Spoilers!
Loss and love lost is a coup d’état of a kind — perpetrated by life, the fate written “in ink on our foreheads.” In its wake is a grief that remakes the world, our world. In Marjan Kamali’s stunning, heartfelt ode to love and loss, 2019’s The Stationary Shop, love teeters on the tumultuous backdrop of an actual coup d’état in 1953 Iran. Kamali’s book is also about the idealism and hope of youth: that anything is possible, including to change the world, and how the deficit grows in hindsight between who we sought to be and who we became.
Roya and Bahman are examples of that youthful energy, that vigor, which blossomed into a love seemingly destined to remake a new Iran in their image. Roya, 17, and her younger sister in 1953 Iran are fortunate to have a father who is progressive and forward-thinking about women and democracy. He’s an ardent supporter of Prime Minster Mohammad Mosaddegh, who is ushering in this new Iran. Mosaddegh, though, is faced down by two other competing factions: supporters of the king, the Shah, and those who would prefer Iran be like Russia, communist. It is within this political climate that we find Roya, who loves going to the Stationary Bookshop, owned by the kind and generous owner, Mr. Fakhri, and reading Rumi’s poems. While her dad is progressive, she is still boxed into what he desires for her (to be a scientist). So, when Bahman enters the Shop, swept in like a storm, already in the throes of political subversiveness, and asks Roya what she wants to do with her life, she is not sure. Their courtship blossoms from there, though, starting with a shared love of Rumi, and unfurling into heady Americanness (I could do an entire sidebar rant about this, but suffice it to say, one of the best “soft power” exports from America is our culture!), listening to Sinatra and doing the tango. Soon, they are engaged, despite Bahman’s mother’s adamant opposition. She’s mentally unwell. We later learn she came from a lower, poor class, and when she was 14, Mr. Fakhri, 18 and from a much higher class and status, took advantage of her. He impregnated her and given the time (1916), she self-aborted the baby. Thereafter, she had three more babies with her new husband (Bahman’s father) who didn’t survive. That is why she is mentally unwell, again, in a time (1953) when such things were hushed up and kept secret for fear of embarrassment and shame. She even tried to kill herself at one point in front of Bahman, no less. The reason she’s adamantly opposed to Roya is that she wishes her son to marry into wealth and high status, not for love.
Ultimately, these two forces, Bahman’s mother’s influence, particularly over Mr. Fakhri, who rightly feels he owes a debt to her, and the political climate they are in, are always at Roya and Bahman’s backs until its in their faces. Bahman disappears for a spell (we later learn it’s to deal with his mother’s aforementioned suicide attempt), and through letter correspondence conveyed by Mr. Fakhri, Roya learns that Bahman wants to meet her at the town square in Tehran. Instead, due to the mother’s influence, Mr. Fakhri changes the location, so Roya and Bahman meet up in different town squares. Mr. Fakhri gets a change of heart and tries to tell Roya this, but is shot and killed by a soldier during a riot that eventually is the real coup d’état against Mosaddegh. Because of this orchestrated miscue and subsequent faked letters to Roya and Bahman, Roya and Bahman think the engagement is called off. Roya and her sister go to America to escape Iran, and Bahman settles with the girl his mother wanted him to marry all along.
In the present of the book, 2013, Roya, who has been married and has a child (later in life, as she lost her first child years before), runs into an Bostonian version of the Stationary Shop. Turns out, the Shop was established by Bahman’s son, and through him, Roya learns Bahman is living in a nearby senior center. They reunite, shakily at first because of that six-decade-in-the-making miscommunication, but once Bahman later explains everything in a letter, their love is rekindled — although to rekindle suggests it was lost, but it seems to have never left — and they have a final, lovely moment before Bahman dies.
Kamali’s book is so lovely, so wistful and nostalgic, for youthful love, youthful idealism, a what-could-have-been for love and for Iran. But life, destiny, the CIA, whatever you want to call it, deigned different plans. It’s not so much that Roya and Bahman had bad lives after they were separated unbeknownst to them, just different and in a word, bereft. As it happens, love and bereft are bedfellows and to experience one is to experience the other. Kamali’s prose simmers like the best of the Persian food she talks about with tenderness and care, echoing across six decades and two vastly different countries and cultures. The throughline, however, is love and loss — the throughline for all of us, the coup d’état most of us fortunately and unfortunately will experience.
Milam's Musings 