In the not so well known short story “Katiya”, the Austrian engineer tells the narrator:
You know, it’s always women who must approach me. I never approach a woman. Because if I did that I’d feel that she has not accepted me for my own sake, but for money or fast-talking or something that’s outside of me. It’d look artificial, unnatural. But if a woman approaches me first I’d worship her.2
This presents the reader with two points: one, the engineer’s approach (or lack of approach) to forming a relationship with a woman; two, his own explanation and justification for it. The reality of the matter is no doubt exactly as he says, namely that he would never take the initiative in forming a relationship, regardless, apparently, of the degree of attraction towards the woman in question. But if a woman – and, apparently, any woman – takes the preliminary steps he ‘would worship her’. The question is to what extent his own explanation is realistic, however sincere he may be in believing it to be true. Is it reasonable to believe that his attitude arises from what he says it does, from the fear that, if he succeeds, the woman will have come to her not for his own sake? And what exactly is the meaning of this? How can the ‘self’ in question be described apart from what is known and observed in him; apart from what he looks like, how he talks and how much power he displays, be it through his money or intellect or, for that matter, sexual prowess? And instead of such rationalizations, would it not be more realistic to think that the trouble is what in common parlance is called shyness, and in the scientific tradition is described as sexual immaturity and/or fear of women in the flesh – a lack of self-confidence which is sometimes put down to pride and sense of self-respect?
Whatever the answer to these questions regarding the engineer’s remarks in “Katiya”, in some other of Hedayat’s stories the reader comes across a similar situation displayed and disguised in other forms, and once again explained, if at all, in unrealistic ways. A supreme example of this is the short story “Puppet behind the Curtain”, which anticipates the main plot of The Blind Owl, with the difference that, unlike the latter, it uses a realist, not modernist, technique. It is the story of an Iranian student in France who falls in love with a soulless model or manikin in a shop window, displaying a women’s dress on sale:
Mehrdad was a boy whose sexual inexperience was a metaphor in his family and among his relatives. And he would still blush most visibly the minute the word ‘woman’ was mentioned in front of him. His French fellow students poked fun at him, and when they spoke of their fun and game and love life, he would listen attentively, but would not have anything of his own to add to it. This was because he had been brought up a mommy’s boy, gutless, sad and depressive. He had not yet talked to a woman outside of his family and relatives. His parents had filled his mind with the moral dicta of a thousand years before; and, to stop their son going after girls, had had him engaged to his cousin Derakhsahndeh.3
Yet it is clear that his extreme shyness is not just due to the effect of the parents’ moral preaching because Mehrdad is even shy of his cousin and fiancé, whom, in any case, he does not really love:
His sole memory of this love went back to the day that Derakhshandeh came to see him off with tears in her eyes [when he was departing for France]. But Mehrdad could not find words to comfort her. That is, shyness would not let him, even though he and her cousin had grown up in the same house and had been playmates in their childhood.4
It was against this background that, in Le Havre, where he was at college, he came across the ‘statue’ of a woman ‘with blonde hair and tilting head’ in a shop window, and fell in love with it:
This was not really a statue. It was a woman, no, better than a woman, an angel, who was smiling at him. Those deep dark blue eyes, that noble and winning smile – a very extraordinary smile – the slim, delicate and proportioned body; the whole thing represented love, ponder and beauty. Besides, this girl would not talk to him. He would not have to pretend deceitfully that he loved her. He would not have to take any trouble on her account, or become jealous. Always silent, always beautiful, she represented his highest ideal [in a woman].5
We shall discuss the similarity, both in form and substance, of this ‘statue’ to The Blind Owl’s ‘ethereal woman’.6 It is important at this point to emphasize the reasons why Mehrdad falls in love with it. The soulless manikin is, in his eyes, not a woman but an ‘angel’, that is, the symbol of a woman, perfect and ideal but void of ordinary human attributes. And precisely for that reason it does not threaten the “gutless mommy’s boy” Mehrdad, who, at the same time, is a perfectionist:
Would he be able to get it, smell it, lick it and put his favorite perfume on it? Apart from that, he would not feel shy towards this woman, since she would never give him away…And he would always remain the same chaste and pure Mehrdad.7
In several places in the story there is talk of the ‘sadness’, ‘depression’ and ‘darkness’ in Mehrdad’s life without mention of their possible cause or causes. But if one of the main factors making for his unhappiness is his alienation from society, and not just French society, another is his alienation from women:
He reflected on the fact that the whole of his life had been a roll of darkness. He did not love his fiancé, Derekhshandeh…As for European women, he knew he could not form a relationship with them easily, since he shunned dancing, talking, entertaining, wearing smart clothes, flattery and all other things which are needed for it. Besides, shyness would not let him, and he could not see the guts for it in himself. But this statue was like a light which lighted up his whole life.8
And even more than that, the ‘statue’ had more substance, more truth, in itself than real-life women:
