She was twenty-one years old. Too old, she thought, to ever get married now. Quite sure she would languish forever in her parents’ home, waiting for a man to come and choose her. Very worried that 1953 would turn to 1954, and 1954 slink into 1955, and there she—Pari—would still be, living with her mother and father in their apartment in Tehran.
She had good reason to give up hope. Her older sister had married at sixteen, a younger one at eighteen. Her mother, Gohar. had stood under the chuppah, the marriage canopy, at seventeen, and was engaged for who-knows-how-long before that.
Pari had heard the story of her mother’s marriage so often, it had become legend. It was the only story her mother told about her own life. All the other stories belonged to the men, who were out in the world, not at home, moving about, doing things, having adventures, making things happen. Gohar had told the story so often as they cooked the dinner together—adding bits of lamb to the lentil stew, exclaiming over the luxury of the meat— that Pari knew the story by heart.
How when Gohar was sixteen years old she was set to marry Davoud, a neighbor boy, now Pari’s father, someone Gohar had known her whole life. How the day before the wedding, Gohar had stood on the roof of her father’s house in Kermanshah hanging out that week’s wash. How she lost her footing and tumbled, like a bird with a broken wing, two stories to...
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