The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (8 page)

This time there were men among the party, and so Lili kept her eyes fixed on the tray she was carrying in her hands. Khanoom infused the afternoon tea with the essence of rose water and cardamom and assembled a tower of plump and glistening dates on her best china plate. Lili’s hands trembled as she entered the
mehmoon khooneh
, guest parlor, with these delicacies, but somehow she managed to serve the party in the proper order: first the oldest gentlemen (the grandfathers of the Khorrami clan), next the fathers and uncles, then the young man in the gray fedora sitting by himself at the far end of the parlor, and finally the women of the family. She had a vague notion that the young man in the hat was her suitor, but she did not dare look at him more closely.

Never before had she felt so many eyes on her. Her cheeks burned and she kept her eyes cast down on the carpet, but she soon found it was not altogether an unpleasant thing, this being looked at by so many people at once.

But then, just as her nervousness began to ease and she felt herself warming to the party’s attentions, she was suddenly called out
of the
mehmoon khooneh.
She had been in the room less than ten minutes and would spend the rest of the hour behind a door outside the parlor, taking turns peeking through a keyhole with her cousin Soudabeh. It was a vantage point from which Lili could see no more of her suitor than his black dress shoes and the hems of his brown gabardine trousers.

And yet within the space of a week she’d fallen in love. The object of her affections was not her suitor, Kazem, but an enormous emerald set between two diamond-studded bows. It was Kazem’s grandmother Ma Mère who’d brought the ring to Khanoom’s house on a day following the
khastegari
.

“You are like my daughter now,” she said as she slid the ring onto Lili’s finger. “I will love you as well as if you were my own daughter.”

Lili thought this emerald ring with its diamond bows was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. At her first sight of it, she’d immediately flung her arms round Ma Mère’s neck and kissed her many times over.

Some mornings Lili would even sneak the ring into her schoolbag, and at recess she would pull it out to show the other girls at school. They would crowd around her, all of their eyes suddenly wide. There were several girls at the school with
namzads
, fiancés, but they were all in the older grades, close to their graduation dates, and in any case none of them were allowed to wear their engagement rings to school.

That year Lili was the youngest one with a suitor, a fact that duly impressed all her friends—especially when she showed them the exquisite jewel that had been given to her.

“Is he handsome?” one of the girls asked dreamily one day.

Lili was taken aback by the question. It occurred to her she had not even seen her suitor’s face.

“Of course,” she lied. “Like a movie star.”

Kazem did visit Khanoom’s house once more before the
aqd
(wedding). The girl’s question at school had upset Lili enough for her to insist on seeing him once more before the wedding ceremony. It was therefore agreed that one evening she and her aunt should appear outside the window of Khanoom’s front parlor at an appointed hour. Kazem would be sitting in the room by himself, and from the courtyard Lili would be able to inspect him discreetly through a window.

At seven o’clock in the evening, the sky was already nearly dark, and the room in which Lili sought a glimpse of her suitor was illuminated by a single paraffin lamp.

“Well, do you see him?” asked her aunt impatiently.

Lili squinted, peered again through the glass, and said she thought she could make out a man in a coat and a fedora.

“But
ammeh
[Auntie], why is he always wearing a hat?”

“What a foolish girl!” replied her aunt. “This is the new style. Your suitor is a modern young man!”

But she was not convinced—not at all. That night she asked her grandmother to pay a visit to the Khorramis herself and inspect Kazem on her behalf.

“Please, Khanoom,” Lili begged. “You must tell me what he looks like without his hat!”

Khanoom laughed.

“
Bacheh-joon
[My dear child], is this what marriage is to you? What lies beneath a man’s hat?”

Her grandmother’s tone was more good-humored than disapproving, but even so Lili’s lips began to quiver, and for the first time she began to cry about what she could not yet imagine.

Now there was nothing to do but wait.

Several years earlier, Reza Shah had raised the age at which girls could be married from nine to sixteen. There was, however, a
provision by which families could handily circumvent this law. If a doctor or midwife examined a girl and found her body “mature,” she could be married at thirteen—three years earlier than the law formally allowed. The examination often included confirmation of the girl’s virginity, a detail without which the marriage preparations would not have proceeded.

