Well you rest, we'll go." But my mother said, "Let's wait and go tomorrow night, when she's feeling better." Pari complained to me, "Is she a princess?"
My mother scolded Ali if he did not answer to Manijeh's requests quickly. If Pari and I spent a long time in her room, my mother would knock on the door, "Why can't you include your other sister? What do you have against her?" Then she would push open the door and prod Manijeh, who clung to her, to come in. We would fall into a hushed silence in Manijeh's presence, excluding her further. (Awareness of our cruelty to Manijeh eluded us at the time).
*One afternoon I came home and found Pari sitting in her room, dressed up in a silk blue dress and gold jewelry.
"Are you going somewhere?" I asked.
"A suitor is here with his mother, They are in the living room with Mom and Dad. Do you want to see what he looks like?"
I nodded. The two of us walked softly, slowly, to the living room.
"Look in through the keyhole," Pari whispered.
I leaned over and put my eyes to the hole. Our parents were sitting with a man and a woman on the maroon, velvet-covered sofa and the two matching armchairs and having tea. The suitor was thin and tall and had a desiccated, humorless face, He was only a few years younger than our father, it seemed. I pulled back, then Pari looked through the hole.
We walked back to Pari's room. She giggled. "Did you see his ears? They were sticking out."
In a moment our father came to the door of the room. "Come in now. His mother wants to talk to you." Then he left the doorway.
Pari got up in a reluctant way and followed him.
An hour or so later from my room I heard an argument going on from the porch. The suitor and his mother must have left.
"I don't want to marry him," Pari was saying. "He's old and ugly."
"Have some sense. He has a very good income and he's well educated and kind," my mother said.
"When you have your own children you'll be happy to have a husband who can provide well for them," my father said.
I heard my younger brother's voice. "She could go to the university."
"Give up a good prospect like him?" my mother said.
"Anyway when has she ever showed interest in school?" my father said.
"He's willing to give a huge mehrieh," my mother said. "You can't throw that away."
"You're trying to sell me."
"Pari, don't talk nonsense."
Gradually their voices subsided and the argument seemed to dissolve with no resolution.
Later that day Pari complained to me, "They want to marry me off at the end of the year."
I remember thinking then: how much lonelier it is going to be for me here when Pari gets married and leaves the house.
Not long after that she got married to the man. A few months before the wedding, my parents started to get things ready. My mother and Pari prepared a dowry and searched for a wedding dress. The groom's parents came over several times to bring jewelry for Pari and talk about the practical matters of the wedding. Ali dried up vegetables, crushed pods to make spices. Invitation cards were made. The day before the wedding Ali and two other women hired for the occasion started cooking stews, rice, cakes, cookies, and other food. They hung lanterns in the tree branches, set up chairs and tables in the salon, and the large terrace extending out from it. On the day of the wedding platters of fruit, nuts, sharbat were set on the tables. My mother took Pari to a beauty parlor to have her hair set.
Many people were invited to the wedding. Even the elementary school principal came. Musicians and a belly dancer performed all evening, late into the night. I fell asleep on the couch at some point and when I woke the next day Pari was already gone with her husband to his family's house, where they would live for a year before setting up their own household.
*By the time I was in the middle of my high school years I began to focus entirely on studying and reading whatever I could get hold of, mainly novels and short stories through which I could find myself in other worlds, other people's lives, connect to emotions expressed in a person. I consumed any dark, pessimistic books I could find in the Setareh Bookshop. One called Claws was about a brother and sister who were caught in such a narrow world that they end up in a double suicide-murder pact. Another, The Abyss, was about a young girl trying to escape the confinement of her village and then ending up as a prostitute. I also read translations of whatever books I could find—novels and short-story collections by American and European writers—Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Balzac. I read books, wrote sketches and stories, and dreamt of escape. My father, although not as mocking of my writing as he was of my sister's aspirations to act, was suspicious and afraid of what the written word could do. He occasionally would eavesdrop on me as I sat at my desk writing or reading. He took away from me a novel by Maxim Gorky called The Mother and tore it into pieces. "Where did you get that communistic filth? I could lose my license if my daughter were caught reading a book like that." In fact I had bought it from a bookstore which occasionally would smuggle a book in against censorship. Communism was considered the enemy of the country at the time. One female teacher in my high school whom I admired was arrested on the charge that she was spreading "communistic" ideas in the school, the word also being a catchall for anything even remotely progressive or liberal.
