Read Online The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life by Jasmin Darznik - Free Book Online Page A

closely.
    Never before had she felt so many eyes on her. Her cheeks burned and she kept her eyes cast down on the carpet, but she soon found it was not altogether an unpleasant thing, this being looked at by so many people at once.
    But then, just as her nervousness began to ease and she felt herself warming to the party’s attentions, she was suddenly called outof the mehmoon khooneh. She had been in the room less than ten minutes and would spend the rest of the hour behind a door outside the parlor, taking turns peeking through a keyhole with her cousin Soudabeh. It was a vantage point from which Lili could see no more of her suitor than his black dress shoes and the hems of his brown gabardine trousers.
    And yet within the space of a week she’d fallen in love. The object of her affections was not her suitor, Kazem, but an enormous emerald set between two diamond-studded bows. It was Kazem’s grandmother Ma Mère who’d brought the ring to Khanoom’s house on a day following the khastegari .
    “You are like my daughter now,” she said as she slid the ring onto Lili’s finger. “I will love you as well as if you were my own daughter.”
    Lili thought this emerald ring with its diamond bows was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. At her first sight of it, she’d immediately flung her arms round Ma Mère’s neck and kissed her many times over.
    Some mornings Lili would even sneak the ring into her schoolbag, and at recess she would pull it out to show the other girls at school. They would crowd around her, all of their eyes suddenly wide. There were several girls at the school with namzads , fiancés, but they were all in the older grades, close to their graduation dates, and in any case none of them were allowed to wear their engagement rings to school.
    That year Lili was the youngest one with a suitor, a fact that duly impressed all her friends—especially when she showed them the exquisite jewel that had been given to her.
    “Is he handsome?” one of the girls asked dreamily one day.
    Lili was taken aback by the question. It occurred to her she had not even seen her suitor’s face.
    “Of course,” she lied. “Like a movie star.”
    Kazem did visit Khanoom’s house once more before the aqd (wedding). The girl’s question at school had upset Lili enough for her to insist on seeing him once more before the wedding ceremony. It was therefore agreed that one evening she and her aunt should appear outside the window of Khanoom’s front parlor at an appointed hour. Kazem would be sitting in the room by himself, and from the courtyard Lili would be able to inspect him discreetly through a window.
    At seven o’clock in the evening, the sky was already nearly dark, and the room in which Lili sought a glimpse of her suitor was illuminated by a single paraffin lamp.
    “Well, do you see him?” asked her aunt impatiently.
    Lili squinted, peered again through the glass, and said she thought she could make out a man in a coat and a fedora.
    “But ammeh [Auntie], why is he always wearing a hat?”
    “What a foolish girl!” replied her aunt. “This is the new style. Your suitor is a modern young man!”
    But she was not convinced—not at all. That night she asked her grandmother to pay a visit to the Khorramis herself and inspect Kazem on her behalf.
    “Please, Khanoom,” Lili begged. “You must tell me what he looks like without his hat!”
    Khanoom laughed.
    “ Bacheh-joon [My dear child], is this what marriage is to you? What lies beneath a man’s hat?”
    Her grandmother’s tone was more good-humored than disapproving, but even so Lili’s lips began to quiver, and for the first time she began to cry about what she could not yet imagine.
    Now there was nothing to do but wait.
    Several years earlier, Reza Shah had raised the age at which girls could be married from nine to sixteen. There was, however, aprovision by which families could handily circumvent this law. If a doctor or midwife examined