The Stationery Shop(49)

It sounded exactly like a plan should.





Chapter Eighteen


1957



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Alternate Plan

Most days I walk home from work through Baharestan Square. The lady dressed in red stands by the fountain, still. Her eyes are smeared with kohl, her hair is matted and dry. They say she hasn’t changed her dress since she was stood up by her lover all those years ago. And she goes there every day—poor lost soul.

I shouldn’t walk through that square; there are other ways to get home. But I can’t help it. I am filled again with longing and regret. This endless desire to turn back time.

I remember the expression in your eyes in the Stationery Shop the day we met. I remember your shoes. I remember how being with you made me happier than I’d ever been.

Mother’s mood swings have decreased. She’s calmer, but almost too calm. The wild rages and angry lashings-out are mostly gone. But she has a low-level chronic sadness. She nurses her inner wounds quietly now. Mr. Fakhri’s death hit her so hard.

Roya Joon, how I wish you hadn’t changed your mind. How I wish her mental state had been tolerable for you. But you made your choice, and I wasn’t going to force myself into your life.

Gozasht, it’s past.

So Mossadegh is gone. The Shah has more and more control. A younger version of myself would be outraged and want to fight. But I am done with fighting. It’s been four years since the coup. People lament the loss of a leader, but all I feel is the loss of you.

I don’t know if Jahangir told you that my father passed away about a year ago? I’m so glad that you and Jahangir still telephone occasionally, by the way—it’s my only way to get news of you. We held a small funeral for my father. Mother wrote elaborate invitations and sent them to the family who had shunned us all these years. She learned to read and write from my father. Her family was poor, illiterate. His family was learned. Their marriage broke class boundaries; it was a disgrace for my father’s family. He was outcast for the decision. But he loved her! I know that he loved her. He loved her when she was young and he loved her when they experienced indescribable loss and he loved her through her depression.

That is the unconditional love I have strived to give her too, hard as it’s been at times. I thought you could grow to love her too. Despite it all.

Others saw my father as weak, but I no longer do. He was intelligent, devoted. He tried very hard to be fair. In many ways, he didn’t belong in the patriarchal system of our society. He respected my mother. He tried to help her through her sorrows and moods. He did not judge her in the harsh way that our culture judges those who struggle with their mental state.

Because they both married outside of their class, I always thought, albeit foolishly, that my mother would respect love. Marrying for love. I know it’s seen as romantic nonsense by some. The poets, our own, wrote so much of love, and the American films are obsessed with it. But of course there still stands the tradition of marriage as a contract to attain or maintain status.

After I met you, I was engulfed—drowned in you. All I could see was you. I dared to imagine a future together. My hopes soared as our plans solidified. I couldn’t think of anyone but you. But my mother kept insisting on Shahla.

So I told her I was in love with you.

She was doing calligraphy when I told her—I’ll never forget it. It calmed her to copy the letters and the doctor had recommended it for her nerves. For a brief moment a look of tenderness crossed her face. But then she stiffened and said, “Basseh.”

Enough, she said. Stop the nonsense.

Our financial situation was wobbly, much as my mother liked to boast about our “villa” by the sea. I knew her boasting drove you crazy. It made me want to melt with shame when she said those things about our “wealth” in front of you. Even now, I want to disappear just thinking of some of the things she said to you. But the truth is that my father had been passed up for promotions. He stagnated at his engineering job. Even though he came from a wealthy family, his relatives’ rejection of him after he married my mother meant he could never ask them for help of any kind, especially financial. Over the years, my mother’s mental state was all the more reason to avoid his relatives, because the few times his sisters did see us, they made it clear her illness only confirmed that she had been wrong for him all along.

Shahla’s family is rich because of the Shah and her own father’s powerful position, and my mother saw marriage to her as helpful, almost essential. They buy their dresses and pearls from Paris, my mother said. As though I cared a rat’s hair about all that. I was worried about our country. I supported Mossadegh because he promised progress and democracy and autonomy. I couldn’t stand the Shah’s cowering to foreigners, his lack of spine. I admired Mossadegh’s independent strength. But I digress. Suffice it to say that Shahla did not fit into my view of my future at all.

You did.

When I got your last letter, when you said that you didn’t want to spend your life with me after all, that my mother’s condition was just too much for you to bear, that you could not marry into a family with this mental instability—what could I do? I wasn’t going to force my family on you. I couldn’t change her condition, much as I would have liked to. I was so hurt, Roya Joon, by your shunning of her, of me. What could I say to that? She’s my mother, and there was no possible way she would not be in our lives. I didn’t want to stop your dreams. I had to let you go. You didn’t want to see me and I respected that.