I made one close friend at school. We stood separate from the more carefree, lighthearted girls who laughed freely, who wore makeup and pretended it was their natural coloring, who cheated on tests. The two of us would walk around the school yard, wearing our gray uniforms, fear of the teachers in our hearts, and talk obsessively about our plans for escape from the narrow confinement of that town, the life prescribed for us: graduating from high school, marrying someone selected by our parents, having a lot of children.
"I want to become a writer," I said.
"I want to become a ballet dancer," she said.
Once a famous Iranian writer, whose fiction she and I read avidly, was coming to town and I found out, to my excited amazement, that he would be visiting my father one afternoon to discuss a legal matter. My father, after looking through some of his books, promised to let me and Nazan meet him. Nazan and I started to plan for his visit. We each bought a new dress to wear and a copy of his latest novel to ask him to autograph. The novel was about a young girl going to college in France, falling in love with her professor, a man much older than herself, who treats her as if she were a child, not taking her attraction to him seriously. I read the book twice, and some of the passages several times. How could he make these characters so real? When the afternoon finally arrived, Nazan and I waited in my room for my father to call us in. As we entered the room where the writer was sitting, I felt as if were going into a magnetic field. We sat across from him and he asked us questions about ourselves, smiling at us in a patronizing way, like the professor's attitude toward the young girl in the novel. Then we gave him the books to autograph. As soon as we left the room, Nazan and I opened the books to see what he had written for each of us. (I have no memory of what he actually wrote but recently I wove a story around it, how his two autographs, one more complimentary than the other, break up the friendship between the two girls. I called it A Poet's Visit, and it became the first story I published in a commercial magazine.)
Not long after that visit I kept asking my mother and father to let me join my brothers in the United States. To break their resistance I wrote my brothers, asking them for help. It was a long battle, but my parents finally gave in to it. My father came into my room and said, "I'm letting you go because I see how hard you work at school. You're my only daughter who likes to read. And I see all the friction between you and your mother. It makes me sad."
I think my mother also wanted me apart from Manijeh who was doing worse and worse at school, practically flunking. Once she frightened me by telling me in a threatening tone, "You are doing better at school than Manijeh, and she's older than you." What did she expect me to do?
It was also made easier since my brothers managed to get a generous scholarship for me, paying tuition and room and board, at a small, Southern women's college.
Pari, now settled in her marriage, pregnant and unhappy, said to me, "I wish I had had your determination to study harder, try to go abroad. This is no life. This is prison." (Several years later she managed to get a divorce at a high price: giving up her son—the custody of the child automatically went to the husband even when, as in my sister's case, the grounds for divorce were his cruelty to her—"He put a lit cigarette to my skin," she told me.)
The closeness Pari and I had sustained itself throughout the years I was at my parents' house and lasted during my early years in college in the United States. At that time she had remarried. She married the second husband, she confided to me, mainly to get out of the grip of my parents who never stopped blaming her for the divorce—my father had screamed at her almost daily, "You're ruining your own life and bringing disgrace to your family," and my mother repeatedly scolded her for being "foolish" and "impractical" to give up all that wealth. (To get a divorce she also had to give up all claim to her husband's money.) Our closeness was ruptured by a tragedy that remains painfully in the background of my life: her beginning to have manic-depressive episodes, making communication with her nearly impossible at times. The illness led to a second divorce and has landed her in a mental hospital in Teheran, where she will probably spend at least part of every year, maybe for the rest of her life. In the last conversation I had with her, long distance from New York to Teheran, when she was in a period of relative calm and lucidity, she asked me, "Are you still writing? Will you send me the last thing you wrote?"
In college I withdrew for periods of time every day and wrote. Occasionally I would mail a piece to Pari and wait eagerly for her response. But I did not think I would make writing my profession. I was eager to be independent and refused to plunge into an occupation that entails no guarantees of publication or financial support. So I studied psychology. I met my American husband right after college (now he teaches psychology at a university). Only when home with a baby was I able to justify spending some time every day writing fiction.
I began to take writing courses. In one taught by Richard Humphreys in Columbia University's general studies program, I wrote three one-page sketches which became my first publication in a small literary magazine. One was a story I heard from my aunt about a woman who abandoned her blind child in the desert because she was afraid a man she had met would not marry her otherwise; another was about Ali, the live-in servant at my parents' house, an illiterate man from the villages who asked me daily to read over and over again from an adventure book he had; the third one was about an insane woman tied by her family to a porch railing in their house—I had seen her myself from the roof of my aunt's house.
