Scattered Pearls Read online

  They went to the orphanage, where all the children had shaved heads and identical jackets. The manager brought a few girls to meet them and they chose a two-year-old called Soosan who was about 18 months older than me. Despite Aboo having retired and Laya nearing retirement age, the adoption process was straightforward and Soosan soon joined our household. With that Shahin’s workload increased. Notwithstanding Aboo’s promises, and though he cared for his adopted daughter, it was my mother and Laya who took on most of the work of looking after this tiny child who was not yet toilet trained, was painfully shy and had clearly been neglected. Soosan constantly wet the bed, which meant my mother was washing sheets most days. Laya’s response to this was to smack Soosan and shout at her, which – knowing what we know today – would only have made the problem worse. On one occasion in the middle of winter, Laya broke a layer of ice that had formed on the pond in the back yard and dunked Soosan in the water up to her waist in order to wash her.

  Eventually Soosan did stop wetting herself but she continued to be treated poorly at times, not only by Laya but also by my father and my uncle Nemat. She lived in constant fear of something happening to me because protecting me was her ‘job’. ‘If anything happens to Sohila I will kill you,’ Laya used to say.

  Soosan would stay in our household for seven years before my uncle Ahmad grew tired of the abuse that she was suffering and decided she should return to an orphanage. At least there, he pointed out, she would go to school – something that Laya and Aboo had not afforded her even after I started school. After she had returned to the orphanage Aboo and Laya, and sometimes Shahin, Asghar and Ahmad, continued to visit her every two weeks, taking fruits, pastry and money.

  Many years later, when I was about twenty and there was no longer regular contact, I decided to find Soosan. After numerous enquiries to orphanages and government departments I discovered where she was and drove to see her. She was shy but very happy to see me, a wide smile on her bony face. After all these years there was a strong bond between us, as if we deeply understood each other. I kissed her and held her so tight, thinking of her suffering because of me. I was wearing four gold bangles on my wrist that day and left two of them with her; even today I see and feel Soosan every time I wear those bangles. She later married and I believe she had a son.

  ~

  With the death of Zari I was Shahin’s only surviving child until my brother Hossein was born (healthy) two years later. But that was not the end of her pain.

  Her next child was a girl, Soraya, and she too became jaundiced.

  ‘God, don’t take Soraya,’ she would say repeatedly. ‘It doesn’t matter that she is yellow. I will look after her and make her well.’

  After seven days the jaundice faded. However, Soraya became very ill. Eventually, though she could not really afford the cost, my mother took her baby to see a doctor. He identified a firm anterior fontanelle (soft spot), but he had no solution. ‘She may get better in time, or she may not,’ was all the advice he gave.

  My mother swore that she would keep this child. She would wrap the baby firmly, then sit on the floor, her legs closed together straight out in front of her and a pillow over her feet. The baby’s head was placed on the pillow, her body lying along the groove between my mother’s legs. Shahin would then rock Soraya gently left and right for hours so she would sleep.

  There was no sympathy – or help – from my father. ‘Damn kid, why doesn’t she die so we get some relief!’ he would say. ‘We should suffocate this puppy.’

  My father certainly never, ever offered to assist with Soraya, or any of my mother’s other children, in any way.

  Soraya didn’t improve. Without telling Asghar, my mother finally decided to take her to the doctor again. Though there was a general practitioner nearby, she travelled an hour by bus with her baby in order to save money on the fees. The doctor immediately wanted to admit Soraya to hospital, but Shahin insisted that she stay with her child.

  ‘It is not possible,’ the doctor said. ‘Only children can stay there.’

  ‘I will not leave my child alone,’ said my mother. ‘She must be with me.’

  ‘Then you must take your child and go,’ said the doctor.

  My mother caught the bus home with her baby. The next day, four months after Soraya had become sick and my mother had first taken her to see a doctor, Soraya died.

  Almost immediately, my mother became pregnant again. When the next child was born, a boy named Mansoor, he also became jaundiced straight after birth. This time my mother went to a doctor immediately, crying in despair.

