Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody PUBLISHER: Unknown
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Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody PUBLISHER: unknown ISBN: 0312911939 My daughter dozed in her seat next to the window of a British Airways jetliner, her red-brown curls encircling her face, tumbling haphazardly below her shoulders. They had never been cut. It was August 3, 1984. My darling child was exhausted from our extended journey. We had left Detroit on Wednesday morning, and as we neared the end of this final leg of the trip, the sun was already rising on Friday. My husband, Moody, glanced up from the pages of the book that rested upon his paunch. He pushed his glasses up to his balding forehead. "You better get ready," he said, I unbuckled my seat belt, grabbed my purse, and made my way down the narrow aisle toward the lavatory in the rear of the airplane. Already the cabin attendants were gathering trash, and otherwise preparing for the first stages of our descent. "This is a mistake," I said to myself. "If only I could get off this plane right now." I locked myself in the rest room and glanced into the mirror to see a woman on the ragged edge of panic. I had just turned thirty-nine, and at that age a woman should have a handle on life. How, I wondered, had I lost control? I freshened my makeup, trying to look my best, trying to keep my mind busy. I did not want to be here, but I was, so now I had to make thebest of it. Perhaps these two weeks would pass quickly. Back home in Detroit, Mahtob would start kindergarten classes at a Montessori school in the suburbs. Moody would immerse himself in his work. We would begin work on our dream house. Just get through these two weeks, I told myself. I hunted through my purse for the pair of heavy black panty hose Moody had instructed me to buy. I pulled them on and smoothed the skirt of my conservative dark green suit over them. Once more I glanced at my reflection, dismissing the thought of running a brush through my brown hair. Why bother? I asked myself. I donned the heavy green scarf Moody said I must wear whenever we were outdoors. Knotted under my chin, it made me look like an old peasant woman. I pondered my eyeglasses. I thought I was more attractive without them. It was a question of how much I wanted to impress Moody's family, or how much I wanted to be able to see of this troubled land. I left the glasses on, realizing that the scarf had already done irreparable damage. Finally I returned to my seat. "I've been thinking," Moody said. "We have to hide our American passports. If they find them, they will take them away from us." "What should we do?" I asked. Moody hesitated. "They will search your purse, because you are American," he said. "Let me carry them. They are less likely to search me." This was probably true, for my husband was of illustrious lineage in his homeland, a fact implicit even in his name. Persian names are laced with layers of meaning, and any Iranian could deduce much from Moody's full name, Sayyed Bozorg Mabmoody. "Sayyed" is a religious title denoting a direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed on both sides of the family, and Moody possessed a complex family tree, written in Farsi, to prove it. His parents bestowed the appellation "Bozorg" on him, hoping that he would grow to deserve this term applied to one who is great, worthy, and honorable. The family surname was originally Hakim, but Moody was born about the time the shah issued an edict prohibiting Islamic names such as this, so Moody's father changed the family name to Mahmoody, which is more Persian than Islamic. It is a derivative of Mabmood, meaning "praised". Added to the status of his name was the prestige of schooling. Although Moody's countrymen officially hate Americans, they venerate the American educational system. As a physician educated and trained in America, Moody would surely be numbered among the privileged elite of his native land. I delved into my purse, found the passports, and handed them to Moody. He slipped them into the inside pocket of his suit. Soon the airplane entered the traffic pattern. The engines slowed perceptibly and the nose of the airplane dipped unusually low, producing a steep, quick descent. "We have to come down fast because of the mountains that surround the city," Moody said. The entire craft shuddered under the strain. Mahtob wakened, suddenly alarmed, and clutched my hand. She gazed up at me for reassurance. "It's okay," I told her, "we'll be landing soon." What was an American woman doing flying into a country that had the most openly hostile attitude toward Americans of any nation in the world? Why was I bringing my daughter to a land that was embroiled in a bitter war with Iraq? Try as I might, I could not bury the dark fear that had haunted me ever since Moody's nephew Mammal Ghodsi had proposed this trip. A two-week vacation anywhere would be endurable if you could look forward to returning to comfortable normalcy. But I was obsessed with a notion that my friends assured me was irrational-that once Moody brought Mahtob and me to Iran, he would try to keep us there forever. He would never do that, my friends had assured me. Moody was thoroughly Americanized. He had lived in the United States for two decades. All of his possessions, his medical practice the sum total of his present and future -were in America. Why would he consider resuming his past life? The arguments were convincing on a rational level, but no one knew Moody's paradoxical personality as well as I. Moody was a loving husband and father, yet given to callous disregard for the needs and desires of his own family. His mind was a blend of brilliance and dark confusion. Culturally he was a mixture of East and West; even he did not know which was the dominant influence in his life. Moody had every reason to take us back to America after the two-week vacation. And he had every reason to force us to stay in Iran. Given that chilling possibility, why, then, had I agreed to come? Mahtob. For the first four years of her life she was a happy, chatty child with a zest for life and a warm relationship with me, with her father, and with her bunny, a cheap, flattened, stuffed animal about four feet tall, emblazoned with white polka dots on a green background. It had straps on its feet so that she could attach the bunny to her own feet and dance with it. Mahtob. In Farsi, the official language of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the word means "moonlight." But to me Mahtob is sunshine. As the wheels of the jetliner touched down upon the runway, I glanced first at Mahtob and then at Moody, and I knew the reason why I had come to Iran. We stepped off the airplane into the overwhelming, oppressive summer heat of Tehran heat that seemed to physically press down upon us as we walked across a stretch of tarmac from the plane to a bus waiting to transport us to the terminal. And it was only seven o'clock in the morning. Mahtob clung to my hand firmly, her big brown eyes taking in this alien world. "Mommy," she whispered, "I have to go to the bathroom. "Okay. We'll find one." As we entered the airport terminal, stepping into a large reception room, we were struck quickly by another disagreeable sensation the overpowering stench of body odor, exacerbated by the heat. I hoped that we could get out of there soon, but the room was jammed with passengers arriving from several flights, and everyone pushed and shoved toward a single passport control desk, the only exit from the room. We were forced to assert ourselves, elbowing our way forward like the others. I cradled Mahtob in front of me, protecting her from the mob. Chattering high-pitched voices screamed all around us. Mahtob and I were drenched in perspiration. I knew that women in Iran were required to keep their arms, legs, and foreheads covered, but I was surprised to see that all of the women airport employees as well as most of the female passengers were wrapped almost completely in what Moody told me were chadors. A chad or is a large, half-moon-shaped cloth entwined around the shoulders, forehead, and chin to reveal only eyes, nose, and mouth. The effect is reminiscent of a nun's habit in times past. The more devout Iranian women allowed only a single eye to poke through. Women scurried through the airport carrying several pieces of heavy luggage in only one hand, for the other was needed to hold the fabric in place under the chin. The long, flowing black panels of their chadors billowed wide. What intrigued me most was that the chad or was optional. There were other garments available to fulfill the harsh requirements of the dress code, but these Moslem women chose to wear the chad or on top of everything else, despite the oppressive heat. I marveled at the power their society and their religion held over them. It took us a half hour to make our way through the crowd to the passport desk, where a scowling official looked at the single Iranian passport that legitimized all three of us, stamped it, and waved us through.