My first visit home after twelve years of absence, the feelings brought out in me, in addition to my psychological search for a mother, became the inspiration for my first published novel, Foreigner, which I wrote on a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. The crumbling marriage of my second sister (Manijeh's life did not turn out to be easy. She never went to college and like Pari she married twice, the first one ending in a stormy divorce), combined with my own adolescent dreams, constituted the core of my second novel, Married to a Stranger.
There is another reason I am drawn to writing about my past: it has to do with a desire to bring into the present a reality which is no longer represented in my present life. The differences between the Iranian and
American cultures are so vast that in order for me to have adjusted to the American way of life I have had to, without always being conscious of it, suppress much of my own childhood and upbringing. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night with a nightmare that my past has vanished altogether and I am floating unanchored. I get out of the bed and begin to write. Then it is all with me again. I can see Pari's face radiant, wearing a tight red dress, drawing the eyes of the passersby to herself, the pretty daughter of a well-known lawyer in town; and myself, intense, shy, wearing a white cotton dress with butterfly designs on it, holding on to her arm as we walk across the square. I can see her following a man into a room of a film studio and myself waiting for her in the reception area, she coming out, her face all flushed, and telling me, as we get to the street, "He wanted me to take my clothes off." I am sitting with her at the edge of the pool in the middle of the courtyard of our house, frogs jumping in and out of the water, bats darting back and forth under a canopy on the other side, telling her about something that happened at school. I can see her in a wedding gown, sitting next to her dark-suited husband among the guests, her face reflecting a vague dreaminess and discontent.
I am lying next to my aunt and she is telling me stories. I keep demanding, as she is about to fall asleep, "Tell me another one."
I am coming home from school with other girls, all of us in uniforms, passing through a bazaar full of food shops, clusters of smoked fish, fresh dates, bananas hanging on their doors; through streets lined by palm trees and occasionally by boys from the other high school who would come close and furtively brush their arms against us or sneak a letter into our hands, expressing a desire to meet us secretly somewhere. Coming home and being hit by loneliness if Pari is not there. My mother, remote and agitated, going from room to room, trying to put everything in order, or sweating over her cooking in the kitchen, my father talking in mysterious tones with a client behind the shut doors of the large upstairs room he uses as his office. Standing on the balcony with Pari and talking and laughing about the boys passing by whom we know by sight and have classified as "The handsome but conceited one," "The one trying to imitate Alain Delon," "The one with the tiny eyes and funny-looking head." Reaching over to the tall palm tree on the street and picking golden fresh dates and eating them…. All that becomes a part of me again, though the scene before me is of Manhattan high-rises, some of their windows still lit at late hours of the night.
In addition to writing fiction I also teach fiction at various universities. There is one piece of advice that I am always confident to give to the students: write about subjects that you are obsessed or fascinated by, that matter deeply to yourself.
Will I myself ever run out of material, writing about my past? It seems to me I could write indefinitely drawing from that period—about my mother who married at the age of twelve and had ten children (she had three more girls after me, one of them died of malaria), whose oldest son is only fifteen years younger than herself; about my aunt's suffering with the two husbands, her yearnings for a child in a culture where a woman's life is meaningless without children; about various aspects of my sisters' and brothers' lives; about all the young girls I grew up with, some of them becoming trapped in bad marriages arranged for them, some of them with enough determination to get away to freer worlds. Then I could go back and expand some of those early brief sketches and short stories and bring to them new perspectives I have gained through writing and living longer myself.
There seems to be no end to the material I can draw from. But one question is always with me, haunts me. Would I have become a writer without Pari's encouragement? The question is always followed by a sadness that I have not been able to give her anything as sustaining in return. She, like myself, was always looking for escape from the circumscribed roles set for her as a woman in a culture that discriminates so grossly against women. In what way do her flights into mental illness correspond to my flights into the fantasy world of fiction? For though I draw from experience, much of what I write still has to be imagined, fabricated, distorted. When Pari looks at her hand and says, "It's turning black from the lotion you sent to me," or when she burns any money she gets hold of, saying, "I can always make more of them," is she trying to say something else?
