The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (23 page)

With Jaleh at my side, I lay in bed, anticipating the moment I had been waiting for. She encouraged me to take deep breaths and remain patient. The nurses took turns prepping me for the birth. The doctor asked if I wanted an epidural to reduce the pain, and I told him I would rather have a natural birth. I wanted to feel every second of it.

And, oh boy, did I feel every second of it! Be careful what you wish for, ladies. The real pain started after midnight, every now and then, hitting my lower back. It sped up with every centimeter I dilated. I fought to endure it with every ounce of strength in me. The battle stretched through the night.

Houshang had come back a little after midnight to see how I was doing, but I gathered all my energy and yelled at him not to enter. The poor man turned around as fast as a shooting star and waited by the door. Jaleh didn’t understand why I would not allow Houshang in.

“Look at me,” I said. “I am a mess. I barely recognize myself. I am roaring like a lioness. I do not want him to see me like this, and I do not want him to see me giving birth, either. This is the most private moment of a woman’s life. I believe it is the only moment that I cannot share with Houshang. I do not want him to see me with my legs open wide, shouting and moaning. Maybe I’m being selfish, but I would rather not expose myself to my partner in this state of despair.”

One of my girlfriends had given birth in front of her husband, and her husband could not make love to her for months afterward.

I told Jaleh, “Please tell him to come and see me when the baby is born.”

Houshang reluctantly accepted my decision, but he kept coming back to the hospital to check on me. At one point, I tried to get out of bed. Jaleh asked me what I was doing, and I begged her to let me leave the hospital. “Maybe it will come if I start walking,” I said.

But I could not move. I knew it was coming, and I was ready to be taken to the delivery room. My doctor was on his way. Jaleh wanted to go with me and was given a set of scrubs. But she kept complaining about the size, saying she asked for a large, but the nurse had given her small ones to embarrass her in front of the doctors.

“Are you out of your mind?” I cried. “Just put the damned things on, and let’s go!”

Now in the delivery room with two nurses and Jaleh at my side, a huge round mirror hung behind the doctor, facing me. The countdown had begun, and with it the first round of futile pushes. All I could hear was “Push, push, pushhhhhhhhh!”

I gathered all my strength and pushed for the final time, realizing I should welcome the fear of the unknown this time rather than fighting it. And it came. I caught glimpses of the process in the mirror whenever the doctor bent over or reached for his tools. I saw the baby’s head and I was ecstatic. I let the baby slide through me and land in the doctor’s hands.

Words flooded my mind. Suddenly creation, survival, fittest, infinity, miracle, and God made more sense to me than ever before. God was manifesting itself through its sheer light of being. This was a God who was not divided by sects or any other barriers. I sensed a God of creation, love, and harmony.

The baby’s one-month-premature body was held upside down in the air, its little feet in the doctor’s hand. It was receiving its first punishment for being born, a friendly slap on the bottom. It started crying and was soon placed on my breast.

“It’s a girl,” said the nurse. I closed my eyes and hugged my baby as tightly as I could.

“She is Tara-Jane,” I said.

Jaleh was offered the ritual of cutting the umbilical cord. She was horrified but did it. She later said she was so numb from having witnessed the birth she thought she might cut her own finger, too.

Because Tara-Jane was premature, she had to be kept in an incubator for five days. Jaleh gave Houshang the news, and the two of them joined me in my room. Houshang was exhausted from running around town, taking care of his work and anticipating the birth of his child, but he was thrilled to have a little girl.

Houshang and I looked at each other for a long time. Something had changed between us. He was not the same man. He looked far more mature.

My grandmother used to say, “If you want to know how someone feels about you, ask your heart the truth.” My heart was telling me that Houshang and I were in love more than ever. We were one, cherishing the birth of the eternal bond between us.

“What is love?” Rumi was once asked. “You would not know until you become us,” he replied.

A happy maternity-ward nurse came to let us know that they would be bringing Tara-Jane to me in a half hour, so I could breast-feed her. I asked Houshang to hand me my makeup bag. He asked why I needed it, and I said I wanted to look good for my first long encounter with my daughter, since they had taken her away so quickly the first time.

The nurses brought Tara-Jane in and left her with us. We were all over her, admiring her thick black hair and her big brown eyes as we caressed her doll-size feet. Houshang kindly suggested that she looked like me, but I could see how Houshang’s strong genes had won the battle of chromosomes.

We left the hospital with Tara-Jane in my arms five days later. It was a perfect day, with the sun shining through the clouds. I felt like I was walking on the moon with my bundle of joy in my arms and my husband at my side.

31

A Quest

H
oushang’s play was set to premiere in five days. We were still living with Farhad and waiting to move into our own apartment. We took Tara to Farhad’s and put her on our king-size bed. She looked so small there. We looked at each other, wondering if she was going to be a petite girl. Little did we know she would be almost six feet one day. (She is now a head taller than me and calls me her “little mommy” every time she hugs me.)

Tara had to sleep between the two of us for the first few nights, until we moved to our own place. I would wake up at her littlest movements or cries, and always tended to her needs. Sometimes I would take her to the living room, bundled in her pink blanket, trying not to awaken Houshang and Farhad.

I would sit on the couch facing the window with my legs crossed—my favorite yoga position—and place Tara safely on my lap, holding on to her back with my left hand and helping her rest her soft and fragile little head on my chest as I directed her rosebud lips to my breast. Tara-Jane was content, and warm, sleeping like an angel when I would wake up at five o’clock in the morning, still sitting cross-legged.

