The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (2 page)

The Sweetness of Youth

M
y parents loved each other to death, for they had both tasted the bitterness of separation. My mother, Effie, was a seemingly great candidate for matchmakers. Elderly female members of the family took pleasure in finding the right match for their granddaughters. But Effie wanted to become a teacher before marrying and continued studying to get her diploma. She was in her sophomore year when she met my father, Anushiravan (named after a righteous nontyrannical Persian king) Vaziritabar. She was studying at the house of her best friend and classmate, my aunt Shamsi. My father, Shamsi’s brother, joined them for a brief moment, and it was love at first sight for both of them.

Although he was talking to Shamsi, my father could not take his eyes off my mother, with her beautiful ivory skin, arched eyebrows, shiny brown hair, and light hazel eyes. My father was a quiet, dignified, and handsome young man with gentle manners and an incredible resemblance to the actor David Niven.

Their love was too strong for them to wait for her diploma, so my father asked for my mother’s hand. Unfortunately, he was offended when my mother’s father demanded a large wedding and a form of financial agreement to compensate for my mother’s dowry, in case of a divorce. (This situation, which is typical in Iran, is called
mehre.
)

My mother could not believe it. She was too proud to say anything, or to go back to Shamsi’s house and talk to her brother. She was forlorn and over time lost a great deal of weight. My mother kept busy reading romantic novels and immersed herself in other people’s love stories.

But not even
Madame Bovary
and the character’s unconventional life could help my mother stop thinking about my father. Whenever the doorbell rang, her heart beat more quickly because she thought it might be him, giving in to her father’s demands.

A year later, my grandfather Hassan, a military man, decided to put an end to his daughter’s misery and dangerous weight loss. He made a surprise visit to my father at the Ministry of Health, where he was employed as an accountant. Hassan placed a fresh red rose from his garden on my father’s desk and said, “My daughter is in love with you.” Effie and Anushiravan married soon after.

I WAS BORN
into a middle-class Iranian family on May 11, 1952, at Fowzia Hospital, in the heart of Tehran. My name, Shohreh, was chosen by my grandfather Jahangir, my father’s father. He was partially educated in France and loved poetry. In fact, when my father gave him the news of my birth and asked him if he had a name for me in mind, Grandpa was reading the poetry of Hafez, the fourteenth-century Persian lyric poet who wrote extensively about faith and hypocrisy. He was as well known as Robert Frost, and his works were found in most Iranians’ homes. Grandfather randomly chose a page and found my name in the first verse.
Shohreh
means famous. “I am the one who is famous for loving others and being loved.”

My newly married mother still loved to go out with her friends and trusted only her mother, Bahar al-Sadat, to take care of me. I began sleeping at Grandmother’s quite often before I even knew how to speak. My overnight stays would continue until I was fifteen years old. My grandmother‘s unconditional love had turned her house into a safe haven for me. She was beautiful and fragile, with curly blond hair, green eyes, and porcelain skin. I loved staying with her and listening to her fascinating stories—even if I didn’t yet know what they meant. I loved the sound of her voice.

Once a month, as I grew, we would go to the bazaar to shop, then we would hire a cab to take us to a slum area of Tehran. She politely knocked on half-open doors and respectfully offered her donations: rice, chocolate, dried fruits or even soaps, and whatever else she may have bought that day.

Lavish yet cozy, Grandmother’s house was in a row of traditional old houses with multiple courtyards. The outer courtyard led to entry doors with two different doorknobs—one for males and the other for females. The inner courtyard was an unforgettable garden with a variety of flowers such as daisies, tuberoses, and forget-me-nots, sweetbriar, marvel-of-peru, and lush, aromatic red roses. It contained a fishpond with a dozen red goldfish swimming happily under the tepid current. I remember how I would carefully watch them with my hands in the water, anticipating the awkward sensation of touching their tender and slippery flesh. Instead, they would quickly disperse and swim as far away as possible.

Facing the pond was a king-size wooden platform bed covered by Persian rugs. My grandmother, grandfather, and I spent hours lying on it, having dinner, taking a nap, or watching the last reflection of the sun on the emerald green water of the fishpond.

GRANDMOTHER TOOK A
nap for exactly one hour every afternoon, between two and three. Therefore, I too had to rest next to her. She would tie my toe to her big toe, using a piece of string. This was her way of making sure that I would not go anywhere unsupervised while she was sleeping—and my way of learning how to remain still, which would later come in handy in my chosen profession.

We dined under the dark turquoise sky, lit by thousands of glittering stars, and listened to the sound of the nightingales throughout the warm summer evenings. We sat cross-legged on the platform and feasted on rice, Persian stew, bread, and yogurt, followed by sweet Persian delights such as baklava and tea. It was usually during tea that my grandfather would tell us stories about whirling dervishes, which could best be described as Persian Buddhists, who desired nothing material but rather searched for spiritual enlightenment. He spoke of their ceremonies, in which they experienced religious ecstasy.

My favorite story, which I still tell friends to this day, involves a rich man who leaves his family and lavish estate behind to become a dervish. The only belongings he takes are a bowl and the clothes he is wearing. After a couple of hours of walking in the forest, he stops by a river to fill his bowl with water to drink. When he’s finished, he starts walking again on his endless journey. Another dervish comes upon his bowl and soon meets up with him to say that he left his bowl behind. The formerly wealthy man returns to the river then tosses his bowl high into the sky and far into the river. The other dervish asks him why he did that, to which the new dervish replies, “Up until now, no other materials could have stopped me from looking for the divine. Yet I had to return to get this bowl. As of this moment, nothing will ever stop me on my path seeking the truth.”