Rachlin contributed the following update to CA in 2007:
Since I wrote my original essay, a great deal has happened. Although I still view Maryam as my mother, I reconciled with Mohtaram. From the perspective of passage of time and living in a new culture, I can see how difficult my mother's life had been, marrying when practically a child to a man much older than herself, giving birth to one child after another, altogether ten. My father loosened his tight grip on me as I grew older and more independent. The Islamic Revolution, the overthrow of the Shah and a new regime taking over made visits back and forth extremely difficult at times. Still, whenever possible, I went to Teheran and stayed with my aunt, and she visited me in America. My writing has gone well too—I published two new novels, a memoir, and several new short stories. But I have had a huge tragedy revolving around my sister Pari.
The shocking news of her dying was made even more traumatic by the way it came to me—in the middle of a night by phone. I woke to a loud siren from an ambulance that took people to the emergency rooms of Mt. Sinai or Lenox Hill Hospitals, in New York City. I was alone in the apartment that night; my husband was in Boston on some work-related task. As the sirens receded, I could hear the phone ringing. I leaned over and picked it up. A woman said in Farsi, "Nahid, this is Pari's friend, Azar."
"So nice to hear from you. Is Pari with you?" I had met Azar on my previous visit to Iran.
"I'm afraid not," she said, her voice trembling. "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news." There was a pause and then the sound of weeping. Her next words went through me like shards of glass. "I'm so sorry, Nahid, our dear Pari had a terrible accident. She lost her balance and tripped down the stairway of their house. It was too late by the time she reached the hospital."
I began choking on my own breath. I just couldn't say a word.
"It happened a month ago, no, to be exact five weeks ago, but it took this long for me to get your phone number from Pari's husband and then get through the international lines. Are you there? … Mansour was away for a few days. I was with her, so were two other friends. It took a long time for the ambulance to come."
The line went dead. The phone rang again and again, but each time as soon as I picked it up we became disconnected. After trying many times to reach information in Iran, I found there were more than a hundred Mirshahis, Azar's last name, listed. I didn't have Azar's address. I tried other numbers in Teheran, first Mansour, Pari's second husband, whom she had separated from and then reconciled with, but couldn't reach him, or anyone else I tried. My father had died and my mother and aunt were away to Turkey.
I had an impulse to call my husband in Boston but didn't. It was as if talking about it would make it all too real. Still the reality was there, coming to me in disturbing images. I envisioned two medics, both females, shrouded in black clothes, coming to Pari's aid as she lay at the bottom of the stairwell. I imagined them listening to her pulse, heartbeat, covering her with a sheet, and carrying her to the ambulance waiting outside.
Lost her balance. Something ice cold slipped into my crowded thoughts: the accident must have been intentional. Perhaps her relationship with Mansour hadn't really improved. Then there were all her other losses: her being prevented to even entertain the thought of acting, not having her son with her, as his father, her first husband, had kept him even from visiting her. I could see her standing on the top of the steep stairway, looking down and telling herself: "Jump, and that will be the end of pain."
I don't know how long I sat there, feeling broken into pieces. Neither do I recall how I got from the bed to the living room couch. I was full of dread, doom. Through the window I could see rain falling, and thought, in a strange, hallucinatory way, the rapid drops of rain were my own tears. How was it possible that I would never see Pari again? At some level of my existence, in my fantasy, I had hoped one day, somehow or other, she and I would be living close to each other, in our old intimacy. Now that dream was completely shattered.
For so much of my life I had found solace in writing. Maneuvering details into a coherent story had a calming effect. Pari too had always needed the world of the imagination, and she had, step-by-step and to an increasing degree, become deprived of that world. That deprivation cast a darker shadow on everything else going on in her life. She wasn't allowed to give her dissatisfactions and disappointments, her losses, shape and meaning and so she became their prisoner. The only way I could cope with feelings of loss was to find out more about what happened, to get closer to the truth of the accident. I decided to go to Teheran and find out exactly what happened to Pari.
There were new and fluctuating rules and regulations to follow every time I went to Iran. I had to check to see what I needed to do; three years had passed since I last visited. I called the Iranian Interest Section, in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, DC. This now functioned as a go-between, since there was no Iranian consulate or embassy in the United States, the two countries having broken relationships since Americans were taken hostage in Iran in 1979, what became known as the hostage crisis.
