The Margaret Thatcher School of Beauty, page 6
“I was not my father’s first choice for help. My older brother Sina, his partner in the small business he had set up in our village outside Yazd, had been called up for military service the month prior. I was put under rigorous training to learn all about men’s tailoring, a booming industry at that time. Now, no self-respecting Iranian man would wear a tie, that noose of the Western man, but back then ties were the icing on suits that sparkled and flared, strands of silk running through an exact blend of poly-viscose and cotton.
“The morning of the parade, I remember getting up before the sun, with the rooster in our backyard. Driving with my father in his wheezing Packard, which he had bought the year before, we came to the gates of the Golden City.
“No one from the local towns was allowed to enter the gates, to sit and stare at the parade. The people who were getting the party ready, the costumiers and handlers, were masked by large fake columns, made especially to match the real ones on the hill overlooking the vast plain. From there my father would assist the head costumier, a tall, gaunt man from France, and help him with any last-minute stitching. It was there that I first saw Jamsheed, astride his horse, dressed as an ancient Sassanian. He was strapped with golden breastplates, his thick bare arms piled high with cuffs of melted pewter, jewellery around his neck.
“All the men playing soldiers were to look straight ahead, warriors ready to take on the decadence of Babylon, with its rooftop garden and tower of Babel. Jamsheed turned to look at me instead, conquering me in a second with eyes that were smeared with dark kohl and all the wrong intent.
“HE CAME FROM A NEIGHBOURING village, but had greater ambitions than our local bazaar stall, he told me later that day, when the weight of the breastplates had three hundred men collapsing beneath the fake columns. The Shah and his guests had retired to their tents, readying themselves for a grand ball later that evening. With three hundred men to tend, my father was too busy to notice a man talking to me. Otherwise he would have surely sent me reeling with the power of his fist.
“‘I’m going to Tehran,’ Jamsheed explained. ‘From there I’ll take a plane to New York, make my millions in one, two years, tops.’
“Knowing that questions would make me less than desirable, I held my thoughts and waited for him to tell me how he was going to do this, to make his millions. There was no secret to the seduction of men; even I, a virgin of seventeen, understood this basic tenant.
“A duck of the head, a lowering of the lashes, a blush here and there and they will bite like hungry lions. To hold your heart in your throat, to feel a flutter at even the slightest look from a man, to hide. That, my mother had always told me, was what an Iranian woman should be like.
“And it certainly worked on Jamsheed. It took him no longer than a moment of my embarrassed silence to tempt him to spill his secrets.
“With excitement, he pulled out a piece of paper from a rucksack and held it before me. It was yellowing and had creased from the many times he had opened and closed it.
“‘This,’ he said with all the pompous air of an elite Sassanian, ‘this is my ticket to greatness.’
“On the paper was a drawing, a diagram of a large animal. I instantly recognised it as a lizard, like the ones I used to see scurrying across the desert floor, the ones my older brother would often catch and kill, dissecting the poor things with our father’s tailor shears. But this lizard was not real: it was a toy, the blueprint for a toy that would crawl along the ground. Jamsheed’s ticket to riches, to American millions.
“‘It works like a yo-yo,’ he explained. ‘There is a rolling pin under his body, see, and a string that pulls the pin, unrolling it and rolling it, making the lizard go. All I would need is a few hundred dollars to invest in it. Some paper, some paint, and I am set. The American children have never had such a plaything! It will be bigger than any toy, you’ll see!’
“It would be the first of many plans that would never see the light of day. But I didn’t know that then. All I could see was the gleam in his eyes, what I took as determination.”
Every time you look into my eyes, you put salt into my wounds.
“He smiled again and blinked. ‘Did anyone ever tell you you have beautiful skin? White as the Alborz snow. The desert is no place for you, that is for sure.’
“I remember blushing and ducking those penetrating eyes of his again. It would not be until later that I would find out there was nothing beneath that gleam; like the breastplate he was wearing, it hid flesh too used to the comfort of its own beauty.
“AFTER THAT PARADE, I WOULD often see him in my village. He would come to the square, where there were a few Western-style cafes, and sit all day long, waiting for me to return from my father’s shop, where I kept the books in a back room. He would always offer me a tea, but I always refused. My entire reputation would be ruined in the second it would take to sit down at that table with him. Everyone in my village knew me, knew about me.
“I was a virgin, as I ought to be, never courted by anyone. Not in all my seventeen years.
“Maybe Jamsheed knew this; maybe he could tell even before looking at me on that day at Persepolis. Maybe he had me picked for someone who would only twitter, let him gleam, let him fly, while I hopped around the ground, seeking food, making a nest, surviving. Whatever the reason, he had chosen me. And I had no one in my head but him.
“He finally made his move, a few months after Persepolis. He came to my home one morning, dressed in his three-piece white suit, one he had purchased from my father’s shop with a week’s earnings. His hair gleamed from Brylcreem and his sideburns and moustache were trimmed only a little, so as not to appear too modern.
