Becoming the WIFE .First part
Khastegari BY Jasmin K. Darznik
Our courtship started and ended with a problem of names.
For a long time in our house that imperious Persian word, khastegari , was invoked only when speaking about Iran and the past. When I turned nineteen it gained new currency. That year I managed to find the most unsuitable of suitors. Houman was thirty-one and lately separated from his wife. Suitors were not supposed to have ex-wives, because Iranians didn't get divorced (though one of course heard rumors from time to time). Houman was both Iranian and divorced. If he was to exist, we would have to find a name for him.
The situation seemed hopeless. We were forbidden from seeing each other. I made impressive displays of my misery. Deliberations were resumed. In the end my parents' disapproval was mitigated by the two factors: Houman was a doctor and he could be called my suitor or khastegar.
In America, Iranian girls who were clever became doctors, the merely pretty ones married doctors, and the very best Iranian girls did both. I had displayed no particular academic aptitude apart from a peculiar attachment to novels, and I was incredibly squeamish. So there was no chance I'd ever join the doctors. But despite my many faults and missteps up to that point, I was still in the running for marrying one.
After some hesitation, my parents agreed to accept Houman, but only so long as they could call him my suitor.
Yet the only title that seemed clear to me in this exchange was “wife.” This was an actual person, the woman to whom he had been married. Because he would not tell me her name, to me she remained his “wife.” In the two years of our courtship he spoke of her often, and I thought that I knew her in the ways that most mattered.
Recalling her kindness, her modesty, her innocence, he would smile and shake his head fondly. They had been childhood friends raised in the same small circle of Iranian Americans and had married in their twenties. He told me that it was he who'd felt stifled and had chosen to leave her, and that in letters to him she wrote that she was still waiting for him and would join him within the day if he should want her back.
A good Iranian girl.
One day alone in his room I went searching for proof of her.
It would not have been difficult to find her letters. A room like that—bare but for a Persian carpet and a mattress pressed against one wall-- had few hiding places. Minutes before he'd skipped down the stairs of his studio to bring us back something to eat. I slid the closet door open. When I found what I wanted, I simply twisted a sheet around my body, brushed back my hair, and emptied the contents of the large tattered envelope onto my lap.
I glanced quickly through the letters, noting the dates of the more recent ones, and then held up the photographs one by one. There were pictures of his wife from many years ago when they had first been married. In some her plump cheeks were streaked with a heavy red blush and she wore a black lace camisole. In spite of the pout that played on her lips, her eyes seemed not to beckon, but plead.
A good Iranian girl.
I listened quietly whenever he spoke of her, but I preferred him to speak of another woman: the forty-year old Frenchwoman with whom he'd lived in a state of refined lassitude one summer when he was a young student visiting France. For my benefit Houman would chronicle the many delightful initiations he'd experienced under this woman's tutelage. I hoarded the details for some as-yet indeterminate purpose: unmarried, long-limbed, witty, cultured, wise and insouciant. I had never known a woman like that and, while I never learned her name, I never tired of hearing about her.
For such entertainments I would scramble out of lecture halls each day and rush to his studio by the beach. I could never linger for long or leave without at least a mild panic jolting me back into reality. “I have to go,” I'd say, and he knew enough not ask me to stay. Only after ducking into the shower, combing my hair, and straightening my s***t would I race back home, in time, I prayed, to make my curfew--designated not by a specific hour, but the somehow superstitious marker of “sunset.”
According to the many rules of our courtship, Houman was allowed to take me out only one night of the week, so on Saturday nights he'd arrive dressed as I never saw him otherwise, in suit and tie and effecting a stiff manner that faded as soon as he eased into his car seat and turned to me with a conspiratorial smile. On the nights when I returned home later than I'd been told, my mother would always be waiting for me. Drawing her face closely to mine, she would take in the whole of my body with a single glance.
Khastegari BY Jasmin K. Darznik
Our courtship started and ended with a problem of names.
For a long time in our house that imperious Persian word, khastegari , was invoked only when speaking about Iran and the past. When I turned nineteen it gained new currency. That year I managed to find the most unsuitable of suitors. Houman was thirty-one and lately separated from his wife. Suitors were not supposed to have ex-wives, because Iranians didn't get divorced (though one of course heard rumors from time to time). Houman was both Iranian and divorced. If he was to exist, we would have to find a name for him.
The situation seemed hopeless. We were forbidden from seeing each other. I made impressive displays of my misery. Deliberations were resumed. In the end my parents' disapproval was mitigated by the two factors: Houman was a doctor and he could be called my suitor or khastegar.
In America, Iranian girls who were clever became doctors, the merely pretty ones married doctors, and the very best Iranian girls did both. I had displayed no particular academic aptitude apart from a peculiar attachment to novels, and I was incredibly squeamish. So there was no chance I'd ever join the doctors. But despite my many faults and missteps up to that point, I was still in the running for marrying one.
After some hesitation, my parents agreed to accept Houman, but only so long as they could call him my suitor.
Yet the only title that seemed clear to me in this exchange was “wife.” This was an actual person, the woman to whom he had been married. Because he would not tell me her name, to me she remained his “wife.” In the two years of our courtship he spoke of her often, and I thought that I knew her in the ways that most mattered.
Recalling her kindness, her modesty, her innocence, he would smile and shake his head fondly. They had been childhood friends raised in the same small circle of Iranian Americans and had married in their twenties. He told me that it was he who'd felt stifled and had chosen to leave her, and that in letters to him she wrote that she was still waiting for him and would join him within the day if he should want her back.
A good Iranian girl.
One day alone in his room I went searching for proof of her.
It would not have been difficult to find her letters. A room like that—bare but for a Persian carpet and a mattress pressed against one wall-- had few hiding places. Minutes before he'd skipped down the stairs of his studio to bring us back something to eat. I slid the closet door open. When I found what I wanted, I simply twisted a sheet around my body, brushed back my hair, and emptied the contents of the large tattered envelope onto my lap.
I glanced quickly through the letters, noting the dates of the more recent ones, and then held up the photographs one by one. There were pictures of his wife from many years ago when they had first been married. In some her plump cheeks were streaked with a heavy red blush and she wore a black lace camisole. In spite of the pout that played on her lips, her eyes seemed not to beckon, but plead.
A good Iranian girl.
I listened quietly whenever he spoke of her, but I preferred him to speak of another woman: the forty-year old Frenchwoman with whom he'd lived in a state of refined lassitude one summer when he was a young student visiting France. For my benefit Houman would chronicle the many delightful initiations he'd experienced under this woman's tutelage. I hoarded the details for some as-yet indeterminate purpose: unmarried, long-limbed, witty, cultured, wise and insouciant. I had never known a woman like that and, while I never learned her name, I never tired of hearing about her.
For such entertainments I would scramble out of lecture halls each day and rush to his studio by the beach. I could never linger for long or leave without at least a mild panic jolting me back into reality. “I have to go,” I'd say, and he knew enough not ask me to stay. Only after ducking into the shower, combing my hair, and straightening my s***t would I race back home, in time, I prayed, to make my curfew--designated not by a specific hour, but the somehow superstitious marker of “sunset.”
According to the many rules of our courtship, Houman was allowed to take me out only one night of the week, so on Saturday nights he'd arrive dressed as I never saw him otherwise, in suit and tie and effecting a stiff manner that faded as soon as he eased into his car seat and turned to me with a conspiratorial smile. On the nights when I returned home later than I'd been told, my mother would always be waiting for me. Drawing her face closely to mine, she would take in the whole of my body with a single glance.
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