The official answering the phone informed me that there was no problem with me going there and returning, as long as I didn't show my U.S. passport when arriving and leaving Iran. I needed only to show my Iranian passport to them. I also had to follow the hejab and cover my hair and arms and legs. I could wear a head scarf and a raincoat, that would be sufficient, but I should make sure they were dark colors. Bright colors on women were now condemned by the regime. I also shouldn't wear makeup or nail polish. The official cautioned me about certain other things. If I took any books or magazines along with me, I should make sure they didn't contain any photos of women with hair or skin showing. As if he were a friend, he advised me to hide my U.S. passport in the lining of my purse or raincoat, so that it wouldn't be discovered easily. He also advised me to go without my husband or daughter. My husband's being Jewish didn't matter; Khomeini, like the Shah, had declared Jews to be "people of the book." But he, and my daughter too, both being American-born did matter somewhat and there was no guarantee that they wouldn't be questioned and delayed.
I arrived at Mehrabad Airport late at night. I was relieved that nothing out of the ordinary happened, as my passport was checked. The officer at the customs booth made me open my suitcase and purse. "Go ahead," he said. I felt a surge of relief again—he hadn't noticed my American passport in the lining of my purse.
Since my aunt was away, I was staying in a hotel. In my room I unpacked, took a shower, and sat in bed. I dialed our number at home to tell my husband that I had arrived safely but I couldn't get through—calls between Iran and America were never easy. I turned off the light and tried to get some sleep. In the morning, after a quick breakfast in the hotel's dining room, I left for Azar's house.
*Azar's building stood on a narrow street lined by two- or three-story houses, divided into separate apartments, all with tall windows, to allow north light in. Some of the windows were covered by lace curtains. The apartment had been provided for her after her husband was killed during the eight-year-old war with Iraq.
"I wish we were seeing each other on a happier occasion," Azar said as we embraced in the doorway.
As she hurried to the kitchen to make tea, I took off my raincoat and head scarf, and sat on the sofa. The voice of a man singing a dreamy love song, accompanied by santur and donbak, blared out of a phonograph in the corner. You came to me in the dark of the night … Your eyes bright stars …
It was the kind of song that the clergy could interpret as being about the Prophet Mohammad revealing himself to someone, so it was acceptable. While I waited for Azar, I noticed jasmine flowers floating in a bowl on the coffee table. A rocking horse stood in one corner, and some other toys lay in another corner.
Azar came back with the tea. She had taken off her head scarf, and her shimmering chestnut hair fell over her shoulders. My eyes focused on a small painting on the wall behind her. It depicted a woman covered by a dark chador and holding a little boy on her lap, with the boy's face turned to her. The colors were somber—gray blue, black.
"Pari gave this to me just recently, she found it in an art fair. It meant a lot to her but she didn't want to have it any more. I'm not a soul-mate with anyone as I was with Pari. At least my children have friends in the building. They're at school now."
"It's hard to believe Pari just fell down the stairs."
"We had gathered in her house because she wanted to tell us something, but then she fell. We were on the second floor. She went to another room to bring something to show to us. When she didn't come back I went to look for her. Then I heard a moan and realized it was coming from the bottom of the stairway. I saw her lying there. I screamed and ran down the stairs. She was unconscious, Nahid, and the side of her face was bleeding. It's odd she didn't scream or anything as she was falling down."
Azar had tears in her eyes and I felt tears collecting in mine too. We both cried for a moment. After we were calmer, Azar said, "She could have hit her head and immediately become unconscious. You know she had all those problems. I don't want to allow myself to believe she did it intentionally. I hope it was only an accident. You should talk to Latifeh and Zohreh too; they were there at the time of the accident."
Latifeh's house stood on a dead-end alley. Zohreh and Azar were already waiting at the dining table, Latifeh told me as she opened the door, and led me inside. Latifeh was older than the other two, and had pale skin and light brown hair. Zohreh was dark-haired, had near-black eyes, and wore a morose expression.
"We all fought for the Revolution and now we feel cheated. Our lives didn't become any easier," Zohreh said to me. "Laws are so discriminatory towards women."
"Yes, it's so unfair. Pari's first husband was so abusive, but she had to pay such a high price for leaving him."
"She had every reason to be depressed," Zohreh said.
"Do you think …"
"She once was so despairing after she came back from court, always fighting to get her son back, that I was worried about her," Zohreh said. "But I don't think she really wanted to end her life. She heard from someone who knew her first husband that her son had been trying to find her. She expected Bijan to come to her house any day."
"Pari never told me that," Azar said.
"She didn't tell me either," Latifeh said.
Zohreh shrugged.
"Nahid," Azar said. "Mansour committed Pari to a sanitarium. The doctors released her after a month."
"One of Mansour's relatives who knows my husband told him that Mansour's brothers are already looking for a new wife for him. They thought Pari was wrong for him, that she felt superior to him," Zohreh said.