Lili had been checked before. The year she turned ten and found a spot of blood in her underpants, she had rushed to Kobra’s side. “Am I sick? Will I die?” she asked through quavering lips. Kobra took one look at the blood and slapped Lili hard and quick across both cheeks. “But why?” Lili whimpered. “I didn’t want to do it,
azizam
[dear one],” Kobra replied, her own eyes smarting with tears. “It’s only a custom. It will keep the blush on your cheeks until your wedding!”

One of her aunts had been troubled, though, by this early onset of menstruation, and had hauled Lili to a midwife to confirm that the all-important “curtain of chastity” was still intact. On the midwife’s finding Lili whole (and therefore still marriageable), her aunt and Lili returned quickly to the house and there all her aunts and stepmothers had gathered around her to sweeten their tongues. “You are a woman now!” they’d declared, beaming.

This time, for her marriage, the examination would be repeated with just a single point of difference: since the word of one female relative would be insufficient proof for the groom’s family, Zaynab and two of Lili’s other aunts would bear witness, too.

Lili was forbidden by her grandmother and aunts from seeing Kazem until the
aqd konoon
, the first nuptial ceremony, but he would often convey candies and small presents to her through a messenger. At No Rooz that first year Kazem sent her an enormous bouquet of tuberoses.

It was, however, the emerald ring that was her best proof of coming happiness. Except for the few times she’d managed to sneak it
into her schoolbag, the ring stayed locked in a bureau at home, but whenever she began to ask about Kazem or the marriage she was allowed to retrieve it from its hiding place and slip it on her finger for a few hours.

The ring would cost her dearly. Sohrab had extended just one condition for his daughter’s marriage: that the Khorramis allow her to continue as a student at the School of Virtue. But a few months shy of the final marriage ceremony, it was discovered that Lili had been showing off her emerald ring to the other girls at school, and the transgression would swiftly upend Sohrab’s decree.

She’d been sitting in one corner of the schoolyard, surrounded by her girlfriends, when Mistress the Second descended upon the group, seized Lili’s engagement ring, and, for good measure, slapped her several times across the face.

“This is a serious school!” she screamed. “A modern school!”

With a good deal more composure, Mistress the Elder would later explain to Sohrab that the School of Virtue did not wish to have any child brides among its charges. It did not speak well of the school’s mission, and Lili was not to return the next day. Sohrab was furious. He rose to his feet, banged his walking stick against the floor, and then proceeded to curse the lady with a lavishness that failed to unsettle her even slightly.

The next day Sohrab began to cast about Tehran for another school, but he soon learned that the other private schools in the city shared the philosophy of the School of Virtue with respect to his daughter’s situation.

During this period, talk of Lili’s impending marriage would be eclipsed by news that Kobra had finally managed to conceive a third child, a development that, to Sohrab’s family at least, seemed only scarcely less incredible than the virgin birth itself.

Whereas a family with five and six children was thought quite ordinary and as many as twelve would have not have aroused comment
or speculation, a family with just two children was regarded as an oddity. Clearly Kobra, still in her twenties, was fertile; her failure to become pregnant was therefore judged yet another sign of her husband’s lack of regard.

Over time this very lack of regard had only managed to augment Kobra’s love for Sohrab. As both her spirits and her standing in the family sank with each childless year, Kobra sought different strategies for wooing Sohrab back from the blue-eyed jinn who’d ensnared him. Kobra always set aside the most succulent pieces of meat and the very thickest pieces of crisped rice for him. By day she laundered and pressed his suits, and by night she painted her face, plucked her brows, and groomed her nails for him.

Such ordinary wifely duties were supplemented with supernatural devotions. She patronized back-alley spiritualists, called
jadoo-jambals
, who charged one fee to fend off plain mistresses and another, much higher fee to fend off beautiful ones. Every time, Kobra paid the maximum fee and returned with her head swimming with fresh hope and elaborate spells. She whipped up concoctions involving such things as cat urine, dill weed, and rose petals, recited the spiritualists’ recommended incantations, and proceeded to sprinkle her love potions along the doorways and windowpanes of Khanoom’s house.

