It wasn’t easy leaving. They waited longer than most. Some families left when the Shah’s tanks entered central Tehran. But Mina’s parents said the upheaval might turn out to be a good thing. It could bring democracy. Freedom. Mina detected in her parents an actual desire for the monarchy to end, which she found blasphemous. Mina loved to watch the parades on TV celebrating the Shah and his wife, Farah. The king and queen looked absolutely fabulous—dressed in burgundy velvet cloaks draped over intricately embroidered silver coats, golden crowns encrusted with diamonds and rubies balanced on their heads. Their jewels sparkled. At the sound of trumpets, hundreds of men saluted. The music was majestic. Mina would leap up off the Persian rug to salute the Shah along with the masses. She couldn’t help it.
Hooman bought posters of the new revolutionary leaders. He listened to their speeches and tried to grow a beard. He put away his fancy polo shirts and wore simple peasant-style cotton shirts and baggy pants. Girls whom Mina used to see walking home from the university in their platform shoes and miniskirts, their long hair swaying seductively down their backs, began to don headscarves and stopped wearing makeup. Everywhere she looked, Islam was in, and anything that reminded people of the Shah or his Western ways was considered old, outdated, and plain uncool.
One day the Shah left and the world changed. The revolution’s new religious leaders took over. People spray-painted the words “FREEDOM,” “REVOLUTION,” “ISLAMIC REPUBLIC” on street walls. People whom Mina had never seen observing the Muslim faith before started to become religious. Aunt Nikki’s daughter, Maryam, emptied out her drawer of makeup and lipstick and filled it instead with prayer beads and prayer stones. Maryam threw out her skimpy dresses and tight tops and went to the bazaar and bought simple headscarves and Islamic uniforms.
It was hard to keep up with who was on which side. Revolutionary or anti-revolutionary? When Mina and her family went to people’s homes, sometimes wine was served and other times sermons were given on the evils of alcohol. Sometimes one spouse served wine while the other angrily denounced it as it was being poured. Families were divided.
Every afternoon Baba used a stepladder to remove the pictures of the new leader that Hooman had put up in the house. With increasing fervor, Hooman climbed on top of bookshelves and furniture to tack the pictures back up.
“We have gotten rid of the dictator,” Hooman said in his changing voice. “We have freed the country of his contamination.”
IN THE KITCHEN, AUNT NIKKI WHISPERED to Darya while Mina eavesdropped.
“My kids are slipping away from me,” Aunt Nikki said. “My kids tell me I’m wrong, old-fashioned, too Westernized. Sometimes it feels like my children aren’t even mine anymore. It’s become like they’re theirs. Children of their propaganda.”
Darya leaned against the kitchen counter, thinking. Then her face lit up. “Invite them over. They can’t resist my pumpkin stew. I’ll talk to Maryam. Parviz will talk to Reza. We’ll talk some sense into their fanatic teenage skulls.”
Aunt Nikki frowned at first, but then she thanked her younger sister. A time for the dinner was set. For the first time in weeks, Mina saw Aunt Nikki relax again. Darya said no need to thank her, they’d do their best.
Mina pretended Aunt Nikki was right to be so hopeful. Never mind that Darya hadn’t been able to talk sense into Hooman’s skull.
MINA AND KAYVON RAN TO OPEN the door to find Uncle Hamed standing there, hat in hand, his face weary. Aunt Nikki was still by the car, talking to the closed windows in a coaxing voice. After several minutes, Cousin Reza came out of the car. He looked taller than when Mina had seen him last. Though he was only sixteen, a little stubble had grown on his chin.
“Come, let me see you!” Darya rushed to give her nephew a kiss. But he shrank away from her.
A woman in a black chador followed Reza into the house.
“Say hello, Maryam,” Aunt Nikki said.
Mina and Kayvon nudged each other. This was their glamorous eighteen-year-old cousin who only a few months ago had been giggling and flirting with the greengrocer’s son? This was the Maryam who had worn high heels and tight blue jeans, her eyelids green from sparkly eye shadow? Mina stared at the new cousin in front of her.
