The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Afterword
A glossary of words and phrases
Also by Marsha Mehran
Copyright
Chapter One
THE PULLING OF THE THREAD was one of the first lessons Zadi Heirati learned in the hammam, the bathhouse. She had been working at the hammam for only a month when she came to learn the meaning of the band, the thread, the soliloquy of its art, the art of removing body hair, called band andazi.
Zadi had come to the hammam from Hamedan, the city where she was born. She took a bus to the capital, arriving at its concave and congested central station, with its blooming arches and strange memorials, and took a city bus to one of the northern suburbs called Tajrish, where she had heard there were wealthier residents. The choice of the wealthier area of the capital was not instinctual, for she would have rather headed south, where flowers sprouted from the corners of brick buildings, like perennials of Roman statues, and stray children ran naked in the streets, screaming obscenities peppered with poetic knowledge. No, the choice of the north came from a need to alter her own internal compass, as she had decided she no longer trusted its strangely vacillating and often derogatory commands. In turning north, pushing against the tide, she felt that twist within her very being.
The bus Zadi had taken from Hamedan had travelled over the rambling Alvand Mountains, snowy and precipitous terrain littered with primeval villages, which had been erected during the time of the ancients and had for the most part been left unchanged. The passing stones and vegetation reminded Zadi of an afternoon a few days prior, when she had been sitting on the back porch of a house she had known for a while. It was a place of particular quiescence. She was sitting on the back porch with a bowl of lima beans. She had pushed the beans out of their skins in preparation for the springtime feast. Accidentally, she had spilled the beans onto the terracotta tiles, and had stood up in fright and disbelief. In her mind now, on the bus, she could see the pods growing stalks in the harsh cold, shooting up between the tiles into the spring air, and the tragic scene unfolding around them. She had stood up in awe and trepidation. But as she sat in that hurtling bus heading towards the capital, she wondered. The beginning is the ending, the poet had said. She had always known, thought Zadi, that from the moment she arrived at her grandmother’s house, she was on her way out of it.
It is what it is.
What it was, was eternal banishment – and there is nothing wrong with eternal banishment.
After alighting at the last bus station in Tajrish, Zadi made her way on foot through the town, which teemed with the day’s festivities, and turned north, not because she knew where she was going but because it was the direction that suddenly brought her back a deep feeling from inside. At the end of a long, narrow street – Poplar Street, flanked by poplars heavy with ripening flowers – she saw the small dome; its bell shape rusted by rain, the patina dulled and beautiful. Her mind was on what was behind her, so she did not realise that she was standing before the hammam’s door until it opened. Zadi, who had until that morning thought proverbs to be mere ornaments to everyday life, was taken aback when a woman opened the door and spoke.
“I used to feel sorry for myself because I had no shoes,” the woman said.
“Until I met a man who was dead,” Zadi replied, understanding as she did that the words uttered were the very reason for their being.
Yes, it was a hammam. There was a position available, for a strong girl. “Step forward,” the woman said. “And don’t mind the jennies lurking in the shadows.”
MINA NAZERI, FORTY-NINE, HAD BEEN working at the hammam for thirty years, and had learned all the secrets of her profession. She was a vivacious, strong matriarch of resilience, courage and determination, and had earned the obedience and respect of her employees and clients. Everyone called her Khanoum, a reverential title for women of high quality. Khanoum Mina not only had a thorough knowledge of the secrets of beauty, of recipes, ingredients and treatments; she also knew the history of the hammam.
WHEN THE ARAB CALIPH UMAR I invaded the Sassanian Dynasty in the seventh century, the hammam had already been operating its healing fonts for a hundred years, pulling from the hot springs on which it was built the essence of waters and oils that dispensed the kind of healing capabilities only known among the priesthood of a certain celestial being.
As the forces of turbaned men stormed the Zagros Mountains and the rest of the vast Iranian plateau, the women who oversaw the bathhouse shut the cedar doors and barred them with boulders, so as to keep the army from their usual medicine of pillage and rape.
The hammam’s doors did not keep out the caliphate’s army; the two dozen women in the hammam were raped and hung from the boughs of the poplars surrounding the stony fountains and returning terraces. But the waters – their enticement persisted. Many of the Caliph’s men were tempted to jump into the pools of steaming mineral-rich liquid, wrapping themselves in the refined ways of the locals, donning themselves in nuances of faith and etiquette. These men, and the rest of the horde that hurried its way from the south, did not know that what they were gaining was something quite mysterious, something that was not easily measured but could perhaps be found over and around those very healing waters.
It is the nearness that I treasure.
Once the Caliph’s army was gone, and the poplars held only a song of their terrible leaves, a woman by the name of Anahita the Great took it upon herself to open those cedar doors again. No one knew why she was great, except perhaps for the fact that she did not believe in curses, a great anomaly and advantage among a population that paid regular alms in the form of human suffering.
THE HAMMAM ON POPLAR STREET was one of the finest in Tehran. It consisted of five acres of prime northern land, half of which was taken up by a maze of buildings, with rooms opening into each other at every turn.
