The minor characters populating Fereshteh’s urban palace are distinct and memorable – the foul-mouthed old servant Massoomeh, Fereshteh’s brief husband Mahmoud, and Uncle Jafar who has OCD and tunes pianos, polishes coins and washes newspapers.
Aria calls her “Mana” almost but not quite her Mama. His love for Aria will develop through the years, and his bitterness after rejection help shape his later career.Īria finally escapes from Zahra, and makes an upward jump in class when she is adopted by Fereshteh, childless heir of a family who are ex-Zoroastrians, and once silversmiths to the shahs. Here Aria is able to communicate with Kamran, the neighbour’s cleft-lipped son, who climbs a tree to deliver bracelets and sweets to her. One of the many strengths of this strong debut by Iranian-Canadian novelist Nazanine Hozar is that every character is contextualised and therefore humanised by an explanatory backstory.Īnd the balcony isn’t so bad. Her bad behaviour is glaring, but Zahra turns out to be a complex character. And Behrouz’s wife, Zahra, the first in a line of false or flawed mother figures, beats and neglects the orphan, often locking her out on the balcony. “I bet with those blue eyes that girl’s a Jew or a jinn’s daughter,” says one. His neighbours are generally hostile to this illegitimate child. Years later Behrouz reflects on his charge: “She had somehow acquired the ability to be two things in one.” This ambiguity continues, for as Aria grows, she wavers between opposed categories: rich and poor, educated and illiterate, orthodox Shia Muslim and something else. It’s usually a boy’s name meaning “the Iranian race”, but Behrouz intends the musical sense of the word: “little tales, cries in the night”. Carrying her home to the impoverished tenements of the southern city, Behrouz – an army driver who, as a motherless boy, pretended to be a mother himself – names her Aria. Unwanted by her father and so abandoned by her mother, in 1953 a baby girl is found under a mulberry tree in wealthy north Tehran.
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