Review of  Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai

Memoir’s still a strong seller in American bookstores, and the hottest form of memoir is “outsider literature.”  After all, who has a more fascinating vision of your surroundings than a newcomer, who sees it all with fresh eyes and a foreign perspective? 
 

And how about this outsider:  a child living in a Middle Eastern nation under a ruler who’s known as a puppet of the United States; a Jew in Iran; a girl in a society that idolizes men; a deaf person on a society where every detail must be noticed and every whisper heard.

It’s that child, a deaf Jewish-Iranian girl, who narrates Caspian Rain.   The novel, the fourth by Gina Nahai, tells with vivid color and detail the story of a young Jewish couple living in Iran near the end of the reign of Shah Reza Palavi.  Unaware of the historic changes to come, residents of Tehran are living a cosmopolitan life, many of them newly wealthy and painfully aware of the thin veneer of sophistication that separates them from those who live in the ghetto, remain relatively poor, and follow old-fashioned social and religious customs. 

The young couple we meet on the first page will quickly wind up married despite that societal gap separating their families’ social backgrounds.  Right from the start, the slight chance they had for happiness – which is, after all, a very Western expectation of a marriage – doesn’t have much of a chance.  His position is already set out for life, working in his father’s business.  She is a woman, a role as confining as that of a slave. 

The families try uneasily to reconcile their insurmountable differences, but with the birth of the couple’s baby, all hope is dashed; a son could have redeemed his mother and won his father some respect from his cold, critical parents.  But it’s a girl.  The child will symbolize much that’s wrong with her family, though she only comes to know that with the passage of time.  The child, Yaasi, is torn between her increasingly bitter and frustrated mother, and a distant father who develops an obsession with the beautiful mistress of a powerful and never-named man.  As he spends more and more time away from home with the rich socialite, the school sends word to their home that something must be done about Yaasi. 

She can’t say why she’s a problem.  The girl doesn’t know, doesn’t understand why friends find her awkward and teachers think she’s continually distracted.  Her mother begins to make the rounds of doctors’ offices, and one by one they tell her, despite her furious denials, that the child is going deaf.

This isn’t something that makes them sad; rather it’s a dangerous truth, a flaw that puts the woman and girl closer to losing the domestic safety of their home, miserable and confining though it is.  There is nowhere else in the world for them to go.

The young mother’s family lives in a ghetto in Tehran, where the lives of her siblings  have gone in different directions.  One brother’s a singer, though he actually has no job and apparently will depend on his family’s support forever.  Another has converted to Islam, a move that brought him immediate wealth but earned him scorn from many Iranian Jews in the community.  And another brother, who died in childhood, is one of the main characters of the book.  He appears frequently in the neighborhoods, a wistful child riding a bicycle and peering in windows.  Everyone sees him, but only some people know he’s a ghost. 

His grown sister Bahar, who is Yaasi’s mother, knows the Ghost Brother stands for the secret the family intended to bury with his young body when he died – that though he was born hearing, he gradually went deaf, quit school, and spent his days riding his bicycle on the streets.  He was their flaw, the family’s bad luck, and there was no place for him.  He’d never heard the approach of the car that hit and killed him. 

Author Gina Nahai was born in Iran and schooled in Switzerland.  That world culture, combined with her BA and MA in International Relations, no doubt informed her work as a consultant with the Rand Corporation, and research on Iran that she did for the US Defense Department.   Her second postgrad degree was an MFA in Creative Writing, and she’s taught writing at several high schools and universities, according to her biography.

Recent bestsellers including The Bookseller of Kabul and A Thousand Splendid Suns have already introduced us to the plight of women oppressed by cultural and religious customs, but Nahai’s Caspian Rain poses the notion, repeated by the characters around the hemmed-in and abandoned young wife Bahar, that no matter how bad you have it, it can be worse.  Her sister, after all, is married to a psychiatrist who savagely beats her and locks her up for days in a pigeon coop on the roof, where her trembling children sneak food to her till she’s allowed to come back into the house. 

The book is narrated by the girl Yaasi, who struggles to portray her mother Bahar not as an angry and distant mother, but as the bright, irrepressible young woman we meet at the start of the book.  “A girl of limited means and abundant spirit,” Bahar expected to fall in love, get married, finish school, teach, and enjoy her life.  As the bitter truth plays out, one out of five isn’t bad, given her inescapable circumstances. 

Caspian Rain is a shuffling trip through a maze of smothering cultural restrictions: they outline a happy life by its absence.  A neighbor of the family’s, who was once imprisoned and tortured on a flimsy charge, spends the rest of his life haunted by the notion that he’s spied upon and liable to be prosecuted – and in his case, is that paranoia, or a very likely fate?

The daughter, Yaasi, has learned early on that her name means “despair,” though her father’s name, Omid, means “hope” in Farsi.  He finally, permanently, leaves his family  just as his daughter’s black-market hearing aids fail and she discovers she is completely deaf.  There is no school for her then, no sign language or text messaging as she becomes the farthest outsider of all, confined within the walls of her mother’s miserable husbandless home.

The narrator of this book is aware all along of her outsiderness: a Jew in Muslim Iran just before the revolution of the early 1980s, a deaf girl in a land with no accommodations for handicaps, an unwanted female born to an unhappy couple.  Yet she concludes that the joy her young mother anticipated, the comfort she did have on occasion, and every brief fleeting happy moment, wouldn’t have existed without the pain and loss that bookended those small treasures.  The tragic climax, while it may mean Yaasi’s death, is also a moment in which she realizes there are people in her home and neighborhood who care for her after all. 

The book, despite its depressing themes, is an adventure to read – it’s filled with rich visual, sensual detail, from the sizzling food to jeweled raindrops in the sun during a summer vacation.  The author, clearly familiar with her setting, lays out in matter-of-fact conversational descriptions the social rules that bind her characters, and that often sound as if they’re from another century far back in history. 

If there’s a lack in this book, it’s any hint of what resources might have been available for the deaf girl.  It would be nice to learn whether there are any options and networks for deaf citizens in Iran today, if Farsi and Arabic sign language are standardized and taught in universities.  Thanks to al-Jazeera, the Arab language news network, we know there is Internet access, but it seems clear the computer age has not put a laptop in every home in the Fertile Crescent.  

Two of the author’s previous three novels deal with Jews in 20^th-century Iran, and the third, Sunday’s Silence, illuminates the lives of a snake-handling religious sect in Appalachian U.S.  Nahai, a professor of  creative-writing at the University of Southern California, also lectures on contemporary politics of the Middle East, appears on public radio and cable news TV, has published numerous articles and served on literary and women’s foundations.  Read more about her at www.ginabnahai.com

In November [2007], an association of Ugandan activists of Rwandan descent complained to the Ugandan Parliament that the government was discriminating against its women, in that passport-application officials single them out to verify their Ugandan nationality based on whether their derrieres and legs are sufficiently large. According to a columnist for the newspaper East African, "Uganda is a society that's besotted with women's buttocks like few other places are." (Immigration officials denied that they "profile.")