The Stationery Shop(73)

“Who tricked us, Roya? Someone did. I said Baharestan Square. Who was it that changed our letters?”

Claire looked at Roya and then at Bahman, the plastic tray in her hand almost tipping over.

“What about your sister? She never liked me. Was it Jahangir? Did you know, Roya Joon, that he later told me he was in love?” He looked at his hands. “With me.” Then he looked up again. “Who did this to us? Shahla would never have had a hand in this. She couldn’t have. Could she? Was it Mr. Fakhri? Not my mother, surely.”

Roya’s heart raced as the past came flooding back, as the people who had figured so prominently in their lives that summer swam in front of her eyes, as she listened to the man she’d loved who had lost so much, including his mind.

“Good-bye, Bahman.”

“Come back. When you can. There is so much history you do not know.”





Chapter Twenty-Eight


2013



* * *



Back Storage Room

Bahman’s letter came in the mail, addressed to Roya’s home. Was it so easy to find the address of Mr. and Mrs. Walter and Roya Archer, nothing more than a neat searchable item on the Web? Roya opened the envelope with a strange feeling of déjà vu: that old familiar thrill coursing through her even as she sat in her kitchen—at seventy-seven!—waiting for Walter to come home from the grocery store.

Dearest Roya Joon,

After our engagement party, I wanted to make it all up to you. The fact that my mother tried to sabotage our joyful celebration saddened me to no end. All I wanted was a normal mother, someone kind, someone who didn’t dominate my life with her strategies and calculations and endless plans to manufacture the life she wanted for me. She wanted me to climb up in that fake, bourgeois world that she coveted. Her rage episodes left my father and me bereft. They barreled through like a force of nature, like a hurricane out of control, and once whatever semblance of peace we had in the home had been destroyed, we were left exhausted and brittle. My mother was sick. She needed help. But we did not know how to help her.

For days after our engagement party, she was restless, agitated. My father recommended that she sit and do her calligraphy. He had taught her in the hopes of having it calm her—so she had an outlet, a pastime, a way to focus her nervous energies on something positive. And she was surprisingly fond of it. But she could never be as good as those who had studied the art from a very young age.

Calligraphy was the skill of the best students of that generation. Those in the top-notch schools had been trained by masters in how to control their hand, produce their strokes, hold their pens.

And, of course, I would later find out the damage this skill could cause. The chasm that it created in our lives. When you came here to the Duxton Center a few days ago, it forced me to acknowledge what I think I had feared all along. My mother changed our letters. Rather, she had them altered, ensuring that you would go to one square and I to another. No one could have wanted that but my mother, Roya Joon. She was the one who felt her world would collapse if her son didn’t go through with the wedding she’d planned for him. And how did my mother get her hands on our letters? Oh, Roya. The answer to that question involves the history you do not know. So here, as I sit in this assisted-living center in the twilight of life, let me tell you what happened that summer.

On the Friday that fell two weeks after our engagement party, Mother could not sit still. She got up, paced the room. She complained of burning, of the heat keeping her up all night, of voices in her head. She demanded cool cucumber peels for her eyes. I peeled the cucumbers, what could I do, I pressed them against her eyelids. I fanned her with the bamboo kebab fan the way she liked. I fussed over her even as I seethed, hoping she’d just calm down, just relax, rein in her demons.

Nothing worked. She scratched the cucumber peels off and hurled them on the floor. She told me I had no idea the pain I was putting her through, how all she’d wanted was for her one son to have a life that was successful and filled with the right people in the best circles and that meant marrying Shahla. She went on about how she’d picked out Shahla for me, spoken to her parents, planned it all. Did I know what I was throwing away, what I was actually doing? She herself had been the daughter of a melon seller, and it was marriage to an engineer who was decent and good and most importantly from the upper class that saved her. Did I have any idea, she went on, what it meant to stagnate in life, to have no standing, to push and strive for a better life but to be stuck because of who your grandparents were, because your father was not educated, because of the class in which you’d been born? I was furious. She had busted out of the class into which she’d been born, and now, instead of letting me marry for love, she insisted that I just keep going as if I were an athlete grabbing her baton. I would not be allowed to stop running, would not be able to turn around, as if my marriage to someone I loved would somehow negate the “progress” she had made in fighting her fate.

I picked up the wilted cucumber peels from the floor. They were warm from contact with her skin, soft and limp. Touching them disgusted me. I argued for us. I told her how clever you were, your excellent grades, how hard you worked at school. I even emphasized your father’s steady job as a government clerk. And as I sit here in twilight writing this letter, it pains me to think I even uttered those words. As if I had any duty to convince her. As if our love alone shouldn’t have been enough. I am stunned by my own weakness.