A Gentle Passing

The receptionist at the hair salon asks me how my day is going so far. “Fine”, I say, neglecting to tell her that I just got news that my aunt has passed on. Telling her the truth, and thus making myself subject to false sympathy from a total stranger, would be hypocritical, and that I don’t want to be. My aunt has passed away quietly, 6000 miles away, as quietly as she had lived. Manzar was a typical middle child, shy, mild, kind, and forever in the shadow of a glamorous sister and two larger than life older brothers: the remarkable Ali-Reza, and that true force of the nature: Mohammad Reza. My earliest memory of her is of her setting the table and cutting the bread for large Friday lunches in my grand parent’s house in Amiriah[1]. I remember watching her cutting bread neatly, in identical sizes with immaculate attention to details, amongst the chaos of the house on Fridays. She loved such neatness. In her own way, she also loved that happy chaos that engulfed the house every Friday. That was her way of getting energy and the light from her big, boisterous family.

I am told she was a decent but unremarkable student. There was a picture of her with in school uniform with starched white collar on my grandmother’s room. In the picture, she is smiling timidly, her braided hair fashioning a large white bow. I can imagine that with her neat hand writing and penchant for order, she would have been liked by at least some teachers. After high school she dawdled around the house for a few years. She helped out with parties given by my grand mother or my mother, baby sat for my younger sister Shirin, and continued to refuse the slew of suitors asking for her hand. The only friend of hers I remember was our neighbor in the enclosed alley, Ensieh (I think that was her first name) Sarshar, who had a slight cleft lip. Then Ali-Reza, newly returned from the US, opened an engineering consulting firm, Tehran-Boston, and hired her (literally dragged her) to work as a draughtsman there.

Working at Tehran-Boston, she flourished. She lost weight. First my mother, and then me, made her fashionable clothing (she was my first customer as a budding 13 year old fashion designer!). My mother’s hairdresser cut her hair short and highlighted it and she started putting make up on. She became pretty with her delicate features extenuated by the make up. The two of us started going to movies on Thursday afternoons, we saw James Bond and Charade and My Fair lady and the Sound of Music. We cried at the end of “Love Story”, got swept in the Russian steps of “Dr. Zhivago”, and fell in love with Peter O’ Tool in “How to Steel a million dollars”. She subscribed to Javanan[2] and Zan-e-Rouz[3](for which I had started writing for). She had money, she was free. She was happy. The fire, for the first time in her life, was coming from within.

It was then that she fell in love with a young engineer at work. There was talk of marriage. My mother and grandmother were cautiously optimistic. My grandmother was a bit more pessimistic, the prospective groom was younger than Manzar, he wanted to go away for a few years to study in the US, he may break her heart, she thought. My mother was the more optimistic one: Manzar looked a lot younger than her age of late 20’s or early 30’s, the guy sounded like a good person. It was my grandmother who turned out to be right. My aunt waited 3 years, and then got a letter, and he was gone just like that. He was the first of many loved ones to be lost forever to either the US or death.

Years passed, Tehran Boston was sold, Manzar lost her job, stayed home, quibbled with my grandmother, stopped wearing fashionable clothing and getting nice haircuts. We stopped going to movies on Thursday afternoons. She spent time with the kids in the family: Shirin, Pouneh, Sayeh, Majid and Ghazel. She was the one who always remembered every one’s birthday or anniversary, the one who always had gifts neatly wrapped for everyone. Gradually, my grandmother gave up the hope of marrying her off and give away the “Terme[4]” she had put aside for Manzar to one of her nieces who was getting married in a rush. Then one bright and sunny fall morning, my grandfather died in a fluke accident. For the first time that I remember, my powerful grandmother broke down. Overnight she aged. Overnight she became an old woman. Manzar was dazed; she never thought her father would ever die.

