Wedding Song (5 page)

After two months, Baba grew terribly homesick. Other travelers brought new merchandise and told him how his mother cried for him as well and called his name. Finally, he started running a fever and was too restless to help in the shop. The peddler gave him a few rials and sent him alone to find a bus on the side of the road. After hours of waiting, a ball of dust appeared in the horizon. A large Mercedes truck wobbled its way down the uneven rocky road to where my father was standing and stopped. Baba paid, climbed the side of the tall truck, and found a seat on the floor with other passengers, crates of watermelon, chickens, a small sheep, and strewn bundles of clothing.

At noon, the bus stopped by a caravansary, a weathered tent and a few stools in the middle of the desert. My father didn’t have any food with him, but was too shy and too afraid to go inside to ask for a drink or a piece of bread. There was a barrel of water on the side of the teahouse, but Baba feared that it was for Moslems only.

Under the scorching sun, my father’s mouth felt like the sand underneath his feet. He saw Bedouin women going down a steep slope and reappearing with jugs of water on their shoulders. The descent to the spring at the bottom of the hill was not as easy as he had thought. Although the nomads had climbed in and out of the hole with ease and grace, my father slipped and stumbled his way down. He was excited at the sight of the turquoise fluid oozing out of the floor of a cave by the side of the mountain, surrounded by greenery and reeds. Sweaty and dusty, he knelt in the muddy ground by the pool and cupped his hands to scoop the clear water to his mouth. It was deliciously sweet. He hurriedly reached with his open palms for more, but as he lifted his head this time to sip the water, he came eye to eye with a black snake, its white mouth wide open as though it were aiming for him.

My father forgot his thirst. He rushed back up the slippery slope, hanging onto the thorny bushes to pull himself up. Now he was even thirstier,
exhausted, and bruised. His pants were torn at the knees. He sat in the shade of a bus, leaning against it for support, feeling defeated and homesick. When the truck reached Shiraz late on a Friday afternoon, my father was delirious from the long, dry journey.

A neighborhood boy saw him and ran ahead to the house, “Mola’s wife, Rabbi’s wife, Esgheli is here!”

My grandmother rushed to him at the door and grabbed him to break his fall. “Esgheli, what have they done to you?” she cried. My grandmother helped Baba through the orange groves in the backyard to the cool basement. She washed the dirt and the grime of the long journey from his face and hands and knees. She held his head up and helped him drink, brought him clean clothes and changed him like a child. She had made beef stew with zucchini and tomatoes and served it over fluffy rice.

Baba ate as if he had not seen food for months and always remembered the food as the most wonderful meal of his life.

My grandmother helped Baba lie down and tucked him in with a light blanket smelling of jasmine. Baba drifted to a deep sleep for the first time in months. As he slept, he could still taste the delicate flavors of fresh tomatoes, coriander, basil, and mint. He could smell the scent of his mother next to him gently caressing his head. Unlike the nights in the village, he slept without beasts or bandits in his dream. He was home.

That day, after having been lost among strangers, my father’s childhood story comforted me and made me laugh. As his sandpaper hand held mine, I felt at home. I had found my way back to him the way he had returned to his mother.

The consequent retelling of the adventure when I was much older, however, lost its magic. I couldn’t reconcile the two opposing feelings— my growing wanderlust and his homesickness. Although the taste of my grandmother’s food, her touch, her love, was enticing, I didn’t want my father to go back. With later retellings, I could not follow him all the way, and I let him return to his mother alone. I thought that if that was my story, I would have gone further away, never to return.

My mother’s words, much stronger than my father’s, echoed in the back of my head. “You have to find a way to leave this hellhole,” she always told me. “Find someone to take you away. Don’t allow yourself to get trapped here like me.”

I never stopped to think why my mother wanted me to go away. Did Maman realize that she was pushing me to leave my family, even my mother?

As a young girl, my parents’ stories of their teenage trials in faraway places and among strangers jarred me. As a teenager, I didn’t understand how Baba couldn’t identify with my mother’s shock of being physically and emotionally violated. Remembering his own cries for his mother at the same age, he must have known that a thirteen-year-old girl would wither away from her family. Having so much love from his own mother, he should have not dismissed the impact on my mother of this rejection by her family. I knew that it was the custom of the times. Had it not been my father, someone else would have married my mother at a young age. Then I wouldn’t exist.

I also wondered if the Persian word for bride,
aroosak
, a little doll, meant just that, a doll for men, a body without emotions.

On their all-day bus ride to Shiraz after the wedding, Maman sat quietly, trying to concentrate on the rugged scenery, the bare mountains streaked with blue and purple mineral deposits, the desert covered with thorny bushes, and Bedouins on camels. This was her first trip outside the chilly climate of Hamedan, her first glance of a desolate landscape.

My father’s thirteen-year-old brother Jahangeer, who had accompanied him to the wedding, was elated and chatty at the prospect of reaching home. Homesick, he had cried for his mother every night, begging my father to take him home.

