The Stationery Shop of Tehran

“As the political divisions deepened that winter and hotheaded people engaged in debates and demonstrations all over the streets, it was the perfect retreat of quiet and learning. It was a sanctuary of calm and quiet: never overlit, never loud.”

In this passage, Roya’s love for the Stationery Shop is described. Roya loves literature, but even more significantly, she initially sees the Stationery Shop as a haven from political activity, as a place to escape “the political divisions” tearing Iran apart. Ironically, she will soon realize that it is actually a hub of political activism, introducing the theme of The Ties Between the Personal and Political.

“As she leaned against the splintered wood of the barricade with Bahman, everything did seem possible. They were one with each other and the whole billowing, unified crowd. They would both change the world.”

This passage captures the feeling of political and personal optimism that characterizes the early chapters of the book, reflecting The Ties Between the Personal and Political. Roya and Bahman have faith in their power as individual agents and of the collective democratic agency of the Iranian people to shape their own future. The fact that their first public outing together ends in a political rally reflects how their love story will always be intertwined with the political.

“The minute I heard my first love story,

I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.

They’re in each other all along.”

This verse by the Persian poet Rumi refers to love as something pre-destined and lovers as soul-mates, joined throughout their lives. Lovers do not need to look for each other and can never be truly apart, because they are spiritually united even when there is no physical proximity between them. This sentiment will appear again at the novel’s close, when Roya and Bahman realize that they have never really lost each other, since their memories kept their love alive in their hearts.

“She was surprised that he’d led her out of the Stationery Shop again and into the brightness of the world as if it were fate that they should walk together, be seen together, sit and drink and eat together. Would they have sweet cakes and eclairs and shirini in the future? Just take bites and dive in? Perch on chairs sipping Italian espresso? Roya was dizzy but suddenly absurdly sure that being with him was her fate for the new year and beyond.”

Roya here again describes her relationship with Bahman as being determined by fate. She also associates their love with the sensual pleasure of food. The combination of sweetcakes, French eclairs, and Italian espresso is evocative of the burgeoning metropolitan and internationalist culture in Tehran, while also speaking to how the motif of food is frequently linked with human connection in the novel (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“Because it was almost summer, because the bushes and trees were already lush, because it was twilight and they were seventeen and the air was filled with jasmine, their walk on the boulevard was one that would imprint itself onto Roya’s heart for years to come.”

The passage marking the transition from Spring to Summer evokes the transience of the lovers’ and of the nation’s youthful optimism. The moment has an elegiac quality even as they are living it, yet it survives in Roya’s heart and memory throughout her life afterward due to The Nature of Memory and Loss. The changing of the seasons is an important motif in the novel, reflecting both the linear passing of time and the cyclical nature of memory (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“You just wait, my girl. Life will slap you down too. It’ll push you down when you least expect it. You’ll see. This world lacks justice. Did you know babies die?”

Mrs. Aslan’s remonstration and prophesy that “babies die” will haunt Roya throughout her life, finding a cruel realization in the death of Marigold (See: Symbols & Motifs). Mrs. Aslan’s entrapment in past disappointments prevents her from moving on with her life in a healthy way, condemning her to a life of bitterness and regret instead and embodying the dangerous side of The Nature of Memory and Loss.

“Bahman walked over and they stood face-to-face, cheek-to-cheek, Jahangir’s arm around Bahman’s waist, his other arm extended with his hand clasping Bahman’s. Jahangir drew Bahman in tight and slowly they moved. The song was sensual, almost alarming. It made Roya long for something she couldn’t even define, something forbidden and inviting. Watching Jahangir and Bahman dance felt like watching two strangers. Like watching what she’d never known she yearned for.”

The tango dance between Bahman and Jahangir offers a clue to Jahangir’s love for Bahman, although this has not yet been disclosed. Roya is aroused by the dance although, partly due to her age and partly due to the restrictions of Iranian society, she does not fully understand the emotions to which it gives rise, hinting at The Experience of Love and Marriage.

“Inside, her family was still deep in their afternoon nap. Maman’s big bowl lay in the kitchen sink, the one in which she always served the chicken and prune khoresh stew. Zari lay wrapped in her shamad cotton sheet in bed. In the next room, Baba snored and Maman lay next to him […] Everyone was accounted for, safe. Her family had no idea what was happening in the squares of Tehran, the force making its way north, the danger of the crowd.”

Roya returns home after the death of Mr. Fakhri in a dazed, traumatized state. She finds her family all sleeping peacefully, unaware that their whole world has changed. Until they awake, the house seems to be suspended in the reality that existed before the coup. For Roya, instead, the trauma of events has shifted her perspective to such an extent that her assumptions of just a few hours ago seem unreal and even comical. The description also symbolically associates food and cooking with the home and the family (See: Symbols & Motifs).

