Mother
The radio was still on when I woke up in the morning, my maman’s knock on my door an out of time beat against Shabpereh singing:
I looked for you in dreams and dreams, I took your hands and passed through the mirage.
My sister thought it indecent for a man to cry, I thought it worse for them to write songs wailing over lost love. It was almost funny, the idea that a woman could ever exercise power like that over a man. To elicit in them, in any genuine manner, a woundedness that was bound to the heart and not to the ego. Which man could be deafened, by will or circumstance, against the single instruction that initiated them: to take? A greed that bred scarcity in equal measure, bound in the principle that to be a man was to be born with the world indebted.
The prevention of the taking – in love or otherwise – was the single grain of hair pressing against this well-laid part, and the man’s “broken heart” was simply that: the itch of the hair, the chink of a thing denied.
When I thought myself too brutal in my knowing, I recognised that with the same certainty that I knew the sky to be blue, confirmation only required one to look: at the history of borders drawn, and drawn again and again, at lands desecrated and communities devastated; and at tallies more current, passports stamped with the names of the father to be replaced only with that of the husband, the keeper of the woman, the child; at the domain even nearer, in the throat, the thrum of some voices singing and overlapping, each with greater conviction, mine, mine, mine.
I also knew that no such song existed for women. Only by some closeness to that power could the words be learnt, albeit always to be said in an accent. And though some used it to point to their fathers and brothers and husbands as the exception, I’d too like to gesture to the clouds and the rain and the rare strikes of light that sometimes hid that great expanse above, whose constant blue never really changed.
And besides, all of Shabpereh’s songs seemed to address a different situation, making it impossible to all be about the same woman. So, really, how wounded could he actually be?
When I brought this up to the girls on the way to school, Roya said that in matters of the heart, all was equal. She’d twisted her opal ring round and round, the one not from the bazaar but the isles of Kish, as she spoke of socialisation and love and the human nature:
Like, if we were born on a deserted island and no one was there to teach us how to be a man and how to be a woman, those binaries that conditioned our behaviours would fall away, but love would remain.
Nasrin found this way of thinking irrelevant.
Azizam, she said, looping an arm around Roya’s shoulders, her free hand gesturing in lecture, if we were born on a deserted island, we’d also grunt and pray to every airplane that flew past, but unfortunately, we’re here where we know what a Boeing is, and worse than that, what a man is too.
To this Roya had tutted, rejecting the implied naivety being placed on her. And yet, she didn’t help herself when she brought the subject back to Shabpereh, saying that all that aside, there was nothing more romantic than someone immortalising you through their music, something akin to worship.
At this we all groaned, both at the sentiment, as well as the prospect of Shabpereh’s music being around forever. A new azaan, greeting us morning, noon, and night. But it was Ava who delivered the real punch, proclaiming that as far as declarations of love went, if anyone ever called her a wolf to their lamb, they were surely mistaking her for their mother.
If we were talking about love, I didn’t think it was possible to not believe in esgh – such a strong stance required you to hold an image of what you thought love was in order to challenge it, making the statement itself contradictory. I thought, rather, that real love took an irregular form. Some sort of ever-changing substance, too slippery to be accurately transposed through human effort and the fickle hands of language. Why else would we say delam, referring to the stomach, when we really meant the heart? Or dooset daram, I have your love, when we meant they have ours?
Even as a verb, ‘to love’, lost truth in the relationship it posed between subject and object. To love someone was entirely passive, a powerlessness of the subject (the lover) against the object (the loved). It didn’t happen the way one kicked a ball, or struck a match, or knocked on a door. Rather, it was the sound of the door knocking. A thing that couldn’t be done but was done to you: the wails of grief, the moans of pleasure, the look of an eye, the sallow skin of the heart breaking. It couldn’t be beckoned. It knocked, it entered. You survived it the best you could. That was love. And anything short of it was torture, the circling around a centre while never reaching the thing itself.
In my head, Shabpereh sang on, I took your hands and passed through the mirage.
I was still thinking of these words in class, as Khanoum Adilli walked around the room (to the window, to the blackboard) in her chador that skirted the floor, reminding me of those Russian folk dancers who moved their feet in tiny steps beneath long dresses to appear like they were floating. Then I thought of Hazrat-e-Maryam, and witches drowning to prove their humanity, and magician’s assistants being split in two while remaining whole in spirit, and I didn’t understand why women always had to play the role of an apparition, some curtain between this world and the next; or why, when looking at the folds at the side of Adilli’s mouth, it felt wrong to hope they were lines that had softened from the joy of passion, of a love that evaded torture.
Here, in this world, I was happy with my arithmetic test result: an 18/20. Nasrin couldn’t say the same, even though she had copied off of me, my paper tilted as far left as would allow without Adilli noticing. But whatever answers Nasrin had misread, Roya had copied from her paper too along with her own added errors, meaning Ava at the end of the line had the lowest mark of all. My higher grade was attributed to nothing other than that arithmetic was my delegated subject. Roya took writing, Ava chemistry, and Nasrin geography. In this way we were the four limbs of a single body, and textiles – the one subject neither of us would take responsibility for – the clunky head that bowled us over.
We’d surrendered it as a no-man’s-land after our final exam last semester nearly got us suspended. Of the whole class, the four of us had done identical (incorrect) stitches, and Khanoum Haghani’s finger had wagged at us wildly as she called us immoral. The use of this word was dependent less on its literal definition, and more its personal one to Haghani, in that it was the worst thing she thought someone could be. And so, she’d bestowed it on us, like God’s own voice, holy and enraged and full of the will to punish, booming at us through her. But if cheating on a high school exam was the threshold for moral behaviour, I felt more inclined to forfeit the pursuit of virtue altogether. The ‘zero’ next to our grades looked less a hole to fall into then, and more of an opening made of my own conviction.
After school, when we walked the long way home through the park, I wondered what it would mean to live like on the deserted island Roya spoke of. To love as though the sky could be any shade, opting into an existence that rewarded those who worked against its rules. I tugged on this cord alone, finding it limp at one moment (the world can be anything) and taut the next (but maybe not for me). We walked until we reached the apple tree, the one which no apples ever grew from. Yet we still called it what it was, what it could be, thinking one day it would gift us a beautiful red fruit like the snake did for Eve, and we wicked women could indulge once again.
Somewhere, a car horn sounded. A man walked past in a long black overcoat; a cat trailing beside him. The gate of a house opened then closed again. And Roya twisted her ring as she spoke, round and round, the opal throwing light in every direction.
Love it!