Two generations left trapped

Caspian Rain

A Novel

Gina B. Nahai

MacAdam Cage: 300 pp., $25

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A girl from the wrong side of the tracks marries a wealthy, arrogant young man who quickly tires of her and abandons her and their daughter.

It’s a familiar story. But transplant these characters to Iran in the decade before the Islamic Revolution, during the shah’s final years, toss in some magical realism and the plot becomes more intriguing. That’s the setting of “Caspian Rain,” the entrancing fourth novel by Gina B. Nahai, a creative writing professor at USC.

The novel is narrated omnisciently by Yaas, who tells the story of her parents’ dysfunctional, clashing Jewish families and of the demise of their marriage, which begins to unravel before she is even born.

Her mother, Bahar Jahanbani, is 16 when she meets Omid Arbab, who is eight years older and instantly recognizes Bahar as a worthy future wife, a suitable accessory. She lives in south Tehran, one block from the old Jewish ghetto. The quixotic Bahar dreams of becoming a high school poetry teacher and obsessively collects photos of American movie stars. She also believes that a fulfilling marriage is within her grasp.

Her father is a failed cantor who sings at weddings and funerals; her mother is a seamstress who never lets her three daughters forget that a girl is “her mother’s worst enemy, a liability she must bear all the way into the grave.” After one of Bahar’s three brothers, referred to only as “the Ghost Brother,” dies in an accident at age 10, it becomes clear to her grieving parents that “there’s nothing but trouble and shame where girls are involved. . . . No point pretending otherwise.”

Omid, meanwhile, is the younger son of a well-connected family from the other side of the city. “Tehran’s upper-class Jews are a selective group who pride themselves on socializing only with each other and with wealthy Muslims and Baha’is,” Nahai writes. “They have no time for anyone who is not rich enough or attractive enough to be admitted into their midst.” That’s why Omid’s mother laughs when he insists on marrying the girl he’s met on the street. “I don’t know the family,” she says, implying that they’re not worth knowing.

A rich, brash young man fetishizing a girl outside his social class and wanting to “possess” her is not a new theme, but Nahai’s volatile context adds complicated layers. In 1970s Iran, Jews are not seen as Iranians, she writes, but as “imposters and spies, sent here by Israel to take over the country like they’ve taken over America, to get rich off the blood of God-fearing Muslims.”

It is a society of arranged marriages, where girls are spotted on the street by men and their mothers and invited for a visit if her family is deemed worthy. Then other factors are assessed: height, weight, beauty and family finances. Iranian wives are expected to show obeisance toward their husbands, no matter what; divorce is pretty much out of the question. Happiness is not relevant.

Bahar’s marriage to Omid is a disaster from the start, and the author unsparingly details his cruelty. He is hardly ever around, but when he is, he treats her with condescension and even repulsion. He forbids her to go back to school and wants nothing to do with her family. Omid soon begins an affair with a Muslim woman he meets in a jewelry shop, the beautiful, aloof Niyaz, who is already another man’s lover.

When Yaas is born, Omid is pleasant enough toward her. Eighteen-year-old Bahar, however, makes it clear that her daughter is an unwelcome intrusion, another terrible reminder of the sense of failure that accompanies being female. Yaas is empathetic and wise enough to understand that the rejection isn’t personal. She knows that Bahar’s stalled, lonely life (and having grown up with an inattentive mother herself) is to blame for her lack of maternal skills. “I’m four, eight, ten years old,” Yaas says, “my mother’s only child, the source of all her heartbreak.”

Yaas views her mother as a profoundly sad figure who lives “in a state of perpetual loss -- the runner who gives her all to the race and always comes up short. She couldn’t give up the fight and couldn’t quite win and so she was caught between the pride of battle and the shame of defeat.” But she sees herself as strong, with “the kind of resilience that would allow me to survive on my own and under any circumstance.” This proves essential when Yaas suffers a physical trauma, and other tragedies make the family’s life much more difficult. As grief overtakes her, Yaas wonders, “What do you do with a loss you can neither cure, nor accept, nor overcome?”

Subplots that seem gratuitous at first are revealed as key to the story, such as the recurring presence of Ghost Brother and others who come back from the dead. The novel is filled with lovely sentences: a silver car “glows in the moonlight like a promise.”

“Caspian Rain” is a beautiful study in disappointment and ineffable loss, in the conflict between duty and desire. Nahai shows her characters just as they are, damaged. They are keenly aware of how they’d like to change their lives -- and of how limited their options really are.

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Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry, including “Beat Poets.”