“Plans are made for reasons. Financial, logical, social reasons. His parents navigated their lives with reason and power and care. Atieh was right for Ali. The two families had always wanted that wedding. His class of people followed optimal paths, creating more wealth and pursuing good sense. His class of people did not pine for grubby girls who worked at the bazaar—and if they did, they took their due, stole their kisses, groped and fondled and then moved along. No harm done.”

This passage contrasts the social, gender, and class conventions governing The Experience of Love and Marriage with Fakhri’s youthful passion for Badri. The double standards for men and women of different classes are presented with dark irony. It is preferable that upper-class men steer clear of working-class girls altogether, however, if they really cannot help themselves, they are advised to “move along” once they have satisfied their desires, discarding the women in the process. The flippant “no harm done” clearly refers to the consequences for the men, not for the women.

“As they rose higher and higher, she wanted the bloated clouds hanging low over Tehran to finally release their deluge, to break down and give out and soak the entire city and everyone in it with a tsunami of tears. But maybe the gray puffs above Tehran just kept it all inside and didn’t release one drop of rain. It stunned her to think as she soared farther and farther away that there would be so much about her hometown that she would now just never know.”

As Roya leaves Tehran on the plane for California, she imagines the bloated clouds hanging over the city are full of tears, invoking an element of pathos as she longs for the natural landscape to reflect her own sorrows and repressed tears. Roya’s emigration from Iran signals a new chapter of her life, one far from Bahman.

“She focused on what Walter said. He was comforting, it was surprising just how much. He was like a character from a family TV show. He hadn’t left a country whose prime minister had been overthrown in a coup. He hadn’t seen men shot at his feet. He went sledding and drank hot chocolate. Behind the blue blazer he wore, Roya was aware of an innocence that most people would give anything to own. She envied him this simplicity, this lack of complication.”

After the traumatic end of her passionate relationship with Bahman, Roya finds Walter a comforting presence. He has not lived through the trauma that she herself has experienced and, as a consequence, she perceives him as displaying a reassuring innocence and simplicity. Roya’s pained awareness of how Iran’s political context has shaped her reflects The Ties Between the Personal and Political.

“[H]ow amazing is that, Roya Joon, to think that you are there in the land of Cary Grant and Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway and President Eisenhower […] I won’t mention the CIA. I’ll be good. Though it still boils my blood to think that they had a hand in our coup […] One day the world will know that the government over there overthrew our government over here […] What did our generation learn that summer? That even if we did all the right things to bring about political change, in one day, one afternoon, foreign powers and corrupt Iranians could destroy it all.”

Bahman is here expressing his conflicted feelings toward America following the CIA’s involvement in the coup. On the one hand, he continues to love and admire American culture, on the other he is furious for what the American government has done to his country. He feels that his generation has been denied their political agency, since despite having done everything possible to secure democracy, it was suddenly sabotaged by forces beyond their control.

“It had never been her intention to spend time in America with someone so cheerful. She found too much good cheer undesirable, smacking of falseness. How did Americans keep up their good spirits day in, day out, year-round? It had to be the brand-shiny-newness of their country. It had to be all that freedom. No thousands of years’ worth of stultifying rules to observe. Just easy-peasy rolling with the flow.”

Roya attributes the relentless cheerfulness that she perceives in Walter and in Americans in general to the comparative youth of the American republic. Her belief that Walter’s personality reflects the influence of his political environment speaks once more to The Ties Between the Personal and Political.

“My mother wasn’t alone in losing babies in those days, but others seem to have borne it better. Maybe it was that she lost so many in a row.

I attributed her melancholy to the loss of those babies. I attributed her depression and mood swings and instability—all of it—to that.

How was I supposed to know there was a loss that preceded all the others and hung over everything?”

Bahman is reflecting on what he has learned of his mother’s history and trying to understand and forgive her actions. He describes Badri’s repeated bereavements as overshadowing everything and tainting his mother’s worldview, but also ultimately blighting the life of her son. Mrs. Aslan’s inability to recover from her loss speaks to how The Nature of Memory and Loss can sometimes entrap people who are unable to recover in a healthier way.

“Roya had lost layers of her reserve. She had never given Walter complete access to herself; she had a part of herself always locked away [. . .] Marigold broke through every single glacial wall Roya had built up and melted it with her toothless smile. For twelve months, Roya, exhausted and exhilarated, was purely herself. Even the romance of her youth fizzled in comparison; nothing had ever meant anything to her the way this baby did.”

This passage describes Roya’s first experience of motherhood with her daughter Marigold, who lives for just a year. After her heartbreak at the end of her relationship with Bahman, Roya has always kept a part of herself shut away from Walter. Her love for her daughter, however, is more overwhelming even than her first love.

“At the end of the Christmas holidays, after Marigold had been gone for almost a year, she dragged the rocking chair down the stairs and onto the curb. She knows Mrs. Michael was watching from her window across the street as she did it. In the town where America had begun, Roya deposited the rocking chair on the curb and left it for someone new to pick up, take home, rock on.”

