Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers

Other Mothers, Other Sons

Other Mothers, Other Sons Mehdi Tavana Okasi My mother feared dying young and orphaning me in a strange country where I had no blood relatives. “What would you do if I died, Omid?” she asked throughout my childhood. I knew to say that I would die, too; like a petal to her stalk, I would wilt and fall away. Hearing my answer gave her strength to endure the many humiliations, the endless sacrifices. She asked me to beseech God to give her a long life and financial freedom. Each night before bed, she dictated my prayers until the words flowed freely and I could no longer fall asleep without uttering them. Health. Prosperity. Longevity. “God always listens to children,” she would say, “because they are pure and clean.” I was an obedient child, had no one but her, and was defined by the prospect of what I could lose, not by what I could gain. “No one will ever love you like I do,” went her constant reminder. “But you’ll only know this after I’m buried and gone.” I was eight years old in the fall of 1984. My mother and I had been in the United States fewer than two months, desperate to find other exiles who, like us, escaped the newly founded Islamic Republic. We got out in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, leaving behind my father, who was killed when a bomb fell on our house. My mother says I slept right through it, so I never saw my father get us out, or rush back inside for the contents of our safe, never saw him buried under the rubble. When I confessed that I couldn’t remember that night, my mother told me that memory was shared like blood, that once in a while, we had to depend on each other for it. I didn’t question the details of my father’s death or of our escape. These bits of history that she dropped into my mouth nourished me, and whenever people asked about my father, or our home in Iran, I would regurgitate them without the slightest hesitation. With 3 me in tow, she set about finding other Iranians to populate our new lives in America, and that’s how we came to know Dari and his family. We met by chance, but fostered a friendship out of our shared loneliness. In those days, in Watertown, Massachusetts, much of what we did was out of loneliness. Unlike my mother and me, Dari’s parents had immigrated before the revolution , and Dari was born in the States, a fact that he announced as if it were a prized comic book still sealed in its plastic casing. Though he was six years older than me, our mothers insisted that we become friends. Eventually, I was taught to call Dari’s mother Khaleh Maryam, and his father Amoo Essi, aunt and uncle, though we weren’t related by blood. In Iran, there would have been little occasion for their friendship. Dari’s mother had lived in Zanjan, a small village with dirt roads and few telephones, while my mother had lived in Tehran, on a government complex where my father was boss. She taught secondary school, having completed her master’s in history, even though we didn’t need the income. Dari’s mother, on the other hand, had but a high school diploma and subsisted on the money her husband sent from America. In those days, my mother likes to say, we were bound by the same soil, and because of the regime, forced thousands of miles from Iran. That was enough reason to stick together. It was a time when tradition mattered, when Iranians still cared for hospitality and threw grand parties, trying to preserve the ways of their own parents on strange and lonely shores. Some time after our mothers became friends, mine confessed to Dari’s that she knew, even before Khaleh Maryam uttered a word, that she was from Iran. I remember distinctly that Saturday morning all those years ago standing at the mouth of Dari’s family’s driveway, having followed a series of yellow signs advertising a yard sale. My mother pointed Khaleh Maryam out almost immediately , her voice suddenly alert. Even I found something recognizable about her, although I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize it then. Her dark saucer eyes, the deep sheen of her waist-length hair, her cashew complexion, her sturdy...