Exclusive Extract: The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
We are delighted to publish this exclusive extract of The Persians, Sanam Mahloudji's darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions both personal and political.
Bita and Mo don't get it, but their universe is plastic, a joke. IKEA, Zara, Americans with their ‘history.’ America, the history killer. They don’t care about heirlooms. Antique furniture is despised — they call it ‘brown furniture.’ They want particleboard, veneer, MDF. No. When you evacuate, you take your jewels. All our Revolution stories involve jewelry. You take your jewels no matter if you like them. Before photographs or your poodle. Yes, we had a poodle, a big beautiful sloppy dog. I’m not ashamed to admit.
Instead of thanking me, Bita and Mo laugh when I offer them jewelry. They don’t see that it’s my greatest expression of love, faith in our family’s continuity, our family a living creature needing heirlooms — jewel-hungry gem thieves, gluttons as all survivors are, ask Darwin.
We came from a great man, descendants – great-granddaughters in fact – of a constitutionalist, a hero fighter, a man who, according to all the stories of Mommy and of course that famous Persian history treatise Choking the Great Lion, gave his life for democracy in Iran. Babak Ali Khan Valiat. The Great Warrior, they called him. It was the early 1900s and he wanted Iran to be a secular republic with a democratically elected parliament. He nearly got us there but he failed in the end, or I wouldn’t be telling this story.
How I love Bita and Mo both, and yet they watched in silence as the saleswoman at the jewelry store talked down to us. I’m sorry to say they don’t know the meaning of family. It’s not their fault: America is younger than my favorite ring, a Siberian amethyst, the rarest kind, dark purple that flashes red and blue in the light, like a code of its seriousness and truth, surrounded by emerald teardrops, playacting to be a flower sunk down into its leaves. A sneaky gem. When I wear it, and hold out my hand to admire its strong colors, ones found in nature and yet hard to fathom, I am my grandmother Banou Khanoum at her dressing table. The Great Tiny Boss, as she was known to all.
When living got too risky, when we self-imprisoned in our walled homes, isolated from our countrymen – yes, in those gardens you hear about, drinking pomegranate juice and eating pistachios, all that nonsense if it makes you feel better – it was time to flee. The protests increasing in number and size and violence, all those students from the villages. Early on, after they published that infamous story calling Khomeini a ‘mad Indian poet’ – the spark that ignited it, as they say – and the Shah’s men killed students protesting in Qom, even I demonstrated, waved a sign: DEATH TO THE MONARCHY. You see, I didn’t agree with absolute authority. It wasn’t enough that the Shah released some prisoners after killing hundreds. I had Marxists in the family, a Swiss university education! A friend even kissed Khomeini’s hand in Paris — Khomeini, the great democratizer! Hah!
But soon enough, after that forty-day cycle of mourning they all talk about, the repetition of grieving and then the explosion of more protests and more killings, that Shiite periodicity, the mood grew even darker. The signs then read DEATH TO THE SHAH. THE BLOODSUCKER. Worse things, too, were said with those placards, words I shall not repeat but know they involved orifices and actions upon the elite, including our family members. The Cinema Rex burned with the five hundred people inside. The Shah imposed martial law and sent in tanks and helicopters and gunned everyone down. All this has been said a million times. What’s once more? People swatted like cicadas in summer. He rolled over the young and they grew more angry.
Mommy feared for us. She said, ‘Leave now for the sake of your children. Let it die down, then return in comfort. Take your jewels, mine, too, just in case these barbarians make us give them everything.’ Little did we know the future ahead, courtesy of our supposed saviors: mass executions, firing squads, beheadings, compulsory veil. An Islamic state.
My sister, Seema, scoffed. She didn’t know something very important about Iranians like us. She thought we were superficial, lived in the world of the material, ignorant of deeper thought. Well, how is it that we have Hafez and Saadi and Ferdowsi and Farrokhzad? — yes finally a woman too. How is it that we have a lineage of the greatest poets on Earth? Really think about it. The language, the words, they’re a side effect. It’s that we Iranians know what is possible of the world. We see that it is capable of such glorious immeasurable heart-pounding beauty. But then again, most of life isn’t like that.
Is it?