Grandfather believed that true dervishes are revered people, not only for their spiritual journey in life but also for their courage to strip off their titles and possessions.

Grandmother and I would turn on the radio as soon as Grandfather went to bed and listen to her favorite program,
One Thousand and One Nights
, the saga of Scheherazade. The sultan of the land has sentenced Scheherazade to death. However, the clever Scheherazade keeps postponing her death by telling the sultan a new story every night, which leads to the following night and the night after that, and so on. Fascinated and mesmerized by Scheherazade’s intriguing tales, I would put my head on Grandma’s lap, and she would stroke my curly black hair. The radio play ended every night with the narrator announcing, “And when the sultan went to sleep, Scheherazade remained silent until the following night of the one thousand and one nights.”

Afterward I would follow Grandmother up the narrow staircase to the flat roof, where we would sleep on our firm mattresses on wooden beds, under a drapery of mosquito nets. Here I would rest flat on my back, gazing at the radiant silver stars through the sheer filter of the net. Anticipating the eleventh stroke of the giant bell of the magnificent Sepah-Salar Mosque around the corner from us, I thought of Scheherazade escaping death, and eventually would fall to sleep.

My grandmother lost her own mother when she gave birth to her third child. Since my grandmother was only two at the time, she could barely remember her mother’s face, though she could remember her scent.

“My mother smelled like white jasmine,” Grandma used to say. “Did you know she was blond like me? People say she was as beautiful as an
houri
[an angel] and a gracious young woman, too.”

Grandmother was raised by her nanny under the supervision of her first stepmother, Khanoom. She was extremely pale with piercing black eyes and soft black hair. She came from a respectable merchant family. Although she was petite, she walked like a tall woman, with her head held high. She was extremely confident, demanding, and very religious till the end of her long life. She passed away at the age of ninety-two.

Grandmother was ten years old when her father, Husain Amir Hamzeh, a wealthy landowner, went to Kerman, in southern Iran, to purchase a piece of land and meet and marry his third wife, Shams, meaning “the sun,” a beautiful young woman from a wealthy family as well.

Grandmother always remembered the day she was taken to her second stepmother’s house. She was riveted by Shams. Her eyes were sea green and her hair was as black as the winter nights. Shams was tall and slim, and had been married once for a short time but divorced her husband—with her family’s consent—as he was thought to be impotent.

She came to Tehran with a couple of large chests bearing her belongings and her dowry, and her personal bondmaid named Fatima. Everybody adored Fatima, and although she had come to us as a part of my great-grandfather’s third wife’s dowry, she never stopped loving and caring for the whole family.

Fatima was one of the daughters of a self-proclaimed sultan in the Persian Gulf. She was abducted when she was eight years old along with her six-year-old sister while boating in the gulf with their chaperones.

The kidnappers had covered the girls’ heads with potato sacks and taken them to a slave market. They sold them to wealthy merchants searching for young and strong domestic help. Fatima had worked for another family for several years before being sold into Shams’s family. By this time, she remembered little of the details of her capture. Unfortunately, Fatima’s sister was sold to another merchant in another market, and Fatima had no idea of her sister’s fate. She believed that their parents must have done everything in their power to find them, but finding them in another country must have been like searching for a needle in a haystack.

TWO YEARS AFTER
I was born, my mother gave birth to my eldest brother, named after a prince, Shahram, whom I adored. My family was jubilant over having a boy. Not that they were disappointed in having me as a firstborn—they were more modern than that. But they were thrilled to now have a boy and a girl. My grandmother Gohar, on my father’s side, gave my mother a ruby pin when Shahram was born, but nothing was given to my mother when I arrived. Some Iranians live their lives in the past, where boys are the favored offspring. Shahram had the biggest pair of dark brown eyes. I treated him like he was my doll. He was very quiet, reserved, and shy, while I was beginning to show signs of being very outspoken, a trait that would follow me through life.

My brother Shahriar (meaning king) was born two years after Shahram and was a natural-born doctor. Nearly every summer, our parents would take us either to the country or the Caspian Sea, both almost four hours away from our home. We rented a house and took everything with us, including our rugs, mattresses, and pots and pans. It was like moving from one house to another. As my brothers and I played on the beach, I still remember young Shahriar dissecting dead frogs in the heat in order to study their anatomy. All the other kids would run to the emerald-colored sea, pick up seaweed, splash salty water, and chase one another in the thick sand, but Shahriar studied dead sea creatures on the beach for hours.

My third and last brother, Shahrokh (“face of a king”), was born ten years after me, in 1962.

When not renting a house, we stayed at the Caspian Sea with my Aunt Badri, who loved gathering the whole family in her small two-bedroom villa. There were times when my cousins and I, more than fifteen of us, would sleep next to one another on the sofas, thin mattresses, and even a sheet covering the floor. We just wanted to be together. I remember how we marched by the sea in our imported American bathing suits and played volleyball on the beach well into our teens.

This was when we were young and restless and the world seemed magical and beautiful.

3

Tehran’s Think Tank

M
y father’s father, Jahangir (meaning “world conqueror”), was a handsome man, tall and slim, with a pair of dark piercing eyes. When he read newspapers he wore a monocle. He dressed in dark suits and white shirts, except in the winter, when he wore thick dark jackets at home and read all day long.

He loved discussing politics with his longtime friend and neighbor, Professor Amir-Alaei, and Iran’s most popular athlete ever, Takhti, an Olympic wrestler. Takhti was in his early thirties. He was much younger than Grandpa and the professor, but I assume he enjoyed their company and learned from them, for he was quiet most of the time when they got together. Grandpa and the professor talked at length. I know this because I was there, too, and I, like Takhti, was a listener.