I called my mother one morning and begged her to forgive me for ever hurting her when I was a child. My mother used to say that although mother and child live in two different bodies, they are created of one essence and soul. So when one is in pain, the other one feels the pain, too, no matter how far apart they are. I had no knowledge of what motherhood meant or felt like until I held Tara.

I told my mother how much I loved my daughter, and how afraid I was of making a mistake with her or losing her. I asked my mother how long this fear would last. She said, “Until you die.”

HOUSHANG’S PLAY PREMIERED
at the Lincoln Auditorium. I took Tara backstage and introduced her to the cast. Watching my colleagues onstage, I decided to ask Houshang if I could bring Tara out during the final scene, a demonstration against the Fundamentalist regime.

“I would like to bring her on in the final scene. I want to be like the thousands of Iranian mothers who bring their children to the demonstrations to echo the voice of the youth in Iran.”

Houshang loved the idea, and Tara and I joined the crowd on the stage. The funny thing was that she slept peacefully in my arms throughout the whole scene. She was already a veteran actor.

WE FINALLY MOVED
into our own place, a boxy two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a typical 1960s cement residential building, painted in beige.

Houshang was desperate to take the play on tour across the United States, but the cost of touring with twenty players was too high. He began working on his next play instead and wanted me to stay home and take care of Tara. Despite his best effort to take care of everything, I began to worry. I was worried about the day we would not be able to pay the rent. I was worried about having to choose between either saving for Tara’s education or paying our next utility bills. I had given birth to her in a free country so she could become who she wanted to be. I had saved her from a brutal religious tyranny in Iran. But I had exposed her to an insecure and uncertain future.

I started looking for a job when Tara was three months old. I first called the producer of an Iranian TV show, an international cable TV station, which broadcast shows in Farsi in California.

The producer had been in touch with me in the past about working on his hourlong show, which aired on Sundays. I went to see him, and he offered me a ten-minute segment on his show in Farsi. He was looking for an angle that would connect with the Iranian audience and wanted me to come up with a fresh new idea.

I had heard many true stories among Los Angeles’s Iranian community that shared one common theme: nostalgia. I decided to write some nostalgic short essays about immigrants like myself and tell them to the audience. I would compare the past to the present, and then question the possibilities of tomorrow, in a sense echoing the voices of millions of people like me.

I named my segment “The City of Angels,” and I began working on it right away. Once a week, Tara and I went in to record. She would watch me delivering my words to the camera, telling stories of my birth country.

Iranians who lived in the Los Angeles area loved the segment and kept encouraging me, sending supportive letters to the station.

TARA WAS ONE
when the Iranian director Farrokh Majidi invited me to Denmark to portray an Iranian actress in exile in his movie
Raha
—which means “free.”

I loved the story and could relate to the character wholeheartedly. I brought Tara with me, and the director’s wife took care of her while we filmed. It took less than a month and was fairly successful with Iranian audiences in Europe and the United States.

Back in L.A., I kept working on the segment for the Iranian TV show and was also offered the hosting job at a Farsi-speaking morning radio show on the only Iranian radio station in L.A. It would be on weekdays from ten in the morning until noon.

I was still afraid to drive. Unwilling to burden Houshang further by asking him for rides to and from the station, I decided to travel by bus. My friends thought I was joking and laughed at me, but I wanted to do this. I had never hosted a radio show before, and I also wanted to prove to my friends that one could live in L.A. without having to drive.

I left home at eight-thirty every morning. Tara and I traveled an hour and a half by bus to the radio station. Our fellow passengers came from all backgrounds. An Iranian carpet seller, who traveled with a different small silk carpet rolled under his arm every morning, claimed it was safer to go to work on a bus. He was once held up at a gas station and robbed of a $10,000 silk carpet and his car, which unfortunately was not insured. His wife would give him a ride to Ventura Boulevard and wait with him until the bus arrived. In the afternoons I would see him carrying two large brown bags. One contained ripe oranges and the other Granny Smith apples.

I still remember the day he lost control of the bag of oranges. All the passengers were on their knees, trying to catch them. The poor bus driver told everyone to get back to their seats, but they were having fun, just like a bunch of kids.

When I arrived at the radio station, I would put Tara in her stroller with her favorite doll and stroke her hair while I was live on the air. Two hours of live radio required a lot of material and research. I would highlight the news in the first hour, and then have my listeners call in during the second half of the show. I asked them what their favorite topics were so everyone could share their opinions live on Radio-Sedaye-Iran (the voice of Iran on radio). Our conversations truly ran the gamut.

As much as I enjoyed my new profession, I felt bad dragging Tara to work every day. She needed to play and have fun. I was now working three jobs—radio host, TV host, and housekeeper. I was earning a decent amount of money at this point. Houshang was busy on another play. We decided to hire a nanny and found Christina, a wonderful woman whom Tara loved and who loved her back.

Tara-Jane was growing fast. Her curly brown hair surrounded her full cheeks and her large brown eyes. She was quiet and loved music. I would put her on the couch, surrounded by pillows and her dolls, turn on the stereo, and do my homework for my TV and radio shows well into the night.

The success of my program convinced a real estate agency to offer me the opportunity to host and produce a half-hour TV show on the same channel, sponsored by the agency. My friend and colleague Vatche Mangasarian, with whom I had had the pleasure of working in the movie
The Guests of Hotel Astoria
, would also be hosting a segment of the show and talk about the new movies of the week.