Having established herself in the small nook given to her as a sleeping quarter, across the courtyard from the main hammam building, Zadi began the lengthy process of learning about the hammam’s myriad traditions. Among them was band andazi, one of the most popular with the clientele of neighbourhood housewives and virgins.
Band andazi, or threading, begins with a preparation of rosewater and powder. A rice pudding of a paste, this mixture has been known to provoke grumbles of hunger in many a confused stomach. Once treated with a coating of the mixture, the thread is then ready for assembling.
The day Zadi truly began to understand the band had begun just as always in the hammam, with Zadi completing the last stages of this preparation for her client, a corpulent matron who favoured long massage treatments and who was a virgin to the thread. Its opening and closing web proved far too drastic, too barbaric, for her refined tastes. Taking one look at the scissor-like string coming her way, she fainted. Not an uncommon reaction to band andazi; one in every three of the hammam’s clients succumbed to their flight instinct.
Zadi was practised in the arena of reviving; she gently rolled the frightened woman onto her side, onto a cushioned divan, especially made for just this purpose, that ran along the perimeters of the room. Uncorking a tiny glass flask of atr, the essence of Caspian roses, she held the perfume to the somnolescent nostrils, allowing the magic of the exalted petals, which had been treated to the salted breezes of the Caspian Sea, to reach into the mind’s sleeping recesses. Only seconds were needed for the woman to awake, to overcome her timidity and nod: yes. Of course not every client fainted. Plenty of bathers were all too willing to submit themselves to bracing tugs of the twisting thread. Despite their show of courage, Zadi knew the real reason why some of her clients were so willing: there are those among us who enjoy pain, who revel in its transitory power to relieve a much deeper malaise. In Zadi’s experience, more often than not, these clients were of a defined breed, the wives and daughters of many of Tehran’s most prominent men, its crème de la crème.
Having wakened her fainted client in this instance, Zadi found herself considering the ingenuity of band adazi. When all was said and done, it was a simple method: pulling the thread and plucking the hair, a dance that needed the participation of both partners. Often the client would retreat, pulling back as the thread came towards her face. Soon, however, she would inch forward, allowing the threader to move back and forth with her until the face became rosy, engorged, and free of unwanted hair. And it was this dance, Zadi realised, that was the best part of band andazi, for it involved a combined determination. Such a simple notion, yet integral to the completion of the dance.
AS WITH ALL, IT DID not take long for Khanoum Mina to discover the reason Zadi had travelled from Hamedan to work in the hammam. She ga ve Zadi a stack of books, instructional mostly, on the art of beauty, and directed her to take them back to her small room across the courtyard. The precious texts unfortunately did not do much to help Zadi; try as she might she could not keep her eyes on the pages before her.
“Do you know why the hammam was built?” Khanoum Mina asked one day, as they stood before the threshold of the hot room.
“To cleanse the body and the spirit that follows,” said Zadi, staring at the amalgam of mosaics spreading out in infinite directions above her head.
“That is what we tell them – what we let them think. But that is not the truth.” Khanoum Mina smiled. “It’s about the particles, the ones we haven’t gotten a hold of yet. And never will.”
Zadi did not understand what particles Khanoum Mina was talking about. She had knowledge of hammam, of course; suspended in the corner of her mind was the sweet and distant memory of one afternoon with her mother, who had taken her to the mountain springs of her hometown, in which there were several mineral baths similar to the ones in Tehran. But nothing in that remembrance had involved the kind of mysterious phenomena Khanoum Mina was referring to.
It was not until a few days later that Zadi came to understand Khanoum Mina’s words.
That was the day Khanoum Mina summoned her to the bridal quarter. After receiving many treatments, the bridal party had gathered at the centre of the hammam. It was customary for the party to partake of all the hammam’s services before having the henna. The party had lasted the whole morning and afternoon, and Zadi felt tired. A chill permeated her insides. She felt the wrenching in her stomach again, a hollow that had been present for months. The coldness running throughout her body seemed to have worsened during the course of the day, leaving her freezing as she stood there in the cooling room. Her long, tent-like dress covered her burgeoning belly.
As the sun set through the ironwork windows that lined the upper tiers of the domed ceiling, Zadi turned a corner into the inner bridal quarter. What she saw there made her knees weaken and tremble.
The young bride’s jubilant and rosy-cheeked face was being laid down on a soft mattress by her female relatives. The treatment was hard and soft at the same time, like a marriage, Khanoum Mina was saying. In a distant corner a woman hired especially for the occasion thumped on a tombak drum, a beat that had its genesis in an understanding of desire. As the drum beats deepened in both tempo and rhythm, the bride’s gown was opened to reveal her body ready for the henna brush.
One by one her female relatives took turns, dipping the brush into the plates of red paste. Blood red, for the blood of the generations, Khanoum Mina had told Zadi. “The pure love that carries through all time.”
An utter sadness filled Zadi then, meeting the coldness somewhere in her middle, where the baby who was growing inside of her, perhaps aware of the dichotomy, kicked violently.