In the streets he was looking closely at the faces of women with their make-ups. Was it these who would make men fall and go mad for them? Was not each and every one of them much less of a statue than that in the shop window?…The boy and girl who were sitting in front of him with their hands round each other’s necks likewise looked ridiculous to him. There was only one truth for Mehrdad, and that was the statue in the shop window.9
In the end he buys the ‘statue’, keeps it for five years while he is studying in France and takes it with him to Tehran in a suitcase “which looked like a coffin”. On return, he gives up his engagement with his cousin/fiancé – who still lives at their extended family house – and declares to her mother that he has taken a decision never to get married. The mother thinks that he no longer is “the old self-effacing and obedient” son of hers, whereas in reality he is “the same old humble and gutless Mehrdad”. He hid the ‘statue’ in an alcove, behind a curtain, in his room in the family house. In the evenings, on getting back home from work he would have a few drinks, pull the curtain off, and sit on the couch opposite the statue for hours, lost in admiring her [sic] beauty. Sometimes when he got tipsy he would get up, go forward and stroke her hair and breasts. All his love life was limited to this; and this statue was for him the very embodiment of wish, love and passion.10
Not surprisingly, the people at home discover the statue and begin to call it “the puppet behind the curtain”. On the other hand, and for totally unexplained reasons, one day Mehrdad decides “to break up with her and kill her”. He even buys a gun for the purpose but still hesitates to ‘kill’ the puppet. One night when he goes home and, as usual, pulls the curtain off and begins to stroke the puppet, the puppet comes to life. Mehrdad walks backwards in terror and throws himself into the couch. The statue moves towards him. He pulls the gun out and shoots: “But this was not the statue; it was Derakhshandeh who was soaking in her own blood”.
This story, as it has been shown by the author elsewhere, is a forerunner of The Blind Owl, i.e. it is one of the short stories in which the main theme and plot of Owl has been developed before reaching its most complete and subtle form in the latter novel.11 The statue compares with the ethereal woman, and Dereakshandeh, with the harlot, who is killed in the end by the narrator’s kitchen knife. Just as Derakhshandeh looks like the puppet or statue, the harlot is a mirror image of the ethereal woman, who, like the statue, looks like an angel, is silent, and personifies the perfect woman. But neither of them is a human being, obviously so in the case of the statue, and mystifyingly so, in the case of the ethereal woman. On the other hand, although Derakhshandeh is not whorish like the harlot in Owl, both of them represent real women, or women in the flesh, imperfect and human. It is clear that in the narrator’s eyes women are either angels or harlots. And precisely for this reason he does not have access to either of them: the angel is not human; the harlot has no time for his perfect, profound and demanding love. The narrator of Owl says of the ethereal woman, the angel:
No I will not mention her name. Since, with her ethereal, slim and misty stature…she does not belong to this base and rapacious world. No, I must not pollute her name with the things of this earth…12
This girl, no this angel, was the source of an inexplicable puzzlement and inspiration for me. Her whole being was so delicate that it could not be touched. She made me feel what it meant to worship someone. I am sure that the look of a stranger, an ordinary person, would make her shrink and wilt. 13
As noted, the ethereal woman is just like the statue in “Puppet behind the Curtain”.
She is an embodiment of purity and perfection, and does not exist as a human being. She too is a perfect statue, silent and soulless. Therefore at the first contact with the narrator she is totally speechless and then mysteriously dies:
To me she was at once a woman and a super-human thing…My heart stopped. I held my breath. I was afraid that if I breathed she would disappear like clouds and smokes. Her silence was like a miracle in the making. It looked as if a wall of crystal separated us.14
Her face was still and motionless as before. ..Her eyes were now shut. In an attempt to see her face better I lowered my head. But, no matter how much I kept looking, she seemed totally remote from me. I thought of saying something but was afraid that her ears being used to soft heavenly music she might hate my voice.15
We thus approach the point of discovering that the ethereal woman is no more than an apparition, certainly not of this world:
I could now feel the warmth of her body and breathe the damp aroma that arose from her long, thick, black hair… I don’t know why I raised my trembling hands and stroked her hair, because I had no control of them…I then pushed my fingers through her hair. It was damp and cold; cold, totally cold, as if she had been dead a few days. No, I was not wrong, she was dead. I put my hand on her breast and her heart. There was no heartbeat. I held the mirror in front of her mouth, but there was no sign of life in her.16
The extreme opposite of that is ‘the harlot’, the other side of women’s face, and the ethereal woman’s mirror image in the second part of the story. She is very much alive, acting as the devil’s instrument for torturing and degrading her husband, the narrator:
I had called her ‘harlot’ (lakkateh) because no name would be more fitting than this…The reason I married her was that she approached me first. That too was a product of her venal nature…[She]was a capricious and inconstant woman, who needed one man for sex, another for love and a third one for torture. I am not sure even if this exhausts the list, but she had definitely chosen me for torture.17
She had loose relationships with rajjaleh-ha, the rabble, the amoral and self-seeking people who succeeded in everything, in money, in sex, in social position, precisely because they were void of any higher aspirations and any feeling for others: “All of them were made of a mouth from which a bunch of intestine hung up and connected with their genital organ”.18 Rajjaleh-ha is a familiar term from other Hedayat’s psycho-fictions; so is their description as such.