“My father was used to bartering his innate Persian pride for the dollar, but his own daughter was something else. He would never accept a dandy for a son-in-law, a dreamer with no steady qualifications, just a string of odd jobs and a toy lizard for a future. When Jamsheed asked him for permission to take me to Shiraz, to the local discotheque, it took less than a second for my father to shut the door in his face. Then he turned around and slapped me.
“‘Whore,’ he called me. ‘What have you done to me?’
“In my father’s mind, I had made Jamsheed come to our door with that gleam in his eye. I had lost my sharm, my dignity and femininity, and could never get it back. I tried to tell him the truth – that I had no idea Jamsheed would come calling in such a brazen way, that I had done nothing to lure him – but my father had no ears for it. My version of the story did not matter. Not then, and not later, when I told it again to myself.”
Chapter Eleven
ZADI STEPPED OUTSIDE THE ANNA Karenina and turned towards the northern avenue. She had asked the Capitan’s daughter for the favour of allowing them a look-see, wanting Maryam to see what it was like to walk the hallways of a proper hospital. Neither of them had ever been inside one, after all.
“Just like the ones we saw in Doctor Zhivago, Maryam-jan,” said Zadi. They had watched the movie on Haji Khanoum’s television set one night last winter. Omar Sharif as the poet doctor, his life ruptured by a revolution. Zadi had seen the film as a young girl, at the local cinema in her hometown of Hamedan.
“You’ll be just like Doctor Zhivago,” Zadi had said to her little one, as they watched Omar Sharif fighting the Cossacks to save a wounded woman. “Doctor Maryam, they’ll call you. Doctor Maryam, we need you.”
Soon after, Zadi had gotten the idea to take her daughter to the university hospital, so she could see real patients, to feel what it would be like to help them.
If anyone asks you about the fairies,
show your face and say, like this!
If anyone asks you about the moon,
climb up on the roof and say, like this!
If anyone asks what there is to do,
light the candle and say, like this.
She picked Maryam up from school and, after a brief chat with one of the teachers, who was among the handful of Argentinean clients who came to the salon, she buttoned her daughter into her pea coat and took her by the hand, leading her westward to the hospital. Sheema Bahrami, the Capitan’s daughter, would be waiting for them there.
“Are you excited about tonight, joon-e man? What you’re going to see?”
Maryam looked up at her with those big brown eyes. “It’s what I’ve dreamed of, Maman,” she said. She wrapped her arms around Zadi, squeezing her face against her stomach.
Zadi’s heart swelled. She had watched this tiny being since the moment she first held her in the palms of her hands. She had observed the miniature of her blossoming character. And in that blossoming she had seen herself, and the things she had understood as a young girl. Had it not been for poetry and the wisdom of her grandmother’s words, she could never have grasped those things, for all the wealth in the world: the beauty of things, the intricacies of nature, and the sureties of its seemingly infinitesimal and arbitrary decisions.
She noticed this strange magic everywhere she went. But it wasn’t just the beauty of life Zadi had seen as a little girl. For as long as she could remember, she had seen pain. She could see the needs and loneliness of people, just by looking at them.
She could be sitting on a bus or walking to school and she would glance at someone, a complete stranger, and see his or her past and future unfold, see their everyday lives come together as one in the same moment. In an instant.
She could see them, in a way that she could not fully understand or explain, even as she tried to explain it to her Grandmother Shahrzad one day.
THEY HAD BEEN SITTING, AS they often did in the afternoons, on the back porch, watching the persimmon trees in her grandmother’s garden rustle in the wind. Zadi told her grandmother what she had felt, what she could understand when she looked at people. She could tell their stories, their innermost hearts, and the heart at the centre of the heart, she said, whispering the secret, as the wind kept on its soliloquy.
“I can see what people want by just looking at them, Maman Shahrzad. How lonely or happy they really are.”
Her grandmother had given her a knowing smile.
“There is a word for what you know,” she’d said. “Ghalb, the eye of the heart.
“Everything that was mapped out in the human body, in the human heart, it all comes back to that mysterious place. The ghalb with its intention for life, for happiness. No one can see it, but it is there. If any one thing is off balance, it is the ghalb that will take you there, Zadi-jan. To become whole again.”
ZADI WATCHED HER DAUGHTER SKIP ahead of her, giggling as passers-by stopped to pat her on the head. To foster Maryam, to give her every opportunity under the sun: Zadi wanted that more than anything.
It was one of the reasons she had first agreed to the poetry meetings. That and the light she had seen in the Capitan’s eyes when he talked of his old poetry circle.
It was that kind of light that had made Zadi look for beauty all those years back.
SHEEMA WATCHED THE LIGHTS AT the end of the plaza. From the university hospital you could see the entire eastern end, all the way to the rose-coloured presidential palace. All day long people were gathering in the area. Demonstrators gathered every Thursday, looking for their lost children, but today there were more than usual. She was waiting for Zadi and Maryam.
Zadi harboured dreams of her daughter becoming a doctor of some sort one day – somebody, she said, who could heal anyone by just walking into a room. That was hardly how it worked in real life, Sheema had tried to tell her, but it had fallen on closed ears. Zadi wanted something, it seemed, although it was hard to know what that was, exactly.