I fell into silence. That Mansour would be substituting another woman for Pari so quickly made my heart ache. It was odd that Mansour hadn't tried to reach me after the accident.
We talked a while longer, sorrow casting a wider and wider shadow over us but none of us reached any conclusions about the accident. How unreal this all was. Pari, with so much life to her, was now out of reach. I wished I could believe what Maryam had told me on those long ago days—that death was only a temporary state and the person will be brought back to life on the Day of Judgment and eventually reunited with loved ones.
I was burning to find Mansour and talk to him, but it was one o'clock and offices would be still closed. I decided to get a haircut at the salon Pari had pointed out to me when I had last been in Teheran. A sheet of paper pasted to a burlap curtain on a door read, "Haircut, blow dry, thirty toomans." The shop appeared to be open. I rang the bell. A plump woman, with henna-red hair poking out from below her head scarf, opened the door and looked at me blankly. I asked her if I could get a haircut without an appointment. She told me the shop was closed. I told her I was Pari's sister and wanted to talk to her.
"Oh," she said, her demeanor changing at once. "You must be Nahid, Pari talked about you a lot. She missed you. I'm so sorry about Pari joon, what a tragedy."
Farideh said she would give me a haircut and we could talk. I followed her into the courtyard and into a room with its door open. Photographs of women in different hair styles hung on the walls.
She washed my hair, then asked me what kind of cut I wanted.
"Just shape it the way you did Pari's," I said.
"I put blonde highlights in Pari's hair. Do you want the same?"
"Yes, please…. I wished I knew what was going on in her heart and mind before the accident."
"The same thought has been going around and around in my head and some of the girls here who knew her. We've all been very upset of course. Everyone loved Pari. If you want my honest opinion, I don't believe she just lost her balance. Her outlook was dark the last time I saw her."
After Farideh was finished highlighting, she washed and blew dry my hair. She held a mirror for me to look at the outcome. "It's just like Pari's," she said. As I was leaving I tried to pay her, but she refused the money.
"Please. I did it in honor of my dear friend."
The next day, in the lobby of Mogadessi National Oil Company, where Mansour worked, the receptionist, a woman covered from head to toe in a black chador, directed me to his office. A door to a room had been left ajar, and I saw that it was a prayer room for women, with several women standing in front of prayer rugs, bowing and rising.
Mansour opened the door. "Nahid Khanoom, what a surprise," he said, giving a start.
He had lost weight, his hair was disheveled, his eyes bloodshot. His clothes, a brown blazer, beige pants, and a white shirt, all looked creased. I sat on a chair and he behind the desk and we looked at each other awkwardly.
He had a box of gaz, on his desk, and he held it before me to take one. I shook my head. My throat felt constricted.
"You didn't even call me about my sister's accident. I had to hear it in the middle of the night from a friend," I managed to speak the words after a moment of uncomfortable silence between us.
"I'm sorry, Nahid, I tried to call you, couldn't get through, and then I couldn't bear trying again. I'm in shock myself." His voice grew tremulous. "I was away for three days visiting my ailing mother and then that happened. Oh, I tried so hard to please Pari, make her happy, but nothing worked. Sometimes she spent entire days in bed. She said her first husband had been following her around in a car. I never knew if she was imagining things or they really happened. She constantly talked about how meaningless her life was and how terrible she felt about Bijan. She kept saying she wished she were dead. I had to put her in a sanitarium again, I was afraid for her." A touch of righteousness came into his voice as he said, "It was for her own sake, but she felt I had betrayed her."
"Do you think she brought that on herself, the falling…."
"Nahid joon, I can't be sure. She didn't leave a note or anything. But she was giving her belongings away." Mansour sighed. "But she's finally at peace, a repose she didn't find living. I couldn't bear the house after what happened. I rented it and moved out to an apartment."
"I wish I could be in the house again, see those steps," I said.
"It's hard with the renters. Besides, what's the point, why bring back the horror?"
There was a knock on the door and Mansour opened it. A man in a suit whispered something to Mansour and left.
"I was just given an assignment that will take me out of Teheran for a few days," Mansour said, coming back to his seat. "How long are you going to be here?"
