Nine Parts of Desire Read Free Page B

accommodating each other cost both of us our principles?
To find the answers, I did something so obvious I couldn’t believe it had taken me a year to get around to it. I started talking to women.

Chapter 1
T HE H OLY V EIL
“Tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent and to draw their veils over their bosoms.”
THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE LIGHT
    A s the bus full of women inched and squealed its slow way through Tehran traffic toward Khomeini’s home, I was the only one aboard who wasn’t weeping. We eased to a stop beside a black-bannered alley. The keening gained pitch, like a whistling kettle reaching the boil. At the end of the alley was Khomeini’s house and the small adjoining husseinya where he’d prayed and preached until just before his death five weeks earlier. Drenched with sweat and trying not to trip on my chador, I filed off the bus and joined the tight black phalanx, making its way down the alley with sobbing chants of “O Khomeini! O Imam!”
    Ahead of us, a group of men entered the husseinya. They were factory workers from the city of Mashad, rubbing their tear-stained faces with callused fists. The balcony from which Khomeini used to speak had been hastily glassed in since his death because mourners had been shinnying up over the railing to kiss and fondle his chair. Our group turned aside from the husseinya to a curtained entrance flanked by female Revolutionary Guards. Under their chadors—the big black squares of fabric tossed over the head and falling to the ankles—the guards wore the same olive-drab uniform with its emblemof a rifle, Koran and clenched-fist as their male counterparts. Behind the curtain, Khomeini’s widow waited to serve us tea.
    In one corner of a cracked concrete courtyard, she sat flanked by her daughter and daughter-in-law. With chadors pulled tight around their squatting figures, they looked like a trio of ninepins waiting for a bowling ball. Khomeini’s wife Khadija, at seventy-five, had the crinkly face of a kindly grandmother. She peered through wire-rimmed glasses, smiling as she reached up a gnarled hand to greet me. When she held my hand and patted it gently, her chador slid backward to reveal a half inch of silver roots topped by a tumble of carrot-colored curls. Until her husband’s death, Khadija had dyed her hair.
    Somehow, I’d never imagined that the stony-faced ayatollah had a wife—certainly not one with vamp-red hair. And I hadn’t pictured him with the cute, giggling great-grandchildren who romped around us in the carpet-strewn courtyard. “I know that when you saw him he looked very serious, even angry,” said Zahra Mostafavi, Khomeini’s forty-seven-year-old daughter. “But he wasn’t like that with us. With children he made so many jokes. He used to let us hide under his robes when we were playing hide-and-seek.” According to Zahra, Khomeini had been quite the sensitive, New Age man, getting up in the night when his five children were infants to take turns giving them their bottles and never asking his wife to do anything for him—“not even to bring him so much as a glass of water.” The family snapshots being passed showed the ayatollah laughing merrily as a plump-fisted toddler tried to aim a spoonful of food at his greatgrandfather’s mouth.
    We squatted alongside the Khomeini womenfolk on red Persian rugs spread over the concrete. “The carpets are all borrowed. The family doesn’t own anything this good,” explained one of the Revolutionary Guards who had worked as household help as well as bodyguard to Khadija for six years. Handing us plastic plates with pictures of ducks on them, she offered dates and slices of watermelon. “I’m sorry we have received you so simply,” Khadija said. “But all through his eighty-seven years of life my husband insisted on simplicity.”
    Ruhollah, an impoverished clerical student from the dusty village of