Scattered Pearls Read online

  Contents

  Epigraph

  1. Reflections

  2. The house in Takht-e Tavoos

  3. Shahin: a life of wealth and poverty

  4. Accepted destinies

  5. Emerging

  6. Revolution, activism and retreat

  7. Chance meeting

  8. New home, new life, new hope

  9. Pregnancy and inertia

  10. The bottom

  11. Scattered pearls

  12. Laya’s story

  13. An end and many beginnings

  14. A profession of my own

  15. Love and loss, part one

  16. Love and loss, part two

  Acknowledgements

  Book club questions

  To all those women the world over who have cried in silence, unseen and unheard

  Human beings are members of a whole,

  In creation of one essence and soul.

  If one member is afflicted with pain,

  Other members uneasy will remain.

  If you’ve no sympathy for human pain,

  The name of human you cannot retain!

  — Saadi, translated by M. Aryanpoor

  1

  Reflections

  Rubber gloves, a sink full of suds, a pile of dirty dishes. And a lonely heart.

  I have spent many evenings staring at the reflection in my kitchen window. The darkness outside and steam from the water give the image of the living room behind me a misty glow. The room is always busy with people: my parents, my brothers and sisters, my children, friends. Their banter and debates and arguments ebb and flow, conversations folding in and around each other in ripples of English and Persian. The smell is of tea, always tea.

  I shift my gaze from the room to my own face. The person reflected back looks tired and a little drawn, but it has been another long day. The eyes look deep into my soul, and I am reminded that despite the warmth of my family around me there is still a hole in my life. It is not only the love of a partner that is missing, but the respect of one too. The care. The empathy. Even just the touch.

  I allow my imagination to take hold, shutting out the voices behind me and closing in on my own world. I imagine a man, tall and gentle, coming up quietly behind me as I clean up. He slides his hands around my waist and pulls himself close; he places his chin onto my shoulder and stares ahead with a gentle smile. My reflection smiles back.

  It doesn’t seem a lot to ask for, so why is it so elusive? Why, after three generations, am I still searching? Why, after over twenty years in Australia, am I still searching? My mind drifts back to 1981 and Iran, to the last time I saw my grandmother.

  ~

  Laya lay still, her eyes closed, her pale face calm. Light washed through the large windows causing the colours of the Persian carpet to shine and giving the white walls and white bedding an ethereal radiance. As I walked towards my grandmother, her lips moved almost imperceptibly. She opened her eyes and saw me, a wave of kindness washing over her. She smiled the best smile she could muster.

  ‘Salam,’ I said.

  ‘How good that you came, Sohila,’ said Laya, her voice just above a whisper.

  I sat down beside the bed and she slowly moved her hand up, placing it on my head.

  ‘I was looking at the door,’ she continued, using an old expression which meant she had been hoping someone would visit. ‘How beautiful you are. Bring your face closer so I can kiss you.’

  I leant closer and, crying inside myself, said, ‘I love you, Nana-gha. Everybody loves you. God willing you will get better soon and I will be able to take you to our house.’

  ‘No, no. I am past that. It is the end of the path.’

  I pulled in closer towards her. Laya’s breath was warm and calm.

  ‘What dreams I have for you, Sohila. You will have a husband who is educated, a gentleman who will love you with all his heart and mind and soul. A husband who you can also love. Life should smile at you. You should have so much happiness that there is no room for sorrow. Yours will be the opposite of my life and that of your mother, with all our sadness and pain.’

  She fell silent, and I noticed tears creeping from the corners of her eyes, running over the dry creases in her cheeks.

  ‘Why do you upset yourself? Better that you rest so you can get better.’

  I stroked her head. It was so sad to see this woman reduced to skin and bones. She had been so strong her whole life.

  ‘I have come to say goodbye,’ I said. ‘I am going away for a trip. When I return I will bring you presents.’

  ‘No, no. My heart says I won’t see you again.’

  ‘Oh come, Nana-gha. You were the one who always gave us hope.’

  ‘Ah, hope. Hope is so good. To have hope. To have dreams. If you fall you stand up. You run and run to reach . . . to reach happiness. But if they close the path to you . . . you want to fly but they cut your wings. You are imprisoned. And inside yourself you may become dead.’

  She was no longer looking at me, but staring straight up, in her own world.

  ‘When I was married to my first husband at fifteen, I didn’t know what a husband was. I was a young girl and just wanted to play with my toys, with the rag dolls my mother had made for me. Later I wanted my children to go to school, to become literate, to know their worth . . . to have respect. But I failed. I know how much you and your mother suffered because of Asghar. My son showed no kindness to either you or your mother; every day was worse than the one before. How I hated myself and hated life. But this son of mine had little chance of being anything else.’

  My grandmother fell silent again. There was nothing I could say. I continued to stroke her head. Ever so slightly she brightened.

  ‘But I see my childhood and my youth in you. Every time I hear the sound of your laugh and know you are happy, my body starts to dance. I want to tell you, Sohila: love life, and love love. Don’t live a life in which others define your destiny. Like my life. Like your mother’s life. There was no way out. Poverty. Lack of education. We were entangled and could not live any better. For you it can be different. You can be a continuation of my soul. In your existence I will continue to live.’