“Tea?” Darya almost shouted, as though Maryam were hard of hearing because of her cover-up.
Mina and Kayvon scrambled to go help in the kitchen. When Mina came back balancing a tray of hourglass-shaped estekan filled with dark chai, she saw that Darya had plopped herself next to Maryam and was talking and laughing and gesturing wildly. Maryam was nodding politely, the way one nods at an older person who is losing her mind.
Baba methodically asked Reza about his studies. “I remember,” Baba said, “when you were four years old and you’d beg me to put you up on my shoulders. Remember that? Remember we’d play hide-and-seek outside?”
Reza scowled.
At dinner, Maryam ate with one hand, grasping her chador tightly with the other.
“Maryam Joon, I told you already, while I respect that you are now a devout follower, we’re all family here, you really don’t need to cover your hair from family. You know that, don’t you?” Darya’s façade of good cheer was disappearing.
Aunt Nikki looked as if she might cry. Maryam loosened her chador a tiny bit. Reza growled about the deaths caused in prisons by the Shah. Hooman listened raptly to Reza’s words. Darya’s vein throbbed in her forehead. Baba kept asking Uncle Hamed if he wanted more wine, but in a half-whisper, when Reza wasn’t looking.
When it was time to kiss the guests good-bye, Maryam hugged them all, but Reza didn’t want to be touched. “But we’re family,” Darya insisted. Reza angrily said good-bye and then marched off to the car.
From behind the living room curtains, Mina saw Maryam walk to the car door and lift the bottom of her chador ever so slightly before climbing in, like Cinderella with her ball gown. Uncle Hamed and Aunt Nikki waved from the front seat with apologetic smiles. They drove off with Maryam and Reza expressionless in the backseat.
Mina and her family stood in the doorway, waving as the car drove away.
“That was . . .” Baba sighed. “A pumpkin stew I won’t forget.”
Hooman continued to look at the street, spellbound. “Reza said that if we are relentless in our demands, we can get revenge on . . .”
Suddenly Darya took Hooman’s face in both her hands. “Listen. Khoob goosh kon. Listen well. I am your mother. You got that? You listen to me. The picture comes down. Basseh! Enough! Go brush your teeth. Go put on your pajamas. Go on, then!”
Hooman was quiet. Mina thought he almost looked scared.
“Go!”
Hooman walked toward his bedroom.
“Put your pajamas on and brush your teeth!” Darya yelled out after him.
Hooman pulled off his sweater as he walked.
“That’s right! Go get ready for bed! I am your mother!! I’m sick of this chart-o-part nonsense!”
Mina heard the faucet turn on in the bathroom.
Darya turned to Mina and Kayvon. “You two as well. Go on! Get ready for bed. Nobody tells you what to do except your father and me. You got that?”
“Darya Joon, it’s time for all of us to rest.” Baba pulled Darya away.
Darya shook his hand off her. She continued to yell at Mina and Kayvon, “I am your mother. You don’t follow anybody else’s stupidity, EVER!”
“Come on, Darya Joon, come on.” Baba led Darya away.
“They’re not going to take them over, Parviz,” Darya said. “They’re just children.”
That night Mina lay in bed thinking of Maryam and Reza. The cousins she once had were no longer there. Maryam and Reza behaved entirely differently now. While it was uncomfortable to think of how they had changed, what scared her more was seeing her mother yell like that. Ranting and raving, forehead vein throbbing; slowly morphing, it seemed these days, into a mother entirely new and strange.
MUCH TO EVERYONE’S RELIEF, HOOMAN’S revolutionary zeal was, in fact, a passing phase. But by then, the zeal of the other teenagers and men and women who had marched the streets to end the Shah’s dictatorship had brought about a change of regime. And the smallest corners of Darya’s and Mina’s lives began to feel the weight of that change.