Divided Loyalties by Nilofar Shidmehr

Author:Nilofar Shidmehr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2018-12-20T19:50:25+00:00

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Pari emerges from the bathroom feeling elated. Her mind is finally made up, and she has sworn a new promise to herself: she will go to see Anoosh on Saturday, but she won’t tell him about their unborn child. Every woman has a secret and this is mine, she thinks, a secret I am going take to the grave. She heads to the bedroom she once shared with Anoosh to find his prayer beads. But first she needs to change her clothes. She opts for something unusual: the scarlet lingerie she wore on their wedding night, with its crimson laces and ribbons decorating the edge. The last time she wore this was the last night she’d spent with her husband. The night she became pregnant. They had made love all night to kill the feeling of dread that was hanging in their bedroom.

Pari looks at her sunken face and her slim figure in the mirror. Although her body is much older than it was on that last night with Anoosh, she still looks young. She reaches behind the mirror where she has hidden a picture of herself and Anoosh together. It is their happiest photo. They are on their honeymoon by the Caspian Sea. Pari has dropped her white scarf. She has short hair and is wearing pearl earrings. They are leaning into one another, head resting on head, arms around shoulders, and are laughing wholeheartedly. Their hair, the same shade of black, looks so similar that it’s hard to tell their heads apart. It is as if one person has leaned toward a mirror, touching her hair to that of her own image. As if a woman has grafted herself to her image with one breath.

From the bottom drawer of her dresser she pulls out the box she thinks holds the prayer beads. It is a small wooden box with a line of Hafiz’s poetry carved on the top: “Any breath drawn seeking love and peace is a good breath / Good deeds do not require permission.” Pari carries the box and the picture into the living room, where she sits down in the Rococo chair to open it. Yes, the prayer beads are there. “Seek and you shall find,” her mother would have said if she were here.

But something else is also in the box, tucked under the beads: a piece of paper. She hangs the prayer beads from the arm of the chair and takes out the paper. When she unfolds it and reads what’s written, in Jalal’s handwriting, her heart squeezes in pain. It is the same pain she felt forty days after Jalal’s funeral when she’d discovered a paper inside an old copy of Hafiz’s book of ghazels that was very dear to him. On that day, the family, including her brothers, had gathered to sort through their father’s belongings. The writing on the paper is a list of baby names: girls’ names on the left and boys’ on the right. The names her father had had in mind for her and Anoosh’s baby.

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