Pure love, Khanoum Mina had said. Zadi could hardly believe she had ever been cared for with such deference, let alone remember what it felt like. That’s what happens when your heart is broken, she reflected. Your heart lost its beat and its ability to release that enchanting sensation.
And that was when the meaning of Khanoum Mina’s words showed itself. The tombak drum was beating its clandestine beat. Taking the brush, the bride’s mother touched the young woman’s stomach. In that instant, with the dipping of the boiled henna leaves, the connection of the mother’s heart to her daughter, love began to flow again. So Khanoum Mina had told Zadi, but it wasn’t until that moment, as she watched the henna brush on the young bride, that she understood its power.
As the beams of the sunset filtered through that domed ceiling, and the room of women began to sway like a giant sea, the blood within Zadi’s own body began to compound. In an instant, warmth overtook her every pore, filling up the cave in her stomach as though it had never been there. Turning on her heels, she ran from the room of women, scurrying into a nearby locker room. There she tore open her work clothes and stared at her stomach.
There, at the precipice that was her pregnant belly, was a trickling, a teardrop coloured dark red. Without thinking, she ran back to the bridal party, standing in the doorway while the bride, now fully sanctified, was hugged and kissed by her relatives.
And Zadi knew she had also been blessed, for in that moment, she had seen why she had been placed in the hammam – to learn, to experiment, to acquire experience, and to give back what she had been given. She had seen her purpose.
GIVING BIRTH TO HER DAUGHTER, Maryam, was one of the best experiences Zadi could have had. And what a wonderful place to give birth and to be born: in a pool of warm, clean, mineral-rich water, while being blessed by half a dozen naked women.
Khanoum Mina was alert, waiting for any sign of Zadi’s impending labour. She knew the difference between false and real contractions. Although she had never been able to give birth herself, she loved to be a midwife, an assistant, or at least an observer. And so she had learned at a much younger age, and had delivered babies before.
As the due date approached, Zadi felt easy contractions. She thought they were real ones and started shouting, but Khanoum Mina tried to calm her, assuring her that the real contractions would be coming soon.
“They are very painful,” Khanoum Mina said, shaking her head to emphasise what she meant.
“More pain than this? Oh my God!”
Khanoum Mina had prepared for the delivery, and when the time came – after several strong, painful and repetitive contractions, minutes apart, during which Zadi could not move – she called the other women to get ready.
“Now is the time; bring her here!”
The women helped Zadi into a small pool with a fountain of running water. The delivery took half an hour, during which the women called on the divines to ease the pain of Zadi’s labour.
Since ancient times, it had been a tradition in Iran to call the divines for help at the time of giving birth. Zoroastrians used to call on the prophet Pir-e Sabz, who was replaced by Hazrat Khezr and, after the invasion of Islam, Imam Ali.
When Maryam was born, all the women started chanting, crying over and over, “Kli li li li li li li li,” the chant for happy moments – births and weddings.
The baby was wrapped in a white cloth, and Khanoum Mina was about to bind her body with a rope, when Zadi stopped her. “I don’t want my baby to be wrapped in ghondagh. I want her to be free, free of meaningless restrictions.”
It was customary for babies to be wrapped in a cloth and bound with rope, to keep their arms and legs straight. The baby, wrapped up like a cocoon, could not move at all. There were two reasons for this practice. First, parents believed it helped the baby’s legs and hands from becoming crooked. And second, they thought it would teach the baby to become an obedient individual with good manners. Zadi had not been wrapped in ghondagh, and she did not want to restrict her daughter by binding her with cloth and rope.
Zadi was overjoyed to have become a mother and felt blessed to have a beautiful daughter. She had been in the hammam for more than eight months, and she had come to know its secrets, the reason for its existence. Heeding Khanoum Mina’s advice, she decided to leave the hammam once her baby was born. “Take everything you have and go, Zadi,” Khanoum Mina said. “A timely tear is better than a misplaced smile.”
Khanoum Mina also thought it timely for an oath of silence.
“Take what you have seen to your grave, Zadi,” she warned. “Nothing should be said about what we have witnessed here. Better not talk about it; better not to even try.” Zadi, who had experienced Khanoum Mina’s overcaution before, promised to keep quiet while secretly deciding to tell her daughter all about it – one day.
Chapter Two
LIKE THE REST OF THE world, Zadi had watched the revolution in Iran unfold, each new word spread on the streets leading to more confusion, but also to the beginnings of a new world. It required from its admirers a certain aversion, for it was important not only to ignore what was real and sweet, but also what was missing inside of its believers.
Zadi had been raised by her grandmother to be independent and free. She wanted the same kind of freedom she had enjoyed as a child for her daughter. The prevailing political ambiguity and the gradual imposition of harsh Islamic laws that limited women’s freedom created a gloomy outlook for Zadi and many like-minded people. She thought she could not subject her child to what was ahead – years of struggle, gender inequality and oppression. Zadi could foresee, she thought, what was on the heels of the revolution, and what had been brewing before the revolution. It would bring unbearable conditions for her and for her daughter. So she did what she had to do. She took what she had and left the country with her daughter.