And strange as it was, Sheema understood that kind of desire; she too had wanted something all her life without knowing what that something was.
When she was little it was clear to her. She wanted to be with her father, to see him, to sit on his lap, to be hugged and kissed by him. Yes, she wanted her father whom she had never known, as he had been imprisoned before she was born. She fantasised about and idealised an imaginary father whom she would meet one day.
His touch, the embraces she had imagined receiving as a little girl, had caused her head to spin with joy.
But when he had come to her finally – released, he told her – after the revolution hit the streets of Tehran, he was nothing liked she had hoped.
It made her body convulse, and react in strange ways. She felt like she was being dispersed, her body shattering into billions of particles, with spaces in between them so that one could not tell if they had ever been part of a whole. She felt that way for days after his return. But after he confronted her about what had happened to her, she did feel a little more real again, except this time all those pieces had been gathered into a dark revolving slump in her centre. No story could ever be told.
SHEEMA WAS BORN IN ANKARA, a few months after her mother escaped Iran fearing persecution; she had been active, supporting her husband’s political line.
Missing her husband, her family, her friends and her country, she had slowly became physically and mentally sick. But for the love of her daughter she resisted her sickness until Sheema got married.
Haji Mahmoud Nosratollahi, a very religious and influential Mullah who had escaped Iran with his family and got refugee status in Turkey, was supporting Sheema and her mother.
Sheema, having a sick mother and an absent father, slowly adopted a nursing role at home. At school, she was a successful student. But she lacked any ambition for her own future. She became careless about herself.
It is what it is.
After she finished school, she applied for many fields of study at university, including engineering, agriculture and medicine. She was accepted into all of them.
I don’t know which one I should continue to study, but I know one thing, she thought. I want to be able to cure my mother. So she had enrolled in medicine.
SHE HAD BEEN COMING OUT of a doorway. She was lost – the streets of Turkey were not so dissimilar to the ones in Buenos Aires. She had found herself repeating the words in her head out loud. She did that often, reaching into a well deep within to pull out lines and ghazals that had been placed there by unseen hands; lines that had been there ever since she could remember. She was repeating those words when she saw him.
Alireza, the son of Haji Mahmoud Nosratollahi, was standing in an alcove across the alley. The rain was falling on his face as he stepped out to talk to her. There was a poetry night not far from here, he said, if she cared to join him. She had to help her mother with the sewing, she told him, walking away.
But a few weeks later he came to the small room she and her mother lived in. He and his father sat down on the small carpet in the living space.
Haji Mahmoud Nosratollahi politely and abstemiously, as is the custom on such an occasion, asked Sheema’s mother to accept his son as their servant, gholaam, Sheema’s husband.
At the time, Sheema was in the second year of medical school. She was not thinking about marriage at all. Sheema and Alireza had grown up together in Ankara, as neighbours and friends. She had thought of him as a good boy; she never saw any major problem with him, so she liked him as a friend, except that Alireza, in contrast to Sheema, who was a moderate Muslim, was very religious and had to follow his father, participating in many religious gatherings and rituals.
“I want to finish my degree first. Besides, I have to take care of my maman,” said Sheema, feeling shocked by the proposal and suddenly trapped by an inevitable fate.
They said, there is hidden bait in this trap.
I am so trapped that I don’t see the bait.
“No, no problem at all. You can finish your degree and take care of your mother. I promise that,” said Haji Mahmoud Nosratollahi, smiling with sincerity and innocence. “I promise!”
She caught her mother’s eyes, but they contained no secret message. She already knew the secret. Her destiny had been engraved on her forehead from the beginning of beginnings. What else could her sick mother have said to a man who had been so generous and kind, helping her and her daughter during these difficult times?
THEY NEVER MADE IT TO the university hospital. As they crossed the avenue, the mob on the plaza had begun chanting. Death to Margaret Thatcher. Death to the army. Maryam looked at Zadi with frightened eyes as they crossed back to where they had just come from.
They were silent until they reached Calle de Florida.
“Maryam! Joon-e man! It’s all right if you were scared.” Zadi squeezed her daughter’s hand. “It’s just silly things. Silly people. We’ll go to the hospital another day.”
Maryam stared at the pavement, then stopped. She shook her head, her little plaits tapping against her school uniform.
“I don’t want to go to the hospital. I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t want to be a doctor when I grow up.”
“Of course you do. You have never even been in a hospital.” Zadi leaned down to look into her little one’s eyes. “Remember, you weren’t even born in one.”
Maryam shook her head again. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to be a doctor!” She let go of Zadi’s hand.
“But it’s what you’ve always wanted!” Zadi poked her daughter with her finger. Just then a thought came to her. She thought to have some fun with Maryam, maybe a game of hide and seek!
“Look at me,” she said, and she ran towards the apartment building.
She stopped at the Anna Karenina’s front door, looking back over her shoulder. Her daughter was still standing halfway down the street.
Zadi turned into the lobby. When she looked back again, Maryam was inside the building.
“Stop it!” Maryam screamed, her hands on her hips.