  ‘Why do my children always become yellow?’ she asked.

  The doctor did not give Shahin a proper explanation – at least not one that she understood. He gave her some tablets and advised her that she must not breastfeed the child herself. ‘You must give him milk formula [which was just becoming fashionable] or a neighbour’s milk.’ Around this time, in the early 1960s, a genetic connection to severe neonatal, or ‘malignant’ jaundice was being recognised, so perhaps the doctor had this in mind, though my mother was not given any tests to confirm this.

  There was a woman two doors down the street, called Azar, who was breastfeeding at the time, so Shahin went to her and asked her to feed Mansoor also, which she agreed to do. She fed my brother for 40 days while my mother expressed her own milk and threw it away. It worked. Mansoor survived. My mother resumed breastfeeding him herself after those eight weeks and he remained healthy.

  My mother gave birth to two more daughters after that, Fariba and Frooshad, both of whom I believe were breastfed. Both survived. In 1967, however – in between Fariba and Frooshad – Shahin had become pregnant again.

  ‘Why do you get pregnant all the time?’ my father asked.

  I don’t believe he had any concept that his forcing himself on my mother every night was leading to pregnancy after pregnancy. Years later my mother told me that she felt like a toilet into which Asghar would empty himself. But by now Shahin had had enough herself. Four months into her term, she decided to abort the pregnancy, remembering that Laya had told her once that she could use ‘date grass’ – a tough, dark green grass with wood-like blades about 15 centimetres long – if ever she wanted to do this.

  Laya had gone to see my uncle Ahmad and his family. Ahmad was a paramedic and captain in the army and had been transferred to a base in the city of Kermanshah for a few years. My brother Hossein and I were at school – I was ten or eleven at this time – and our younger siblings were playing outside. Shahin went to her bedroom, lay down on the bed and inserted a blade of date grass into her vagina. The next day she saw a blood clot and two or three days later, after some pain, the male foetus came out. Shahin buried it in the yard. Satisfied, she got back to her work around the house. All wasn’t well, though. Over the next day or so, she got increasingly strong pains in her stomach – eventually to the point that she had to stop working and lie down (something almost unheard of for my mother). That evening when Asghar arrived home he said, ‘Where are you? This is not the time to sleep. Come on, give us tea. What do we have to eat? Come on . . . move!’

  All of this was interspersed with so much swearing I had to cover my ears.

  ‘I dropped the child,’ said Shahin.

  ‘Good. One bread eater less,’ said Asghar. ‘We are free of the noise.’

  That evening I gave my father his food. He did not think to take my mother to the doctor, but this was not unusual. She had an incredibly high pain threshold and whenever she was sick, would press through it for two or three days until she was back to normal. This time, however, my mother woke up in the middle of the night and found her blankets and bedding soaked in blood. It was much more than she would expect from a normal period. She covered herself with a clean cloth and, in the morning, soaked the bedding in water. This pattern continued for two more days before Asghar noticed that Shahin was so pale she looked like a corpse. He sought the advice of Farangis, a family friend who was renting Ahm
ad’s rooms, who told him that Shahin was dying and must go to hospital. He and Farangis put her in the car and drove to the hospital, honking the horn all the way as though they were an ambulance. There she was operated on for complications with her uterus and the placenta following her abortion, and she was given a blood transfusion.

  In the meantime we children had been left at home. I remember being very anxious and playing a game like that flower petal game: ‘She gets better . . . she doesn’t . . . she gets better . . . she doesn’t. . .’ When our father came home he said, ‘Your mother has died. This is no laughing matter.’

  He seemed to think that we didn’t look worried enough, but even so I’ve never been sure why he said that. Perhaps he actually did think she would die because when he went to the hospital the next day to see her his first comment was, ‘A dead person becomes alive again’.

  Despite this near miss, Shahin aborted two more pregnancies the same way after my youngest sister, Frooshad, was born when I was about thirteen.