  Laya’s head sank more deeply into her pillow. Soon she was asleep. I stood up, held her hand for a few moments, then left the room. The next day I would be leaving Iran for Australia.

  She would never know just how far I would fall short of the hopes she had for me.

  2

  The house in Takht–e Tavoos

  My mother, Shahin, was 15 years old when she married Asghar, Laya’s eldest son, in 1946. She fell pregnant five months after they married – the first of what would be 14 pregnancies, with as few as 40 days between some of them, over the next 25 years.

  Shahin’s first child, a girl named Malihe, died of pneumonia when she was 14 months old. My mother always believed that this was because she had taken her baby outside in the middle of a very cold winter, with much snow all around; it was only for a few minutes but long enough for the child to catch a bad cold from which she never recovered. Her next child was a boy named Mehrdad, born less than a year later. He died after only seven days due to complications of jaundice. She then lost her next child, another son, the same way. After each death Shahin would cry and cry, but Asghar showed no empathy. ‘When you are dead you are dead,’ he would say.

  In these times – the 1940s and ’50s – healthcare in Iran, at least for less well-off families like ours, was very basic. Conditions like neonatal jaundice, which rarely if ever lead to death in modern times, often caused infant mortality. Superstition, rather than medicine, tended to guide parenting behaviour.

  After the third death, Laya and Shahin tra
velled with Aboo, Laya’s third husband, and two neighbours to Mashhad, an ancient and spiritual city in the far north-east of Iran. It is the location of the enormous Imam Reza Shrine, a temple popular with those who have problems to solve. People come from far and wide, donating as much money and gold as they can (or often cannot) afford, then pray for miracles for everything from medical challenges to family disputes. However, Laya did not turn to God for guidance. Instead she found a fortune teller at the bazaar and invited him to come to their inn to help Shahin.

  When he heard Shahin’s story, the fortune teller said the babies were dying because of ‘extraterrestrials’. It would cost 50 toman – a lot of money at the time – for him to correct matters. However, he agreed to take 20 toman immediately and the rest when the family returned to Mashhad with the good news. The fortune teller asked Shahin to sit on a ‘magic’ bowl. He sat opposite her, then asked Laya and her friend to sit on either side, the four of them forming a diamond. He placed a bowl of water on the floor in the centre of this diamond, then laid a square cloth between the four of them, a corner in each person’s lap. He asked them all to stare at the cloth. All of a sudden there was a chirping noise and the centre of the cloth appeared to rise by itself. Shahin screamed and threw away the cloth.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ said the fortune teller. ‘That was your angel. I have to bring your angel three times.’

  But Shahin would have nothing more to do with it. At the end the fortune teller said that he had sworn at her angel not to harm Shahin’s babies again. She became pregnant again shortly after, gave birth to a son and then lost that son to jaundice after only three days.

  The next advice offered to Shahin came from a neighbour, who declared that her wedding to Asghar had not taken place at a ‘good’ hour. Shahin and her husband needed to divorce and remarry. The man, a mullah wearing a turban, offered to recite the divorce phrase for 10 toman. Once again, Laya handed over the money. Asghar stayed away for 24 hours and by the time he returned home the deed had been done, with little or no obvious change.

  Then a number of women from nearby said that Shahin’s problem was that she ate too many ‘hot’ foods – she needed a better balance of ‘cool’ foods. These terms didn’t relate to the temperature of the foods but to their type. It was a ‘yin-yang’ type of thing. So Laya started sourcing these so-called ‘cool’ foods. From the gardens of the hospital where she worked, she collected khorfeh (purslane), a slippery, tasteless, wild vegetable. This she crushed, extracting the juice. She bought a herb called kasni (chicory) from a vegetable seller and used it to make a bitter juice. As there was no refrigeration, both drinks were stored in bowls outside in the cold air. Shahin drank khorfeh juice one morning and kasni juice the next, alternating between them for three months. Other than that she ate mainly plain bread, avoiding hot foods. When, during Norooz (the Persian new year in March), the local women gathered together to share pastries and cakes, Shahin (who always loved pastries very much) asked for yoghurt.

  Shahin’s fifth child was a girl. She was named Zari and was the most beautiful baby with perfect, pale white skin. She became a little yellow the next day but did not develop a fever. Nevertheless, Shahin would often sit up all night rocking her daughter in her cot, crying the whole time as she waited for Zari to die. Neighbours would pass and call out, ‘Our heart is burning for you, Shahin. God protects you, the tree, and your children are branches’. And this child didn’t die. Zari soon grew into a chatty toddler who became everyone’s favourite.

  It wasn’t long after Zari was born that my parents moved to a new house that they shared with Laya and Aboo and Laya’s middle son Ahmad and his family. The house was close to central Tehran, near the main road of Takht-e Tavoos. My father was a sheet metal worker and had a shop not far away. He also leased and ran a bicycle shop that was also only about one kilometre away.

  Soon after they moved into this house, in April 1955, I was born. I also became jaundiced and quite ill, but somehow I survived.

