Persian Girls: A Memoir Read Online Free

that. If one of us got sick, they tried to correct the balance.
    When Maryam couldn’t get pregnant, Aziz had taken her to a fortune-teller, an herbalist, and finally even consulted a male gynecologist, a last resort since it was a sin for a woman to be examined by a man (there was a shortage of female doctors). The gynecologist gave Maryam tests and said he couldn’t find anything wrong with her. He added, “Not everything is known to us.” It was possible it was her husband who was the cause of her not getting pregnant, but in the male-dominated society people never questioned the husbands.
    Sometimes it was Aziz who put me to sleep at night. She lay next to me and told me stories from One Thousand and One Nights, with their intricate, interwoven plots. Whether the story revolved around a flying horse, a bird that could carry off elephants, doors that opened at the sound of a voice, or a jin who granted wishes, Aziz made them sound as if they were true.
     
     
     
     
     
    Maryam, like others in the neighborhood, structured her days around the rituals of religion, following its cardinal rules: prayer three times a day, hejab (covering hair and skin in men’s presence), fasting for one month, pilgrimage, giving alms. Voices of muezzins streamed out of the surrounding mosques three times a day. Women prayed at home rather than in mosques, where men went for their prayers. Women went to mosques only on special occasions—to ask God to fulfill a wish or to listen to sermons given by different aghound s (Muslim priests). For alms Maryam gave so generously to the poor that she rarely had money left over at the end of the month. Her income was the rent she collected from the tenants on the other side of the courtyard, and from the profits of five bakeries she had inherited from her late husband.
    It was almost a refrain with Maryam and others around her to say, “It’s the life beyond that matters.”
    Once, arriving home from school when I was about seven years old, I found Maryam and her two tenants, Hamideh and Ezat Sadaat, both widowed, in the living room, sitting by white cloths spread on the floor. They were cutting them in a certain way.
    “We’re making shrouds,” Maryam explained to me. “It’s good to prepare for the life beyond. It’s nothing to be afraid of if you’re good on this earth. Death isn’t final; you’ll be brought back to life on the Day of Judgment. Angels will come to you and question you the moment you are in your grave. If your answers reflect that you conducted your life in the right way, the angels will lift you and deliver you to paradise. If badness comes through you’ll be sent to hell where burning fires await you.”
    The sound of traffic didn’t reach our alley set within a maze of alleys, all too narrow for cars. I could hear her words clearly, though she spoke very softly. She rarely made me feel as if she were preaching at me or trying to correct my ways.
    I went to my room, trying to engage my mind with my own daily concerns—doing my school work well, wondering if I would spend a night with Batul at the end of the week. Through the open door to the courtyard I could hear the murmur of various sounds—the chirping of sparrows, the tumbling of fish in the pool (when it became cold, Maryam put them in a tank inside), the cooing of mourning doves Maryam kept in a cage, the rippling of water in the joob outside, from which water was channeled into cisterns inside houses. A motley, orange-and-yellow-haired, flat-faced alley cat wandered in from outside and mewed as he headed for the food in the saucer we had set down for him, then went to sit at the edge of the pool and stared longingly at the goldfish in the water. The parakeet in a large brass cage said, “ Salaam, halet chetoreh (Hello, how are you)?”
    Later in the day I joined Maryam and Hamideh and Ezat Sadaat for dinner in the courtyard. The three of them had prepared dinner together, as they often did. They were