  ~

  For the first 12 years of my life my parents and I lived in a long double room in the basement of the Takht-e Tavoos house, joined over time by my three younger siblings. During the day this room was a living area. Natural light was provided at the back by a large highlight window at yard level and at the front by a high, shallow window at street level. Now, whenever I see one of those windows on a footpath it brings back memories of watching shoes passing to and fro at the front of our house. At night the front half of this double room became my parents’ bedroom while we children slept in the back. With no partition, not even a curtain between the two halves of the room, there was no privacy. I still remember the sounds of my father climbing onto my mother. ‘You did it last night,’ she might whisper. To which he would reply, ‘So what?’

  It was strange to hear my father speaking softly as he always spoke at a high volume during the day, usually with swear words laced through every sentence. I would put my fingers in my ears and my head under the blanket so I couldn’t hear the panting or see the movement of the blanket in the dim light. From my mother there was never a sound, and certainly no hint of enjoyment or satisfaction out of this process.

  Our furniture, if you could call it that, was mainly inexpensive Persian rugs on the floor, cotton-filled mattresses and a few motakah – cylindrical pillows, or bolsters. The motakah were decorated with embroidery, but to make cleaning easier they were usually covered in plain, sheet-like material. Occasionally all the bedding would be taken to a man called a panbeh zan, or ‘cotton beater’, for refreshing and cleaning; when they came back they felt soft and smelt lovely and clean. If this man was short of work he would walk the streets shouting ‘panbeh zanim!’, meaning ‘cotton beating’. Other furniture included a clothes hanger with five hooks from which my father would hang his pants, with the belt still through the loops, every night. There was only ever one picture hanging from our walls: a framed photograph of my father in a suit and tie. The only other thing on the wall would be a free calendar that my father was given each year, probably by a supplier.

  All of this plainness contrasted with my uncle Ahmad’s rooms upstairs at ground level, and with every other house I ever visited. Uncle Ahmad, his wife Mahin and two of their sons had the same amount of space as we did, but a wall had been built, dividing it into two separate rooms. The front was a sitting room with large windows looking out onto the street. It had side tables and a dining table and chairs, and was nicely decorated with vases and fresh flowers and pictures on the wall. It always felt warm in there. Another room on this level, at the back of the house overlooking the yard, was occupied for a time by my father’s youngest brother Nemat and his wife Ehteram, but mostly it was my grandmother Laya who lived there. It was one of my favourite places to be. The floor was covered in a nice, thick Persian carpet – dark red, with lots of flowers and birds in the design. She had two wardrobes full of things she had collected over the years, especially linen. She always had sweets too: cashews and pistachios, almonds, candy and, best of all, the best baghlava in the world! This Qazvin baghlava is made with almonds and pistachios and is much drier and less oily than Turkish or Afghan baklavas.

  My other favourite place to be was on the roof of our house.

  The man in the house across the street was a pilot. He drove a beautiful, light yellow Chevrolet. Through the windows of his house we could see chandeliers. His wife Froozan was stunningly beautiful. Whenever she would leave her home, my mother, grandmother, aunties and I would gather at the front window in Ahmad’s living room, peering through the lace curtains to watch her walk. She wore the most elegant, à la mode clothing, reminiscent of Sophia Loren or Audrey Hepburn. Occasionally she wore a hat and walked in an especially graceful way, holding one hand extended in front of her as if someone were about to kiss it! My mother was so fascinated by this lady’s beauty that she gave her last daughter a similar name: Frooshad. I was just as taken by Froozan’s daughter as I was by her. She would have been around my age – about ten at the time – and had curly, light brown hair tied up with white ribbons. Her name was Fariba, which my mother later named one of my sisters.

  I had a special view of Froozan and her world which I kept secret. Our house had a flat roof that we could access. We used it as a play area – we even slept up there in summer when it was hot. Sometimes I would go up to the roof on my own to play with a life-size doll my uncle Abdollah had brought from the USA. From this roof I was able to crouch down and look across the road into Froozan’s house. It must have been her bedroom I could see so clearly into, because once I saw her standing in front of a full length mirror, rubbing cream onto her naked body and massaging her arms and legs. I was awestruck. Seeing this flawless, statuesque woman caring for herself was quite surreal; it felt like I was watching someone on another planet.