Walter has taken to drinking in the rocking chair in which Roya nursed Marigold. Roya, comforted and touched by the support of Zari and Patricia, has decided to re-engage with life. The rocking chair has become a kind of talisman for the grief that is all-consuming to the bereaved parents. She symbolically expels it from the house, hoping it will reacquire its earlier, more positive connotations with a new family.

“Now, at age thirty, her friends from school were either married or in serious relationships. They were scattered all over the country and even the world. Her link to them was through social media, not through phone calls or that ancient ritual of actually seeing one another […] And all she could think was just how much she missed her mom.”

This passage describes Claire’s digital, screen-based social life, where she experiences friendship and family in a vicarious, superficial manner through interactions on social media and watching reality shows. There are important parallels between her grief and Roya’s, reflecting The Nature of Memory and Loss. When Roya loses her daughter, she temporarily loses all hope for the future. When Claire loses her mother, she feels cut off from the past—from her passion to literature and history and from authentic, pre-digital, human relations.

“History repeats itself. To watch these young students pour into the streets again, convinced that if they rid themselves of the Shah all problems will be solved, is painful.”

In a letter to Roya describing the nascent Islamic Revolution (See: Background), Bahman expresses his skepticism about the movement. He sees his own youthful fervor mirrored in the protesting students, and fears that they will meet with similar disappointments.

“It had been decades since Marigold had died of the croup, and decades since Mossadegh had been overthrown in the coup. The world was something else entirely. Iran had had its Islamic Revolution in 1979—and now her country was no longer ruled by the Shah but by religious clerics. The losses mounted, and Roya didn’t have time to mourn them all […] But babies could not die. They could not disappear and just leave their belongings behind. Her baby wasn’t dead. […] Marigold wasn’t just with her every day and night; Marigold was a part of her. She carried her daughter with her at all times.”

Reflecting on the ongoing political turbulence in her homeland, with the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, Roya conflates these political “losses” with the more personal loss of her daughter, reflecting The Ties Between the Personal and Political. Echoing but refuting Mrs. Aslan’s mantra that “babies die,” she concludes that babies never really die, because they live on in the hearts and memories of those who love them. As well as her literal baby, Marigold, Roya is also referring metaphorically to her youthful love for Bahman and to the political ideals of her youth.

“It is when I think of the purple sky on the evening of our engagement, and the moments we shared, that I remember beauty in this world. But after what has happened in our country, and really, when I look around this modern world, I can’t help thinking there is an ugliness, a streak of cruelty in all of it […] The moments of beauty and connection keep me going.”

Bahman is here reflecting on The Nature of Memory and Loss that has marked his life and the recent history of his country. He remarks that, on the basis of the twists and turns of linear, chronological history alone, he would be inclined to hopelessness. He finds redemption, however, in the enduring memory of “moments of beauty and connection” with Roya and his family, which remain forever present in his heart and memory and sustain him against the vicissitudes of everyday life.

“She held him under the toothpaste sheets and, too, in the pastry shops of a city long changed as they went through the lobby of Cinema Metropole with its red circular sofas to kiss under the sky. Before she knew it, they were in Jahangir’s living room, familiar patterns of navy blue and white geometric shapes on the Persian rug as they practiced their dance steps […] She pressed her cheek against his heart and lay there, grateful for the time she’d had with him, however short or long it had been, grateful she had known him, grateful that once, when she was young, she had experienced a love so strong that it did not go away, that decades and distance and miles and children and lies and letters could never make it disappear.”

Finally reconciled, Roya embraces the dying Bahman under the “toothpaste sheets” at the retirement center. The setting is far from romantic and their time together is terribly brief after so many years apart. However, Roya contrasts the eternal present of enduring love and memory against quantifiable, linear time. Overcoming barriers of time and space, she is at once in the retirement center in New England and back in the Tehran of her youth.

“For the first day of spring, for Persian New Year, they would have the curtains washed and the windows cleaned they would have the house scrubbed from top to bottom. And celebrate rebirth and renewal […] She thought of all the times her country had swelled with pride and hope and collapsed in fear and repression. Maybe one day it would be free. She thought of […] the man with whom she had lain in bed on the last day of his life. She was suddenly wrecked by her love for him and for Walter and for all those who had gone and for those who remained.”

In her closing reflections, Roya moves from her singular, erotic love for Bahman toward a more generalized, collective love—a rejoicing in human connection. She contrasts the devastations of linear history with the cyclical recurrence of the Persian Spring, a celebration of rebirth and regeneration. Her mind shifts easily between the past and the present, Iran and America, global politics and personal relations.

“He opens the shop to help the young. He makes it a priority to carry books as much as stationery. Titles from all over the world, spines with lettering that beckon, words of the old greats and the new, tomes of knowledge and risk.”

The Epilogue describes events on the day of the coup from Mr. Fakhri’s perspective. Here, he describes his motivations in setting up the Stationery Shop as a means to encourage young people to pursue the kind of intellectual and romantic freedom that he himself has been denied. The shop thus symbolizes The Ties Between the Personal and the Political (See: Symbols & Motifs).