One year on
Chahar Shanbeh Soori,
the first of the New Year festivities, Kobra grabbed a handful of golden coins, pulled on her veil, and picked her way through the bonfires in the streets. When she reached the Jewish baths, she disrobed and threw her lot in with the unmarried, the infertile, and the generally accursed who flocked there on this night for the Jews’ famed cures. As she was led from corner to corner of the bathhouse and doused with purifying waters, Kobra offered up prayers to Moses’ mother, Jochebed, then dressed without toweling off the precious moisture. Kobra passed back over the threshold of the house on Avenue Moniriyeh whispering the
name of Moses’ father to herself over and over, just as she’d been instructed. “Amran, Amran, Amran…”

Nothing she did had any effect whatsoever on Sohrab.

Indeed, he might never have returned to her but for his ever-shifting fortunes. Kobra’s third child had been conceived during one of Kobra and Sohrab’s “reconciliations”—one of those interludes when Sohrab’s finances had dipped dangerously low and he therefore had no choice but to return to his mother’s house, and to Kobra’s bed. At such times Sohrab found in Kobra an unlikely but reliable source of financial support. He knew she regularly skimmed a few
tomans
off whatever housekeeping money he gave her, and although her savings did not amount to very much, on more than one occasion it would be just enough to pay off his most pressing debts.

He was not exactly kind toward her when he took her money, but Sohrab certainly grumbled much less than usual, and when Kobra sewed herself a long, pleated dress and began sweeping through the house in it, grinning and stroking her belly with great emphasis, it was obvious to everyone that she’d more than exacted her due. Kobra strung up a moleskin hammock—a
nanoo
—from one of her bedroom walls to the other, unfurled a mattress for herself on the floor, and waited for her baby to arrive. He was born in the spring and she named him Omid, which means “hope.”

For a long time Kobra believed that Omid’s birth would bring Sohrab back to Avenue Moniriyeh for good. When this did not come to pass, she simply threw all her love and longing at her little baby boy. As Lili was by then twelve (and fast approaching the date of her marriage to Kazem) and Nader eleven years old, Kobra’s days were taken up entirely with Omid. Never in her life had she been happier than when she was bent over his
nanoo
, cooing him into sleep. Kobra would have loved him no less if he’d been the picture of ugliness, but Omid was a perfectly beautiful baby—fair and plump, with a thick fringe of lashes around his black eyes and a sweetly dimpled
chin. She dressed him in navy blue sailor suits that she sewed for him herself. Every few months she sat him down on the floor of the kitchen, placed a small bowl on his head, and then sang to him as she clipped his hair. And as Omid grew from an infant into a toddler, his capers charmed Kobra so far from her cares that for a time she did not seem to have any cares at all.

One afternoon a portly, wizened woman named Touba Khanoom came to the house to pluck Lili’s eyebrows for the very first time. “She has a good hand for it,” Khanoom explained, and pressed a golden coin into the lady’s palm for good luck. Lili was seated on a chair, facing east, toward Mecca, and her hair was pulled back in a white kerchief. As Ma Mère and several other of Lili’s in-laws-to-be waited with coins clenched between their fists, Touba Khanoom cut a length of thread with her teeth, dipped it into a bowl of rose water, and then, with a great flourish, called out, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the All-Knowing!” At the first pluck, Lili’s aunts let loose the traditional wedding trills—unending waves of “Lililililililili!” that echoed Lili’s name.

“May there always be weddings in this house!” Touba exclaimed as the women pressed more gold coins into her pockets. “May she give you ten sons!”

At dawn the next day, two porters came to the house and took away the
khoncheh
, the two ceremonial wedding offerings. On one silver tray rested thousands of wild rue seeds that had been dyed and arranged into long, flowing arabesques. On the other lay foot-long sheets of saffron-spiced bread. Each of the porters lifted a tray and placed it on his head, straining visibly under the weight.

The first nuptial ceremony—the
aqd konoon
—had been scheduled to take place exactly six months before Lili’s thirteenth birthday. Khanoom had insisted that it be held in the traditional fashion, with
separate wedding parties for the men and women. The first night, when the
aqd
was to be performed, was only for the men, and there would be musicians and a troupe of dancers to entertain them in the garden. The second night, a much less lavish affair in all but the foods to be prepared, would be for the women of the two families. The Khorramis thought this arrangement unspeakably backward but had eventually sent their grudging consent.