I told him I'd be in Iran for six more days, and I wanted to visit Pari's grave. He said it was in Behesht Zahra (Zahra's Heaven) cemetery, named after the Prophet Mohammad's daughter, martyr Fatemeh Zahra. He had had a tree planted next to her grave and he paid someone to attend to it. He wished he could go with me, but he didn't know how long his assignment away from Teheran would last. He advised me to wait a day or two before going to the cemetery; the computer system that identified graves was down temporarily and there were thousands of graves there because all the dead soldiers were buried there too. He himself would have trouble finding the grave without that guidance.
Outside, I felt so overwhelmed by helplessness and confusion that I wondered why I had come to Iran. Why was I tormenting myself? Was there something deeply damaged about me that had been scratched by Pari's death? As if pulled by a magnet I started towards the sanitarium. I recalled the exact location; it had penetrated my brain when Pari had pointed it out to me, as the place she had been hospitalized in before. I had a vague hope that a nurse or a doctor would remember Pari and tell me something about her. Maybe they could look up her records. I passed a row of bargain clothing stores, electronic stores, toy shops. A group of boys in the red, green, and white shirts of the Iranian national soccer team rushed by. Graffiti covered walls. "THE GREAT SATAN AMERICA," "THE ARCH VILLAIN, AMERICA."
Finally the sanitarium loomed into sight. It was now called Aram Bag (Calm Garden). A muscular man with a curling black mustache was standing around by its door. I convinced him to let me in. There was no one in the courtyard, as there had been when I had passed it with Pari. It seemed, judging by how quiet it was, that this was the time patients were kept indoors, perhaps to be given tests, medicine, or examined by doctors.
I entered the reception area and, after I explained to the receptionist why I was there, she led me to a nurse. A nurse, wearing a navy head scarf and a white uniform, was sitting on a chair next to a window, knitting. I introduced myself and she told me her name was Shirin.
"Of course I remember Pari," she said as I sat on a chair across from her. "We were friends."
"I took her out a few times for lunch. She was depressed, but nothing serious. She was a delightful patient. With her lively imagination she lifted us from the grayness of life."
"Yes, she had that capacity. Now she's dead."
Shirin gave a start. "She died? I'm so sorry to hear it. Of what?"
I told her about the accident.
"That's so sad, I can't believe it," Shirin said.
"Was she suicidal?" I asked.
"I don't think she would bring something like that on herself. She was full of life, in spite of everything."
"Is it possible for me to speak to her psychiatrist?"
"Doctors rotate. He isn't here now. But a young psychiatrist who had seen Pari a few times is still here."
Just then a patient ran into the hall, screaming, "Water, water," and the nurse dashed out to help. When she came back, we resumed talking, with me asking more questions about Pari, and she asking me questions about life in America. The silence in the hall was broken again by sounds of coughing, strange, harsh laughter, incomprehensible mumbles, groans of misery. A middle-aged woman in a beige hospital gown shuffled down the hall. A red substance was smeared all over her face. She was saying to no one in particular, "Terrible, terrible."
Several nurses appeared. One of them took the woman's arm and led her away. Others passed by carrying thermometers, vials of blood, bottles of pills, syringes.
When it became quiet again, Shirin asked, "Was there any letter?"
"No, Pari hadn't left a suicide note or anything."
She shook her head, and said nothing else.
Dr. Hejazi, the psychiatrist, was young and sullen. His office was plain, with no personal touches, and he didn't look at me as I sat across from him.
"If you know so much about medicine why don't I give you my doctor's coat?" he said sharply.
"You talk to me like that because I'm a woman," I said, blood racing to my face. "You wouldn't say anything like that to a man."
"What I hate about Iranians living in America is that they pick up this kind of ridiculous jargon."
"You can at least tell me what medication she was on."
"Lithium, to calm her down."
"Isn't that given for a bipolar condition?"
"We give it for other problems too. She wouldn't be here if she didn't have problems," he said with a dismissive gesture of his hand.
I got up and left the room. The encounter felt unreal, as if it had been a nightmare. I remembered that as a child I had asked the pharmacist near Maryam's house about some medicine I was picking up. He had turned to his partner and said with a derisive laugh, "Look at this girl, asking such questions!" I had felt hurt for days.
In the courtyard, a patient who was sitting on a bench got up and came over to me. She gave me a piece of folded paper and walked away.
I unfolded the paper. Please get me out of here.
As I continued to the entrance, another patient came into the courtyard. "Get me out of this cage," she shouted. "What have I done to be punished like this, get me out, get me out."
Another woman joined in. "I want to die, please let me."
