Esmat pounded her little girl verbally by shouting at her again, “Stop that, you little bitch! I don’t want to hear any noise from you again! Just sit there and shut the hell up!”
Swallowing her pain, the little girl made a whimpering sound and wiped her runny nose and tears with the sleeve of her dirty old shirt, but the tears refused to dry up – they kept coming.
Now, many turbulent years and ten thousand heartbreaking disappointments later, lonely, pondering the trials and tribulations of her life, she searched through the fragmented events of her childhood. She curled up on the bus seat as if she were the same frightened hurt little girl, the sweet child. Riding the emotional waves of her past troubles and miseries, no other passengers noticed her when she put her thumb in her mouth, lay down on the seat in a fetal position and gradually slipped away, not into the sanctuary and serenity of sleep, nor did she ascend into the harsh realm of wakefulness. But, with the residue of the elixir of taryak still in her veins, she was weightlessly suspended in the twilight zone in between.
Chapter Two
Little Fatemeh, Faty, as everyone called her in those innocent days, was a five-year-old happy, little shabbily-dressed girl, the only child of Esmat, from her second marriage that had ended in an unexpected tragedy. Her young husband of only two years, Ali-Akbar, a dark-featured medium height southern man, a skilled stonecutter by profession, had been crushed to death under tons of huge boulders falling from an old crane that collapsed when Faty was only six months old. Protecting himself against any liability, the greedy owner of the business falsely blamed the tragedy on Ali-Akbar's negligence and unyieldingly refused to pay any money when Esmat repeatedly asked for the customary compensation for her husband’s tragic death. She became enraged when her repeated threats didn’t dent the owner’s decision about the matter. She felt the weight of vengeance in her heart so intensely that the thought of throwing a bottle of sulphuric acid in the owner's face didn’t escape Esmat's mind for a long time. She was truculently tough enough and mean enough to carry out that appallingly evil thought. It was obvious that the intensity of the hatred that lingered in her heart for her Ali-Akbar’s boss clearly signified the depth of a totally opposite emotion, love, she felt for her deceased husband. Only the passage of time poured layers of ashes on her hot and burning hatred, cooling it somewhat, but she was unable to completely erase its residue for the rest of her life.
Esmat was born in the small farm town of Taft, a village west of the ancient desert town of Yazd, to a farm worker's family, a Middle Eastern version of sharecroppers as old as the land itself. She had a round face, diminutive eyes that could hardly be seen, covered with heavy eyelids. She had a small round nose and rosy red cheeks. She had thick and naturally red lips, and black eyebrows with no space in between that made them look more like a man's mustache than a woman’s eyebrows. With all the strenuous work she had performed over her life, her arms were sizably thick, muscular and powerful. She possessed large swaying breasts and thighs – she was as thick and strong as the trunk of a hundred-year-old oak.
As nature has never been one hundred percent generous by giving all the beauty to one woman, conversely it never compacts all the ugly features in one either. In Esmat’s case, if she had a lot of unattractiveness in her entire features and body, she had one outstanding trait going for her and that was her skin. It was soft, smooth as porcelain, and an indescribable shade of white that once seen naked and touched gently by a man, any man, would compel him to come back for more, much more, repeatedly more.
Fat Esmat, as she was called behind her back, had carried the excess weight of muscle, bone and pure fat; as far back as she could remember. Her massive head was covered with wild black curly hair that hardly looked natural. But ironically, there was something attractive in her fat body. It was proportionate and symmetrical, attractive enough that men with strong sexual drives and/or loose morals were drawn to her like bees to flowers.
She had an unmatched, stormy and violent temper that was a backup for her gustiness – another quality about her. But with her large and strong body, whenever she was provoked, she would wrap her chador around her waist, wave her arms in the air, and scream and roar like a wounded tigress. She could scare men and women alike to death with her thunderous voice and her violent temper.
She worked alongside her father, with her sister and two brothers, almost as soon as she could walk. They worked from sunup to sundown, day in and day out, seven days a week – backbreaking labor, for an absentee landlord, always on the same farm. The entire family received some wheat and nominal cash in advance each year to tide them over until the next autumn when the owner calculated the results of the harvest, always lopsidedly, and offered them one-fifth. Almost every year, after all the expenditures were deducted, they still owed the landlord, forcing them to remain on the land like the deep-rooted stumps of old dead trees. This was a feudalistic system, the ill-proportioned scheme practiced for centuries across the entire country. An inventive system in which the farm owners throughout the country could insure the workers’ indebtedness thus fastened them to the farm for generations to come.
After her father's death, when she was sixteen, a few suitors came along and asked for her hand in marriage, and even though her mother insisted that she accept, each time she found some excuse and refused. To pursue a better life, she moved to Yazd in search of something shining like a rainbow from afar. Later, when the city of Yazd failed to realize her dreams, not offering her an opportunity for a better future, she took a risk and moved to catch the rainbow in Tehran; a city overcrowded by overconfident men, and, women, who would invent all sort of reasons to marry them. She rented a small room in a twelve-room adobe house located in the southeastern section of Tehran, a ghetto near the old Messgar-abad cemetery, poor people’s burial place. A different family, almost all destitute, from lower echelon of the society, each migrating from various parts of the country, occupied each room, with multitudes of bare-footed, barely-dressed, and loud children, running around from sunup to sundown.
It was while living there that she met and married Gholam, her first husband, and gave birth to Faty. Although it was only a dingy little place with a large folded mattress against the wall and practically no other furniture, she still called it home, a cozy warm place that was solely hers. She always considered that her simple home, the four walls and a roof, with no fancy decorative pieces of furniture, offered her more comfort and happiness than the Shah’s palace, Niavaran.
When excited, she would sing loudly in her husky voice, “I'm hot like an oven in the winter, a cool breeze in the summer.” She was utterly profane, but her vulgarity seemed to be a part of her defense, more a protective mechanism than an inherent part of her psychological makeup. Her vulgarity along with her sexual attitude offered a sort of titillating perversion that attracted men, ironically married men, who found her vulgarities sexually quite provocative – something they couldn’t get at home. They didn’t expect their wives to talk like whores and even if they did, it would have turned them off more than on.
Most married women didn't hesitate to despise and often hate her indiscriminately, but aware of how far she would go to hurt them, they were always petrified to confront her. This hatred developed over a long period of time. After her second husband Ali-Akbar died, when her search to find another good man hit a brick wall, she allowed men into her room, always very discreetly, late at night, for a quick sexual encounter at a fixed price. This was a sort of second job – moonlighting. She never considered herself a prostitute, differentiating herself from that oldest profession by claiming, “Whores go after men, but for me, men come after me. They're crazy for my plump curvy body, my soft skin and these big boobs. Poor bastards can't help it. I give them sweetness. ... What do you think their goddamn wives give them? Nothing, honey ... nothing but snake venom.”
Esmat’s first husband Gholam, a good hard-working carpenter, left her after they had been married only eight short months, but eight sweet and memorable months. To make more money, he headed south to drive trucks for the Americans during World War II. He hauled military supplies from the southern
