Lipstick Jihad Read Online Free PDF Page A

to grow gol-e shamdooni (geraniums). Each day he would water them, determined to make something bloom, to resist letting himself go. My grandmother, fiercely proud, had from the beginning decided on a strategy of not caring; if she could not have her orchards at Farahzad, she didn’t want gardens at all. When the time came to minister to the flowers, she would roll her eyes, “It’s Katouzi, what can I say?” as though my grandfather—whom she called by his last name, in that stately, old way—were watering a desert. Their apartment complex was built around a large pond, with grassy patches on its banks, and on summer evenings we would lay out a rug and loll under the suburban sky with thermoses of tea. My grandmother would cook a huge, steaming pot of fava beans, which we’d unpeel, dipping the hot beans in a vinegary sauce, after popping them out of their long, velvety pods. I wondered whether anyone I knew from school might see us—so absurd, we must seem, all sprawled out on a rug by the pond, eating beans from the pod.
    My father, too, was obsessed with the re-creation of a garden. He rented a plot of land in a lot in Saratoga, and each weekend after he picked me up from Maman’s, we would drive there to water his patch. He transported me to and from the patch in a white Volvo, the first of many white Volvos to come, with the license plate RAKSH, after the name of the hero Rostam’s wondrous white steed, in the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, the ancient Persian epic poem. What’s your dad’s license plate mean? my friends sometimes asked. Oh, it’s just this horse in this one story, I said quickly. Eventually the Volvos graduated to SUVs, still white of course, and RAKSH became RAKSH Jr., bearing us round the wide streets of San Jose, as though the suburbs were a battle.

    With seeds he had relatives bring from Iran, Daddy planted rows of eggplant, narrow cucumber, mint, basil, and all the herbs necessary for Persian cooking that at the time didn’t exist—at least in their proper variety—at the immense supermarket that everyone else’s parents seemed to find sufficient for their produce needs. The only aspect of Iranian culture he cherished, and wanted to pass on to me, was this reverence for nature, which he worried he might not be able to instill amidst the cement and strip malls of San Jose. And so, after monitoring the progress of the Persian herbs, we would take long walks through the hills of Los Altos, stopping at each new tree to note the quality of the bark, the shape of the leaves. Eventually I could distinguish a mulberry tree from a walnut, walnut from almond, and both from the tree that would grow pomegranates. At nights, Daddy would take sheets of white paper and trace the outline of what looked like a bloated cat. He then built me an architect’s table, on which I too could learn to draw the proper dimensions of the cat, which he informed me was the accurate geographic contour of Iran. Until I became an adolescent, and insisted on living at the mall, this was all my father and I did together: cultivate herbs, draw the cat-Iran to scale, pass leafy examinations.
    Agha Joon, my grandfather, was a gentle, lyrical man, who spent his days in America—almost three decades of them—reading Persian poetry, going for walks, and not learning English. He never complained about the hardship or the crudeness of his transplanted life, and somehow managed to keep that same remote, blissful look in his eyes until the very end. His great joy was also his patch, which he eventually did transform into a wild garden. When I would run back to the apartment after swimming, waiting for my bathing suit to dry, he would point proudly to the blooming flowers, his voice lilting softly with a Turkish accent, from his childhood in the ethnically Turkish region of Iran: Look, daughter, look at what God has created. As a first-grader, it puzzled me that he