This is the scene that pains me the most. Being the same age, my mother and uncle should have been playing marbles on the floor of that bus, chatting about their schools and friends. Instead, the wedding party dismissed Maman’s anxiety and sympathized with her brother-in-law’s tears for being away for just a short time.

My father’s family waited at the bus stop in Shiraz to greet them. They threw green cloth and sugar candy over them, and sprayed them with rose water for good luck, a sweet life.

Aunt Maheen giggled when she saw the bride. She whispered loudly in my father’s ear, “You’re so tall—why such a short wife?”

Such simple words of gentle criticism Baba never ignored. My mother
told me that my father’s behavior changed immediately. He became quiet, sad, and kept his distance from her. After the departure of my maternal grandmother, when my mother needed her husband’s emotional support the most, he had none to give. Distraught, Baba himself had no one to support or to reassure him.

Maman, two years before her marriage, with grandmother Touran and three of her brothers in Hamedan. My maternal grandfather was often absent from home, trying to sell merchandise in faraway villages until Touran demanded that he should return home. His assets confiscated during Reza Shah’s reign to help with the war expenses, twice he opened bookstores. Twice they were burned down. He gave up and plunged the family into terrible poverty, forcing grandmother Touran to work as a cook and sometimes a maid in local hotels
. Picture courtesy of Nahid Gerstein.

On my mother’s first week in Shiraz, guests came to bring gifts and to see the new bride. Bent over with a low broom, my mother was sweeping the yard on her honeymoon. “Is that your new maid?” a neighbor asked my grandmother.

That embarrassed Khanom-bozorg, my mother told me. She was mad at Maman for allowing the company to see her at work in tattered clothes. She worried that they might become the subject of gossip and criticism.

Worse yet, a distant relative came unannounced to see this new addition to the family. She and my grandmother had never liked each other. The visitor covered her mouth with the corner of her
chador
and laughed, “Look! They’ve brought a peasant for a bride!”

Part of my mother’s dowry: gold necklace, earrings, and a Ghajar coin
. Photography by Jon and Jennifer Crockford.

My grandmother stewed over the insult and later complained to my father that the snake’s tongue had revealed itself.

My mother didn’t lift her teary eyes to see who was making the cruel comments. She felt like a bird that had flown in by mistake, banging herself against every clear window pane to reach the wide skies outside, only to get bloodied.

Insecure, conscious of community standards, devoted to his mother and siblings, and thirsty for approval, my father too felt caged by his own mistake. There was no way out. For decades, he sided with the rest, and looked at my mother as a stranger in order not to become one himself. Instead of defending and protecting his wife, my father became a mirror to the family, magnifying their image of my mother, and reflecting it back on her, and sometimes on us as well.

My father and I traveled to Tehran when I was in high school. I enjoyed staying at a hotel, riding on the top floor of double-decker buses, and eating in the cafeterias for the first time. We went for long walks along fashionable streets, lined with foreign-named boutiques, and looked into the cafés whose windows framed young men and women laughing like actors on a movie screen, without worrying about their modesty, without fear of
the community gossips. I had my arm in his, loving every minute of having him to myself, knowing that he too enjoyed the intimacy.

A sample of my father’s artistry in designing and crafting jewelry, often made for new brides
. Picture courtesy of Dr. and Mrs. Dayanim.

My father and I didn’t visit my mother’s family in Tehran. I didn’t question the decision, but he explained nevertheless. We stood in front of the glass window of a shop where women’s robes wrapped around mannequins gracefully as if they were parading to an evening ball. Maybe he too imagined beautiful women walking luxuriously around clean homes in silk and velvet robes.

He had made the wrong decision, he told me for the first time about his marriage. “I was young,” he said. “Someone should have told me your mother wasn’t right for me.” He was entrusted to an elder with little wisdom. It was no surprise that he was blindfolded with false words and had married a woman of no fortune or class.

I didn’t tell him that a wealthy family would not have sent such a young girl away. He knew that.

“I cringe when I’m around her family,” he added. “I don’t want you to be exposed to them.”

I adored our time alone and away from life in our chaotic, multi-family house in Shiraz, so I didn’t ask him to define class. The robe he bought me obligated me to listen to his grievances. We ate white rice and yogurt in a
non-kosher restaurant, since my father didn’t fear the watchful eyes of the community. As I drank my tea, he chewed his mustache and recalled event after event at which my mother’s family had acted with callousness and disregard for social graces.

“This is the family I fell into,” he sighed. “My fate!” Like my mother, Baba blamed his destiny for his unhappiness.

I tried to think of ways to fight this unpredictable, often adversarial “fate,” but I couldn’t. I was happy. I was enjoying a sweet cup of tea; I couldn’t wait to show my robe to my friends. I never reminded my father that he was denigrating
my
mother.