1. Fire

I HAVE NEVER FORGOTTEN the magic of a summer evening in Tehran. After a hot day, when the sun went down, the coolness of the evening caressed our souls. Maman would pick jasmine flowers from the thick vines that clung to the walls of our courtyard. She laid them on a pounded tin dish, already laden with Persian tea, white mulberries, plump figs, and Persian melon. The smell of the jasmine, the cool dry air, and the delicious summer fruits fed my body and soul.

On one such evening, Baba and I were alone.

“Mehrnaz jan, there are so many suitors who want to come to ask for your hand. Why don’t you allow them to come?”

“Suitors and their families judge women by their hips and the size of their breasts, Baba. I do not want to marry a man who comes here to judge my body. He doesn’t know my soul. My chest is covered with scars. My breasts have deep scars. I do not have nipples. How can I allow suitors to come here?”

“You are beautiful. You are Baba’s princess. You are smart. You are the dream of every man.”

“Yes, until they see my naked chest.”

“They don’t need to see your naked chest. You can wear a beautiful nightgown and keep your chest covered during lovemaking.”

“Baba, don’t talk about this stuff. It’s embarrassing. You don’t understand. I want a man to fall in love with me. I want a man to touch my heart before he touches my body. I believe when a man falls in love with me he will not see my scars. If he loves me, he will love my imperfect breasts.”

I was sixteen when Baba and I had this conversation. I saw myself then, and for many years afterwards, as a beauty with my clothes on, but as a beast when they were removed.

I had been placed on the dining room table. Looking up, all I could see was a doctor with giant hands talking to Baba. “There is an infection under her nipples. It’s better if I cut them off.”

I hated the doctor’s big hands. They were half the size of my body. At the age of four, I didn’t realize the impact this surgery would have on my life. Where did they throw my nipples? I wondered. In the kitchen garbage?

My brother Jamal and my sister Soraya loved to tease me and always ganged up on me. One morning, at breakfast, the two reached over, grabbed the two whole eggs that were in the basket on the table, and left the cracked egg for me. “Hahaha, you get the cracked one,” Jamal snorted.

Jamal was ten, Soraya was eight, and I was four years old. I didn’t like it when they tormented me.

“Mehrnaz, stop crying,” Maman said, exasperated. “Homa, did you get the shoes from Ms. Mohammadi for me?”

Maman had gotten up that morning with swollen feet. Her shoes no longer fit her, so she had sent Homa to get her some shoes from Ms. Mohammadi, Maman’s friend who had large feet. Maman was a teacher. She was getting ready to go to school.

“Mehrnaz, please stop crying,” Maman said again. “It is only a cracked egg. Homa, make Mehrnaz a boiled egg, then get her ready and take her to school.”

I loved going to school so I could stay with Maman in her classroom. And I was proud when a student from another classroom had come to ask Maman if I could be sent to the grade four classroom. The teacher of that classroom wanted me to demonstrate prayers to the class. I was happy to recite the prayers in front of the older children at school. I was very young to have memorized the prayers already, and the teachers and the principal always praised me for it. Muslims pray five times a day, and students are taught the prayers during religious study.

That day, when my brother and sister left for school, I stayed home with Homa and Fati. Fati was the new cook. She was grumpy, and she never left the kitchen. Since my egg was cracked, Homa was going to prepare another one for me—she did not want to ask Fati to cook it—and then she would take me to school afterwards.

Homa had come to our house as a servant to take care of me when I was born. At the time, we lived in Qazvin, an ancient capital of the Persian Empire, where Maman was from. When Maman was young, she had spent the summers with her parents in the mountainous village of Zavardasht in the Province of Qazvin. Zavardasht is located at a high elevation, and summer temperatures are cooler there than in Qazvin City.

The people of Zavardasht respected Maman, and they eagerly sent their children to our house to be our servants. Buses or cars could not reach the village—people travelled only on horses. As a seven-year-old girl, Homa had been tied onto a horse and sent to our house. Maman said that the horses were trained to do this. Homa’s parents needed the money.

Homa prepared another egg for me on a heater. After I ate, she showed me how to blow out the fire from the top, instead of turning down the supply of oil to the heater. I tried to blow the fire out, but my face got hot.

Homa left to go and get something. I got a little closer to the heater to try again, but my nightgown caught fire. Homa ran into the room when she heard my screams. She tried to put out the fire, but it only got larger and more ferocious.

Baba’s office was down the hall. He could hear me screaming, but at first he thought I was playing. Then he ran into the room and gasped when he saw me. I was a ball of fire. When Baba arrived, Homa ran away and hid. Baba quickly put out the fire. But by then, all the skin on my chest and arms was badly burned.