*At the cemetery entrance a giant pair of granite hands held a large red tulip. In a distance, through the smog, I could see the gold dome and minarets of a mosque. Vendors appeared, hawking bouquets or single flowers to people passing in cars or on foot. I stopped by a little girl and bought a bouquet from her, then went to the booth next to the entrance and asked the man sitting inside for directions. He went into a room and came back in a few moments and told me exactly how to get to Pari's grave. I walked down tree-lined paths, passing people who were sitting on blankets spread in the shade of trees. Trays of sweets and fruit wrapped in plastic and tied with black ribbons were set to be served for the memorial of their loved ones. A beggar in a dusty black chador, holding a sleeping child in one arm, the other hand outstretched, approached them one by one.
Finally I came across a row of marble headstones engraved with epitaphs like, "Open the gates of heaven," or, "Your soul is already in heaven." I noticed two women kneeling by the grave of a young man and looking at photographs of him that were inside of a plastic case fastened to a pole next to the stone.
"You're in heaven and at peace," one of the women said. "It's we mortals who are suffering."
Then I was at Pari's grave. The tree that Mansour said he had had planted shaded the grave. Two doves were engraved on the horizontal stone. As I put the flowers on the stone, my mind denied that Pari was dead. "This is no place for you," I told Pari. "Come on out, I'm here to see you." Though I knew I had said these words, I was startled to hear my voice.
A teenage boy appeared and offered to wash the grave. As he performed his task he recited:
Oh, beautiful woman, your pure soul will be
carried to heaven by two angels.
Oh, the example of purity, you'll be soon in heaven
where a garlanded seat under cool shady trees is awaiting you.
A bird hopped on the grave and then flew away, going up and up until it was swallowed by the sunny sky. "That was her soul," the man said matter-of-factly. "If it's a bird it means she's in heaven, otherwise a fly would have appeared."
I paid him more than he asked; he had asked for so little. After he left, I sunk into a state of near-oblivion. I spent the next few days, talking to whoever I could find who knew Pari, but no one had the same impression, about what really happened.
Back in New York I tried to push away my dark thoughts and feelings by involving myself with the more stable, pleasurable aspects of my life, but the loss of Pari and not knowing what really happened, remains like a dark hole in my existence. When I look at Pari in her photograph on my desk, with her hopeful bright smile, other images rush back: how my loneliness went away as soon as she entered our house in Ahvaz, she on the stage playing the part of Laura from Tennessee Williams play Glass Menagerie in translation, my dreams to write a play for her, her telling me, as I read her a story, "You're so good." Then she is here with me, sitting next to me.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Rachlin, Nahid, Persian Girls: A Memoir, Jeremy P. Tarcher (New York, NY), 2006.
PERIODICALS
Belles Lettres, fall, 1992, Marilyn Booth, review of Veils: Short Stories, p. 52; spring, 1994, Saideh Pakravan, review of Married to a Stranger, p. 53.
Booklist, March 1, 2006, Donna Chavez, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 67.
Literary Review, fall, 1996, Thomas Filbin, reviews of Married to a Stranger, Veils, and Foreigner, p. 172.
MELUS, summer, 2008, Persis M. Karim, interview with Rachlin, pp. 153-158, and Armena Moinfar, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 181.
Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1983, Carolyn See, review of Married to a Stranger, p. 20.
New York Times Book Review, February 18, 1979, Anne Tyler, review of Foreigner, p. 3; October 2, 1983, Barbara Thompson, review of Married to a Stranger, p. 14; November 29, 1992, Laurel Graeber, review of Veils, p. 18.
Publishers Weekly, July 22, 1983, review of Married to a Stranger, p. 118; April 20, 1992, review of Veils, p. 19; May 31, 1993, review of Married to
a Stranger, p. 47; October 2, 1995, review of The Heart's Desire, p. 66; January 23, 2006, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 186; August 7, 2006, review of Persian Girls, p. 45.
School Library Journal, August, 2006, Christine C. Menefee, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 145.
Seattle Times, July 21, 2006, Michael Upchurch, review of Jumping over Fire, p. 137.
World Literature Today, spring, 1996, Nasrin Rahimieh, review of The Heart's Desire, p. 463.
ONLINE
Iranian.com,http://www.iranian.com/ (January 18, 1996), review of The Heart's Desire.
Nahid Rachlin Home Page,http://www.nahidrachlin.com (June 16, 2008).
Persian Mirror Online,http://www.persianmirror.com/ (June 16, 2008), Shabnam Rezaei, interview with Rachlin.