The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life by Jasmin Darznik

Zaynab would ask breathlessly, leaning toward Touran Khanoom. “Tell me, will he come back to the house tonight?”
    “Patience, sister, patience!”
    Interpreting the Fortune of Hfez was known to be an exacting art, one that called upon both a reader’s creative and critical faculties. Ever mindful of the poem’s portent, Touran Khanoom always took her time before delivering her divinations.
    One afternoon when she was ten years old and Zaynab had called Touran Khanoom to her house, Lili asked to have her own Fortune of Hfez read.
    “Why not?” allowed Zaynab. Her own fortune had been promising and her spirits were high that day.
    Touran placed her glasses back onto her face and let Lili choose a page from the book.
    “One day,” Touran began after several minutes of silent study,“you will be sitting in a garden on a day just as beautiful as this one, and a bird will come sit on your lap. It will lift you up into the sky and carry you to another garden across the sea, and there, in that other garden, a prince will come and marry you.”
    Touran Khanoom settled back in her chair and regarded Lili with a smile. “That will be your destiny, my child,” she said finally, and flashed Zaynab a conspiratorial wink. By then Lili was so busy imagining the beautiful bird and the prince that it did not occur to her that Touran Khanoom might not have been reading her a fortune from the book but telling a story entirely of her own invention. In the coming years, however, Lili would turn this fortune over in her mind many, many times, measuring its beauty and promise against the truth of her life.

Two
    Aroos (The Bride)
“I was eleven years old when he chose me.”
So far my mother’s voice on the tapes had remained steady, but here the story came out like an unbroken cry. Even after fifty years, when she spoke of Kazem it was in a voice so unlike her usual voice—so choked and yielding—that it didn’t seem to belong to her at all.

    D RESSED IN HER DARK gray pinafore, a pair of white satin ribbons braided through her pigtails, Lili would have been too busy chatting with her girlfriends to notice the man who came every morning and stood watching her from the street across from the School of Virtue. But he came every day for several weeks, always arriving at the exact hour that the girls lined up outside the gates of the school. He wore a fedora (dove gray felt with a black band), smoked a cigarette or two, and watched Lili until she passed through the gates and disappeared into the schoolyard.
    She will be my bride , he decided at last, and set off toward home and the woman who could make it so.
    The year was 1949 and Kazem Khorrami, the eldest son of an upper-middle-class businessman and his schoolmistress wife, was twenty-six years old. Like my grandfather Sohrab, the members of Kazem’s household were partial to Western ways and fashioned themselves accordingly. The women of his family had not worn veils for many years, and the men had long since abandoned their tunicsand turbans in favor of European-style jackets, ties, and hats. The Khorrami family was headed by Kazem’s maternal grandmother, whom they all called Ma Mère—this despite the fact that none of them spoke more than ten words of French, including Ma Mère herself.
    But the pull of tradition could be felt even in the chic and modern quarters ruled by Kazem’s grandmother. For years she had been anxious that Kazem take a wife and start his own family. A parade of suitable candidates appeared in the Khorrami compound, the length of their skirts shorter with each passing year. Kazem had warmed at once to their attentions. He’d even chosen several girlfriends from among Ma Mère’s offerings, some of them quite pretty and from good families. But in the end he’d refused every one, insisting on finding his own wife and doing so only in his own time.
    When at last he could no longer quiet his grandmother’s pleas, Kazem looked past the permed and