  ~

  The house in Takht-e Tavoos was in a nice area, with many middle class families – people in the south of Tehran would call it ballay-e-shahr, meaning ‘upper side of the city’. Most of our neighbours had good cars and tastefully furnished homes. They were mostly professional people.

  In contrast, our house was very plain. The building had been designed and built by my father and was jointly owned by him and Ahmad. Middle class Iranian architecture can be quite restrained, largely because heavy concrete bricks are used as the main building material. This, combined with my father’s utilitarian tendencies, meant our house was exceedingly austere. It was a simple brown brick rectangle of two storeys: a basement and a ground floor. Rendered inside in white, both levels were divided down the middle, from front to back, by wide, tiled hallways. My family lived on the basement level which also contained the kitchen. It could be accessed from street level down a flight of eleven green and white granite stairs. I remember it was eleven for two reasons: first, I have always had – and still have – a habit of counting things like this; and second, because those stairs would become my companion every time I left the house for the outside world.

  At the back of the house was a concrete yard. It was lower than the street and could be accessed via five steps up from the basement or six steps down from a small balcony at the end of the ground floor hallway. The balcony and those six stairs had a railing with a distinctive, repeated ‘wave’ design. Later my brother Hossein was always climbing on this railing, risking a fall onto the pavement below. The yard was bare except for a plain cement, rectangular hoze (pond) about one metre deep at its centre.

  My parents had moved into the Takht-e Tavoos house before it was completely finished. There was no electricity connected and no water storage. All water had to be collected from an open concrete aqueduct running alongside the road outside the house, between the footpath and the road itself. My mother would carry what water we needed in a bucket from the canal into the house. After washing clothes, she would carry the wet clothes 300 metres to rinse them in the aqueduct of a nearby street because she felt ashamed to do this outside her own house.

  After the house was complete it had a large underground abb anbar – a water tank – that was filled once every month by diverting water from the canal in the street. When it was our turn the man who managed this, called the mir abb, would knock at the door at any hour, even two in the morning, and my father would say, ‘Shahin, wake up. Divert the water.’ Then my mother would have to go outside and place a wooden barrier into a slot that would redirect the water. Once the tank was full, about two hours later, she would remove the barrier. Drinking water for the house was then brought up from the abb anbar by a hand pump beside the pond in the yard. This pump was also used to fill the pond, from which water could be drawn by the bucket for washing. The pump and the pond served this practical purpose for many years before we were finally connected to mains water.

  The pond was also a source of tragedy.

  In the middle of the second summer at Takht-e Tavoos, the house was a buzz of activity. Shahin’s brother Abdollah and his wife, Pooran, were staying. They had been married for a few months and, because Abdollah was working for the Iranian Navy, they lived in Abadan near the Persian Gulf, a very hot place at this time of year. Asghar was at work in his bicycle shop and Abdollah had gone down the street to post a letter. Otherwise everyone else was at home. Aboo was having tea at the back of the house; Ahmad and Nemat, Laya’s third son, were talking; Pooran was reading a newspaper; Shahin was frying eggplant; Laya was busy doing other housework; and I was asleep in my cot. Zari, now two-and-a-half, came down the stairs from the back yard into the kitchen and said, ‘I want cantaloupe.’

  When Laya said that they didn’t have any cantaloupe, Zari told her that she heard a man in the street calling out that he had sweet cantaloupe. Laya said okay, she would go out and buy some. She went up the stairs towards the front of the house, Zari following behind her.
>
  A few minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was the next door neighbour who said that they had noticed from their balcony that something was floating in the pond. My mother shrieked and, taking the stairs in a single stride, ran up to the yard. She reached the pond as Ahmad was pulling an unconscious Zari out of the water. Shahin screamed and screamed, hitting herself on the head, while Ahmad quickly took Zari to his car and raced straight to the hospital. In the confusion Shahin was left behind; she ran all the way to the hospital, about one kilometre away, almost collapsing when she got there. But it was too late. Zari could not be revived. When Asghar arrived at the hospital a few minutes later – it was across the road from his shop – he cried too. It was the only time he was ever known to cry for one of his children.

  This tragedy weighed heavily on the whole family, with everyone blaming themselves for not knowing where Zari was. It seemed that after following her grandmother up the stairs towards the front door, Zari had not gone outside with her but had doubled back along the ground floor hallway, down the stairs and out to the yard. She had a small handkerchief in her hand and must have reached down to the water to dampen it, lost her balance and fallen in.

  Every time Shahin told me this story, right up until the end of her life, it would cause her to cry. She told me that afterwards she did not eat for 20 days, so deep was her grief. She remembered walking around the house in the mornings looking for Zari.

  After Zari’s accident my father placed an iron grate over the pond and later, after the mains water had been connected, the pond was filled with old bricks and dirt. A decorative white concrete pond in the shape of a shell was placed on top.

  ~

  Not long after the loss of Zari, Aboo decided that he and Laya should adopt a child from an orphanage in west Tehran. He and Laya had no children of their own, and he thought that a slightly older child might be able to look after me and make sure I did not drown like Zari. When Laya asked who would look after the child, Aboo said he would.