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

a girl and found her body “mature,” she could be married at thirteen—three years earlier than the law formally allowed. The examination often included confirmation of the girl’s virginity, a detail without which the marriage preparations would not have proceeded.
    Lili had been checked before. The year she turned ten and found a spot of blood in her underpants, she had rushed to Kobra’s side. “Am I sick? Will I die?” she asked through quavering lips. Kobra took one look at the blood and slapped Lili hard and quick across both cheeks. “But why?” Lili whimpered. “I didn’t want to do it, azizam [dear one],” Kobra replied, her own eyes smarting with tears. “It’s only a custom. It will keep the blush on your cheeks until your wedding!”
    One of her aunts had been troubled, though, by this early onset of menstruation, and had hauled Lili to a midwife to confirm that the all-important “curtain of chastity” was still intact. On the midwife’s finding Lili whole (and therefore still marriageable), her aunt and Lili returned quickly to the house and there all her aunts and stepmothers had gathered around her to sweeten their tongues. “You are a woman now!” they’d declared, beaming.
    This time, for her marriage, the examination would be repeated with just a single point of difference: since the word of one female relative would be insufficient proof for the groom’s family, Zaynab and two of Lili’s other aunts would bear witness, too.
    Lili was forbidden by her grandmother and aunts from seeing Kazem until the aqd konoon , the first nuptial ceremony, but he would often convey candies and small presents to her through a messenger. At No Rooz that first year Kazem sent her an enormous bouquet of tuberoses.
    It was, however, the emerald ring that was her best proof of coming happiness. Except for the few times she’d managed to sneak itinto her schoolbag, the ring stayed locked in a bureau at home, but whenever she began to ask about Kazem or the marriage she was allowed to retrieve it from its hiding place and slip it on her finger for a few hours.
    The ring would cost her dearly. Sohrab had extended just one condition for his daughter’s marriage: that the Khorramis allow her to continue as a student at the School of Virtue. But a few months shy of the final marriage ceremony, it was discovered that Lili had been showing off her emerald ring to the other girls at school, and the transgression would swiftly upend Sohrab’s decree.
    She’d been sitting in one corner of the schoolyard, surrounded by her girlfriends, when Mistress the Second descended upon the group, seized Lili’s engagement ring, and, for good measure, slapped her several times across the face.
    “This is a serious school!” she screamed. “A modern school!”
    With a good deal more composure, Mistress the Elder would later explain to Sohrab that the School of Virtue did not wish to have any child brides among its charges. It did not speak well of the school’s mission, and Lili was not to return the next day. Sohrab was furious. He rose to his feet, banged his walking stick against the floor, and then proceeded to curse the lady with a lavishness that failed to unsettle her even slightly.
    The next day Sohrab began to cast about Tehran for another school, but he soon learned that the other private schools in the city shared the philosophy of the School of Virtue with respect to his daughter’s situation.
    During this period, talk of Lili’s impending marriage would be eclipsed by news that Kobra had finally managed to conceive a third child, a development that, to Sohrab’s family at least, seemed only scarcely less incredible than the virgin birth itself.
    Whereas a family with five and six children was thought quite ordinary and as many as twelve would have not have aroused commentor speculation, a family with just two children was regarded as an oddity. Clearly Kobra, still in her twenties, was fertile; her failure