-
The Ascension (Me’raj)
- University of Arkansas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The Ascension (Me’raj) Ari Siletz Aunt Tahmineh somehow knew she would remain barren until she had found a name for her future child. So, for the first fifteen years of her marriage, she and her husband fought over what they would call their as-yet-to-be-conceived offspring. She liked authentic Iranian names, like “Koroush,” “Parvaneh,” and “Keyvan,” while her husband, a religious man, insisted on a Koranic names like “Mohammad,” “Ali,” or “Fatemeh.” Finally, they came to an agreement. If the child was a girl, they would name her “Farangis,” after an ancient Iranian heroine , and if it was a boy, they would name him “Esma’il,” a Koranic name which also appears in the Bible as Ishmael, the son of Abraham, and means “God listens,” presumably—“God listens to us and has answered our prayer for a child.” But when Esma’il was finally born, it turned out that God hadn’t listened very well. The infant came out of the womb so blue and sickly that the family doctor gave him no chance of surviving the night. But Aunt Tahmineh had also called a midwife to the birthing, and this midwife thought otherwise. “This isn’t your child, dear,” she told the exhausted Tahmineh. “It belongs to a mother Jinn. The jealous Jinn has swapped your beautiful, healthy baby with her own sickly child. You must return this infant to the Jinn and get your own baby back!” So the midwife wrapped the newborn in warm clothes and took him out to the far side of their property, where she placed him on floor of the outhouse and closed the door. This act would let the Jinn mother know that Aunt Tahmineh had not been fooled by the swap. But the old doctor knew that the outcome of this ritual would not produce a healthy baby. Infants with the same condition with which Esma’il was born usually lived only hours. Yet he humored the midwife’s farfetched wisdom and surmised that taking the baby 147 from Aunt Tahmineh’s arms would disrupt any parental bonding and shorten the mother’s grief. Throughout the night the entire family, the parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents, stayed awake to keep vigil in hopes that the healthy baby would be returned to the outhouse. At sunrise, the midwife went to fetch the infant, while Aunt Tahmineh’s sisters consoled her and prepared her for the news. Like petals falling on a garden stone, their words of anticipatory comfort did nothing to break the impermeable resignation on Aunt Tahmineh’s face. Hearing the midwife’s returning footsteps, everyone braced for the grief and wailing. They were quite unprepared for what they saw. The midwife stopped at the doorjamb, looking as though something had struck her. Her puzzled stare was directed at the doctor. It took him a moment to overcome his disbelief that inside the bundle was a living thing. He then leapt up, snatched the bundle from the midwife, and began frantically to unwrap the blanket. No one could have known how tenaciously the infant would cling to life and survive the night in the outhouse. The parents were assured by the midwife that the Jinn had swapped back her baby with the sickly one. This baby just needed to be nursed back to health after the trauma of the kidnapping. Looking at the baby’s face Aunt Tahmineh and her husband accepted him, of course, but instead of the name Esma’il, they decided to call him “Nader,” a nice Arabic name that refers to things that are difficult to find, like diamonds or geniuses; events that are nader are great victories , big inventions, or the ultimate nader, the appearance of a messiah. But there is nothing that says the words “nader” and “precious” must go together. “Nader” simply by itself means rare and unusual. Applied to my cousin, however , it could just as easily mean “oddball.” Did his parents really mean to name their child “oddball”? Another interpretation of the name might be that they intended to name him Nader after the powerful Iranian conqueror who invaded India and looted its treasures. One such treasure was the “Kooh-I-Noor” diamond, the mountain of light which I once saw in a museum in Britain. The diamond reminded me of a precious stolen object: as in a healthy baby named Ishmael, kidnapped by a Jinn. A few of the relatives grumbled that it was bad luck...