The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together. This is probably eight hundred years old. I forget who said it, but it’s important. Remember it. Some people say we don’t even have a separate word for rose – it’s just red flower – but we have something better: imagination.
These jewels, the Armani, a taste for the extravagant, Perrier instead of tap water — our valiant attempt to bring our wild vision of heaven as Earth to our everyday lives. Roses to the thorns. Even the less fortunate of us try — they care about having lush hair, impeccable shoes. More so. The Prada Mahda, as we say, the Chanel Pahnelle, the rhyming, it’s all an act, pretend. You get the picture. The poets – those seers – aren’t separate from me and Mommy. Or even Bita and Mo and Houman and the rest of the idiots. We are born artists, us Persians, born dreamers. Even if we express it in high finance or dentistry.
Seema thought our love of nice things was base — because we are insecure and want to fit in with the West. We want respect, legitimacy. I laugh at that.
The more makeup, jewels an Iranian woman wears, I say the greater her concept of beauty, the deeper she is, the more she hurts inside, the more incongruous her inner and outer lives. This is all that is left of beauty in the world! Have you never worn a bright color to lift your spirits?
Next time you see such an Iranian woman, look beyond your own distaste. I understand that distaste myself, you may be surprised to know. I wish everyone could be equally wealthy, I love all people, I have the utmost respect for the person who has to work to live, not just to shine brighter like me. No, think of such an Iranian woman and her distance from what she was originally: in her heart of hearts, an heir to millennia of culture, beauty. And yet, she, this woman, never had any real power. She was wife, mother, helper, whore. Those diamonds? They’re all she has.
‘It’s overblown, this talk. We will stay,’ Seema said to Mommy the week before we fled Iran. We sat in Mommy’s apartment, in her white marble bathroom modeled after what she thought a mosque for women should look like, as she mixed her hair dye in a metal bowl. Seema, with a newborn baby Bita on her breast, said nothing would come of it. She was not so sure this protesting would help the country, and soon, the military or SAVAK would take control. Things would get back to normal, then change could come slowly, responsibly. ‘Incremental progress, I am now convinced is the way,’ Seema said, who had supposedly been a communist once, who as a kid would tell me the State should raise all children. ‘Give me my niece,’ I said and grabbed Bita as Seema rested on the closed toilet, doing those strange blinks of hers when she got agitated, then staring at her feet. ‘Of course the various interests need to be respected and listened to; we slowly need to become a true constitutional monarchy. Then, maybe we can be a republic.’
Mommy threw her arms in the air. Channeling ancestors. ‘Vay vay vay, khoda,’ she said. The arms of her robe swinging with her fists. ‘If you don’t go, I will die of worry. I will wear only black for your impending end of life. And if you don’t die, I will never let you forget you disobeyed me. Never!’ The wooden spoon in her hand flung hair dye across the room.
We laughed. Bita cried. A streak of goop ran down the formerly pristine wall behind the bathtub.
I knew it was a bluff. Mommy would never wear all black. If she taught me anything, it was that all black made a brunette look like death, a rule I didn’t follow, of course. But if we didn’t die, I believed her; she’d be angry for eternity, her ghost would sit in my brain like it was her own living room.
About Nader, her only son, she was almost Zen, though she wouldn’t know what that meant: ‘He has no wife, no children, he rests easy. If he goes, he goes.‘
Our travel agent, Yasaman Khanoum, rescued us. She ran her own agency. See, we had jobs, us women, even then we were active, ambitious. Yasaman Khanoum sent us to Vienna first. Said that was safest. All attention was on Paris. Who was flying in and out. Then a short flight to France where we’d spend the autumn on the Côte d’Azur, in Cannes, and wait. And because we had money in the Swiss banks, we’d lie in the waning sun in gorgeous French string bikinis, nibble on veal milanese and that nearly Italian Riviera pizza of the Old Port, and drink burgundy. Then when the fighting died out, we’d come home to Iran. Our travel agent extraordinaire had no doubt.
I laugh in Yasaman Khanoum’s likely dead face now. We were fools, all of us. In the end, we left much earlier than most of our friends. The first to say goodbye ...
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji is published by 4th Estate in the UK, and is out on the 30 January, 2025.