All my father’s employees—my father worked in a government office next to our home—gathered around me. One of them suggested the old remedy of grinding a fresh onion and pouring it over the skin. I screamed even louder. Baba kept calling for Homa. He didn’t know what had happened. I kept crying and saying, “It wasn’t Homa’s fault.” I was afraid that my parents would send her back to her village. Homa was hiding in the attic. They found her later that night. I wanted Homa to sit by my side so no one would hit her or send her back.

I suffered third-degree burns all over my chest and arms. The family doctor told my parents that it was not necessary to send me to the hospital. He came to the house daily, placed me on the dining room table, and cut the dead skin off with a knife.

Maman could not bear to watch, but Baba stood next to me, while any men that happened to be visiting in the house held my hands and feet down while the doctor cut off my skin. I screamed.

Finally, after I had suffered from pain and fever for over a month and a half, my parents decided to take me to Tehran, where there were plastic surgeons and more advanced hospitals.

I spent two more months in the hospital in Tehran. My long curly hair had all been burned off, and I didn’t like how I looked without it. So Maman knitted me an orange toque and bought me a black braided wig. She sewed the braid to the toque so it looked like I had long hair underneath it. Baba and Maman requested a big room for me, and Maman stayed with me the entire time. She slept in a recliner chair beside my bed, and they put a futon on the floor for Aunt Roohi.

My grandmother, Maman Aterahm, first met Roohi as a young girl. She went to the same school as my Aunt Masi, Maman’s younger sister. Aunt Roohi’s mother was a Russian immigrant and Roohi had a deformity in one of her legs. Roohi’s mother shared her story with Maman Aterahm. She had emigrated from the Soviet Union with her two children. Her husband had sent them to Iran be safe and had planned to join them later, but he couldn’t get out of the Soviet Union, and so he never came. Roohi’s mother had to face the hardship of taking care of her two children on her own as well as go to work every day. On top of all that, her daughter’s leg needed so much care. Maman Aterahm was so moved by the woman’s plight that she took the little girl, Roohi, home.

Iran and the Soviet Union share a border. Armenia and Azerbaijan are northern neighbours of Iran. A mass of people had immigrated from the Soviet Union into Iran in the early twentieth century when hundreds of thousands had to flee from the Bolsheviks. Many refugees started their lives in Qazvin as well as in the two provinces in Northern Iran, Mazandaran, and Gilan. Maman Aterahm took the woman’s daughter home and raised my Aunt Roohi as if she were her own daughter.

When I was in the hospital, Aunt Roohi was working at a government office in Tehran. Every day after work she came to the hospital, and at night she slept in my room on a futon next to my bed. My parents set up all my toys and tea sets on a Persian rug that they had laid next to her futon. Aunt Roohi read to me and played with me.

Maman was also in pain—her feet and hands were swollen—but she never left my bedside. It took the doctors a few years before they eventually concluded that she had rheumatoid arthritis. She suffered from chronic pain and joint deformation that only worsened as the years passed.

Her illness began the morning she sent Homa to borrow that pair of big shoes, about an hour before my accident. Although Maman and I had begun our journeys on the same day, we soon began to go down separate paths. Her pain seemed to abate in the evening, but it was extreme in the morning, and she suffered constantly. Our house by the Caspian Sea became a place for hosting guests and hosting dinner parties. These parties distracted Maman from her pain as she slowly disengaged emotionally from us children.

Baba’s job required us to move every few years. He chose the cities in Northern Iran because they reminded him of growing up in Neshta. Orange groves, rice paddies, mild temperatures, and the beautiful Caspian Sea: this was home for Baba. These cities were a few hours away from my grandparents’ house. “I want to stay with Aunt Masi. I don’t want to come home,” I would cry every time we left my grandparents’ house.

Aunt Masi had a big selection of vinyl albums. She played music and taught me all kinds of dance moves, from Persian dance to the Cha Cha and the Twist. But her favourite music was Elvis Presley’s. Aunt Masi and her friends looked like those girls in Elvis’s movies. Once, she was really excited because she won a competition dancing to Elvis’s music at a local club.

In the summertime, we slept in see-through nets on the flat rooftops. The stars were so big. I loved looking at the night sky and listening to Aunt Masi tell me stories. “What story do you want to hear tonight?” Aunt Masi would ask as we slipped under the covers at bedtime.

“The story of your friend. The friend with the burn scars.”

“When she was a child, her whole body was covered with burn scars,” Aunt Masi began. “Then when she turned eighteen, she went to England for plastic surgery. We didn’t see her for a whole year. When she came back, she had a big party. She was wearing a beautiful sleeveless dress. After the party ended, a few of us stayed for a sleepover. We asked to see her body. The room was lit by moonlight. She took off her dress. She was beautiful—her long black hair hung down over her porcelain skin. She had beautiful breasts with no scars. Her body was flawless except for one strand of hair on the side. When I went to remove the hair, I discovered it wasn’t a hair at all: it was the only scar left from the plastic surgery. Her other scars were all gone.”