  In contrast to Froozan’s glamour, I’m sure people saw us as working class, old-fashioned and uneducated. During this period, throughout the 1960s and ’70s under the Shah’s reign, there were no rules about clothing, and middle and upper class women in Iran, like Froozan, dressed in fashionable Western clothes. My mother, on the other hand, almost always wore a plain skirt and top – she was always utilitarian, never trendy. Sometimes she wore the chador, a large wrap of cotton which covers the head and cloaks the whole body, though if she did so it was out of convenience rather than for any traditional or religious reason. My grandmother and aunts also only very rarely wore the chador and usually only in specific circumstances, such as attending a funeral, going to a mosque or taking the pilgrimage to Mecca. For the same reason my mother wore the chador for a period after my father returned from a trip to Mecca. The truth is my mother didn’t dress plainly because of her status in society: it was simply that she was an introvert who preferred to blend with the crowd, and because she preferred to spend any money she had on essentials or on her children. Later in life she would wear the chador more often because of her age; it was a quick way of preparing to go out without having to do her hair or worry about her clothes. She did appreciate smart dressing in others though, whether that was Froozan or her own daughters.

  ~

  Across the hall from my family in the basement of the Takht-e Tavoos were two rooms: the space was identical in proportion to ours but a wall divided it into two separate rooms. At the front was the kitchen, in which food was prepared for the whole house. It was quite a basic space, not a modern kitchen in any sense, and it was quite dark. Natural light came from another high window onto the street, while a single, bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling. I think designing an underground kitchen for the house really reflected my father’s complete lack of awareness of the practicalities of running a household.

  There were stone ‘caves’ in the kitchen for the storage of pots and pans, firewood and coal, oil, buckets and various other utensils. Thin curtains, hanging from lengths of elastic, covered these chambers. Another chamber with a chimney above it was used for cooking. We didn’t have
an electric or gas stove – cooking was done over a manghal, which is like a barbecue tray in which a fire would burn. You sometimes see a gas-fired manghal today in middle-eastern kabob restaurants; it has holes or slots in which long skewers sit, allowing meat to be turned constantly, or a grill over the top. In the corner of the kitchen was a Swedish masonry furnace which acted as an oven and also made the room very warm. Originally, water came only from the pond out the back; later, a single cold water tap was installed which drew from the town supply. There was also a long bench for food preparation, along which all the women of the household would work, discussing the day’s news and gossip. They never discussed politics or social issues. In fact, I don’t remember my family ever talking about such things. We were consumed by our own small domestic world.

  Although Shahin was very restricted in what she was able to spend on food – my father gave her only a small allowance – there were many tastes and smells which came out of this kitchen. We did eat a lot of dizi, a lamb dish with chickpeas, potatoes, white beans and tomatoes. This was a relatively cheap meal, known as the food of the working class. (These days it is quite trendy with young people in Iran.) But there was also fried eggplant, with such a rich smell when it was cooking, smoked fish and, of course, saffron rice. My mother was always careful not to waste the precious saffron. There were jojeh kabob (chicken) and chelo kabob (lamb and rice), stuffed capsicum and dolmeh barg – stuffing wrapped in vine leaves – and, of course, hot Persian breads bought fresh every day. There were a number of bakeries nearby, each specialising in one of the four staple breads of our diet. Laya and my mother would sometimes debate whether nan-e barbari or nan-e lavash was the best bread to accompany the day’s meal. Occasionally, as a luxury, we would have milk, delivered by the milkman driving a three-wheeled car with large urns on the back.

  Mostly the families in our house ate on their own – Ahmad and his family at their table upstairs, and my family on the floor in our basement room, sitting around a sofreh, or cloth. One of my main memories of eating in these times were a few beautiful crystal dishes that my mother owned, given to her by a rich aunt. They were some of the very few decorative items that we owned. In summer, we all ate breakfast together outside in the back yard. A thin carpet was laid on the ground with a sofreh on top of that. Someone would bring out a large samavar, a Middle Eastern urn, from which tea could be made.