Chapter 17: The Aghd

On the morning of my wedding — our wedding, the only wedding, the one my sister and I had promised each other in a dark bedroom when we were seventeen — I woke before dawn in a room full of sleeping female cousins and lay still for a while in the blue dark, listening to a city I had been born far from breathe outside the window, and I did the thing my sister does. I counted.

Six years since the Monopoly board scattered across the floor. Five years since a boy caught my sister in a cafeteria and did not let go. Four years of an apartment and a calligraphy and a game with a fee schedule. Three signatures waiting on a contract in the next room. Two brides. One groom. One day, finally, that everyone we loved had crossed an ocean to witness.

Beside me, Parisa was already awake. Of course she was. She was lying on her back with her eyes open, hands folded on her chest like a woman composing herself for something, and without turning her head she reached over and found my hand, the way she has found my hand in the dark since before either of us could talk.

“Today,” she said.

“Today,” I agreed.

“I’m not nervous.” A pause. “That was a lie, I’m testing it out loud to see if it becomes true.”

“Did it?”

“No. But I have you, and I have the room-is-safe arrangement, so it’s a manageable kind of nervous.” She squeezed my hand once. “Thank you for going first.”

And then the door opened and the women of the family poured in with tea and light and noise, and the last quiet moment of our unmarried lives was over, and the making of two brides began.

They dressed us and did our hair in a room we were not allowed to leave, and while they worked, in the great room of Hussain’s house, the sofreh-ye aghd was being laid out on the floor, and I will describe it for you, because it is the oldest and most beautiful thing in this whole story, and because everything on it was chosen to say something to a marriage before the marriage could speak for itself.

A length of termeh — fine old Persian cloth, cashmere and silk woven in patterns older than any country the guests had flown from — was spread on the floor facing east, toward the morning, toward the light, and on it was arranged the whole grammar of a Persian wedding.

At the head of the spread, a mirror — the aayeneh-ye bakht, the mirror of fate — flanked by two tall candelabras, light and reflection, so that when the bride entered and lifted her veil the first thing the groom would see was her face arriving in the glass. Between the candles the mirror waited, dark and patient, for two faces it had never been asked to hold before.

And spread before the mirror, every object with its meaning: a tray of seven herbs and spices to guard the couple from the evil eye and the bitterness of others. Flat sheets of noon-e sangak stamped in saffron with a blessing — mobaarak-baad, may it be blessed — to feed the marriage prosperity. Decorated eggs and almonds and walnuts for fertility, that the union bear fruit. Pomegranates and apples for a joyous future. A cup of rosewater from the petals of the Mohammadi rose to perfume the air. Crystallized sugar — kaas-e nabaat — for the sweetness of life. Gold coins for wealth and the mahr made visible. A brazier of wild rue seeds burning against ill fortune, the smoke curling up thin and blue.

And two things on that sofreh that had never sat on any sofreh in Hussain’s long memory of weddings, placed there at my father’s quiet instruction, because my father built this marriage to be honest in law and honest before God, whichever God was doing the looking: an open Qur’an, and beside it, open, an English Bible. Two faiths, side by side on the termeh, neither hidden, neither ashamed. The bride’s book and the groom’s, laid flat and equal in the morning light.

Benjamin, I am told, stood over that open Bible for a long moment when he came in, and then found my father across the room and did not say anything, and my father did not say anything either, and the two of them simply looked at each other over a spread that held both their scriptures, and that was an entire conversation between two fathers who had each given the other something across an ocean.

Here is how the ceremony goes, in the old way, the way ours went.

The groom is seated first, at the foot of the sofreh, facing the mirror. Then the bride is brought in and seated beside him, and a fine white shawl — a scarf of silk — is held open above the couple’s heads by the married women of the family, stretched flat like a small sky. And over that canopy, two sugar cones — kaleh ghand, cones of hardened sugar — are rubbed together and ground, so that sugar rains down onto the shawl above the couple’s heads, sweetness showering the marriage without ever touching it, caught in the cloth by the hands of women who are already married and wish the new couple the sweetness they have known.