The event that broke her down, forever, however, was the next: Fourteen months after my grandfather’s death, my uncle Mohammad Reza died of Leukemia. I remember Manzar crying quietly under her veil at Khatm[5], I remember her vacant and pained face. Ironically, even her grief, as heavy as it was, was foreshadowed by that of a mother, a wife, and an older sister. The picture people would take away from the memorial service in my grand parent’s house was that of the 2 year old Cyrus on the lap of grief stricken Tahereh, my uncle’s wife, or that of my grandmother’s body shaking uncontrollably, my mother’s moaning, and Ali-Reza’s dignified but absolute grief. Manzar, crying softly, however, was the one who made sure all kids are fed and ushered to bed that night.

Two years after my uncle’s death, the exodus to West (mostly America) began: I left in 1974. My younger uncle, Gholi, followed a year or so later. Manzar came to visit me in Cambridge. There is a picture of the two of us outside my apartment in winter clothing. It was a rather happy visit, even though her suitcase went missing for days leaving her with one set of clothing in New England winter. My grandmother died in 1977. When I went back to Iran in December, she was already settling into the life she would led for the next 30 years: alone in the big apartment left as though my grand parents were still living there, their bedroom and the rest of apartment all intact. Everything looked as though my grandparents have just stepped out for a few hours, perhaps to go to one of their usual Thursday excursions to Shah-Abolazim[6].

My parents left Iran just before revolution, my aunt Pouri, and my cousins: Pouneh and Sayeh left just after. Manzar came to visit us in the US. She, was here when the hostages were taken. We urged her to stay: “what is there to go back to?” we asked. But she was determined to go back, to take care of her shrine of memories to the family that had provided her with the will to live. “Abdi is going back too”, she said in reference to my younger uncle. Once she was in Iran, the borders closed down and she couldn’t come back. she was trapped. Her last trip to Paris to get visa to come back to the US was a disaster that broke her spirits for good.

We continued correspondence. I sent pictures of my wedding, of my sons: Darin and Sebastian, and called her when Shirin died. My cousins did the same. She built a little display from smiling wedding and baby pictures of her live but away and dead relatives, on the living room table. Then one day she went missing. After a week of searching, my uncle found her unconscious in a public hospital. She has been victim of a hit and run accident. Her bones were shattered. For awhile it was touch and go, but she got better and went home to my uncle’s house. It took months for her to walk, and as soon as she did, she insisted to go back home, to her shrine, to her memories, to be with the ghost of her loved ones. After the accident, she stopped writing and started calling. It was easier for her as she didn’t want to walk to the front of the house to get her mail. For a while, we called her every Sunday. Mostly my mother would just listen to her. Sometimes she would call in the middle on the night, having forgotten the time difference between Tehran and Boston. Even when we were told she doesn’t remember much, she still remembered me, the kids and Lee, although in her mind my kids were still in the elementary school, the same age as the last pictures we had sent her! Most of the time, it was hard to understand her, but the weekly conversations was a treat for my mother and her.

The calls from both sides stopped about 10 months ago. She, no longer able to care for herself, had stopped calling. My mother, descending into her own fog, didn’t want to call. We found out that she is in a nursing home and doing ok, but didn’t know how to call her there. I was in my way back from Turkey when I get the call from Pouri that she is in grave condition, and Abdi is trying to get back. An email from Ghazel a few days later made the final announcement: She is gone, died alone, and buried in Behesht Zahra along side my grandparents. I thought of all the good times we had in Amirieh and Abu Rayhan, and all the heartaches and sad times in Zafar. In the end, we all had loved her and we all had abandoned her.

The hairdresser asks me if I like my new cut. I nod. I pay the bill. The receptionist wishes me a good day. I walk outside to a sun filled Boston summer and merge into the crowd in Newbury street

Boston, July 18, 2008
[1] A neighborhood in Tehran
[2] An Iranian popular magazine
[3] A women’s magazine in Iran
[4] A hand made cloth used in Iranian wedding ceremony
[5] Religious memorial service in Iran
[6] A religious shrine in Iran