Excerpt, Pages 49-50
At home, father taught us to call him “Peder”; mother was “Mamon”; Soheila, “Suzanne”; and Setareh, “Roya,” believing that it would create an atmosphere of intimacy and closeness. I always asked myself why I was not given a secondary name; but, perhaps my name was the most befitting. Shahab means “meteorite”: a briefly lit object in the sky, moving at a high rate of speed—dazzling, and I wanted so much throughout my life to mimic that description, whether by physical means, through an accumulation of knowledge, or by any other means possible. Father chose our names from general terrestrial bodies. “Sohelia” is a planet in the solar system. “Setareh” means ‘a star.’ Just going by these terms, I think it described my sisters’ fundamental characteristics. Soheila, as a planet, was not as shiny as a star but had a constant rhythm that could be counted on. It appears at a certain location in the sky—no surprises. Like a tortoise, she moves towards her destination. Setareh, as one would expect, was full of fire, passion, quick to anger, and, in a sense, depending on the amount of output energy, would tend to burn herself out before arriving at the destination. Ironically, as these three objects in the sky seemingly have nothing to do with one another—one dashes right through the sky, the other circles the sun habitually and constantly, while the star in the distance flickers on occasion—our characteristics and relationship were bound by an unforeseen force, not unlike the force of gravity. We came to each other’s aide when it was necessary and went about our business when danger was deflected. Back when we were young, before we went off to start school, it was carefree times; time when children bond with one another. However, we had unresolved issues that we could not manage to verbalize. We were constantly at each other's throat, fighting for one reason or another. I had so many visible scratches on my face from my sisters trying to create enough pain so that I would let them go. They warned me that the scratches might become permanent. The relationship I had with my younger sister was always a fiery one. Setareh seemed to be constantly screaming for help. She received a gift one day of a doll that looked like a moola. She was petrified of it. The doll could be wound up and when released would go in a straight line, except when it involved her. For some unknown reason, whenever I wound it up it chased her around the coffee table, sending her into a screaming panic. She still has not forgiven me, always reminding me how terrible I was when we were young. One could probably read modern psychology books and come up with a multitude of different reasons why the relationshp between my sisters and I was so violent, but I think the best answer would be that I did not have a good role model to show me the ropes. After all, the relationship between our mother and father was a turbulent one. Divorce was not an option for our mother. Before 1967, under Iran's Islamic Shia law, the husband received guardianship of the children. At least two or three times a year, father would put us in the car (when he owned one) and drive us to grandmother's house, where mother had fled. We would have to sit in the car while father was inside the house trying to convince our mother to come back home. The earliest account of this was when I was four years old. The relationship between my sisters and me did eventually improve. However, the improvement only came when we moved far away from each other; when each of us became more preoccupied with our own lives.
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