In the short story “Three Drops of Blood” which, like “Puppet behind the Curtain”, anticipates The Blind Owl, rajjaleh-ha are represented, not by a man but by a tomcat, just as the harlot is symbolized by Nazi, the she-cat loved by Siyavosh. As the spring begins, Nazi is courted by several cats, but she chooses the tomcat: ‘one of those thievish, lean, hungry and stray cats’. Jealous of the tomcat, Siyavosh shoots at it in the dark. Nazi takes the corpse of her mate away, but Siyavosh goes on hearing the dead cat’s cry of anguish. Each time he hears the cat’s cry he shoots in its direction, and each time three drops of fresh blood drip down to the foot of the pine tree.19
At this stage a distinction must be made between portrayals of women in different groups of Hedayat’s fiction. It is in the psycho-fiction group of his works that, directly or indirectly, women are portrayed as either harlot or angel (and men as rabble). The point to emphasize is that the psycho-fictions exclusively concern the lives of modern middle and upper classes of the time to which Hedayat belonged. And although none of them may be described as autobiographical, to different degrees the author’s presence, i.e. the reflection of his moods and values, may be sensed in them. It is in these stories, stories written about the lives of people of his own social and cultural monde and milieu, that explicit value judgments are freely made; and betrayal, anger, frustration, defeat, disappearance and death, experienced. This is incontrast to his critical realist fiction – putting aside Hajji Aqa, which is a political satire – which reflects aspects of the lives of traditional urban middle and lower middle classes. They are realist in style, focus on social types rather than individual characters, i.e. on social and objective as opposed to psychological and subjective events and experiences, and are clearly far removed from the author’s personal experience and close observation. And, as we shall see further below, the portrayal of men and women in these stories are, just like the form and substance of the stories themselves, distinctly different from the psycho-fictions.
Hedayat’s earliest psycho-fiction, the short story “Buried Alive”, was written in France in 1930, two years after his first suicide attempt in Paris. Following that attempt he had said in a postcard to his brother Mahmud, “Recently I committed a folly which ended well”. He was to write to his friend Taqi Razavi in Paris shortly after returning to Tehran in September 1930, “I intend to publish [the short story] ‘Buried Alive’, which is an account of that folly”. That was Hedayat’s short-hand way of showing the connection between that short story and his suicide attempt. In fact it is not ‘an account’ of that. It is a fictional story, although it is clearly based on the experiences of a student in Paris who has known depression from first hand and has made an attempt on his own life. The narrator meets a Parisian girl, but the day he is due to take her home he decides not to keep his date and goes to walk in Montparnasse Cemetery instead:
It’s nine days since I saw her last. She asked me to go and bring her to my room the next day. But I don’t know why I changed my mind. Not that she was bad looking or I didn’t like her, but some unknown force stopped me doing it…Without consciously willing it I went to the cemetery. 20
He explains his behavior by saying that he wished to sever all his ties, did not want to see the girl, wanted to end all of his relations, and just wished to die. But a few lines before he had said that he did not know why he failed to keep his date with her. And the fact that he was due to take her to her room that day is not without significance.
In the little known short story ‘The Masks’, the narrator’s girlfriend is close enough to him to have seen him alone at least once at his home, something that was a rare occurrence in Tehran of the early 1930s including the upper class circles, even though it is clear that the relationship has not gone further than that. But for some not very convincing reasons he is angry with her and decides on ‘revenge’:
He decided to make up with Khojesteh and exchange this life …with one night. Khojasteh will be there; they’ll take poison and die in each other’s arms. He found this thought appealing and poetical.21
This reminds one of The Blind Owl, both when the narrator pours the poisoned wine down the throat of the ethereal woman, and when, embracing the harlot in bed, his kitchen knife – which is somehow there in the bed – slips into “somewhere inside her body”. Another striking point in the short story, ‘The Masks’, is the opinion which the lover puts forward about love and loving. He tells the girl:
You know there is no reality outside our own self. This point shows itself up clearly in the act of loving. Each of us loves the other person with the power of his imagination. And it is his own imagination which satisfies his desire, not the woman sitting next to him, the woman he thinks he loves. The woman is the ultimate image of our self; she is no more than an illusion, far from reality.22
To love a woman, then, is to love an ideal image which exists in the man’s mind, not the real-life woman who, however attractive she may be, is bound to be an imperfect human being; it is to love an ideal image, just like the ethereal woman in The Blind Owl and the puppet in “Puppet behind the Curtain”, both of whom the narrator and anti-hero of those stories love passionately and without qualification, and neither of whom exists in the real world. The ending of the short story “The Masks” is also reminiscent of the other psycho-fictions. Here too, the two lovers die in a car crash deliberately caused by the man just as they’re leaving town to spend a few days together for the first time.
In the short story “S.G.L.L.”, one of the two in which Hedayat has tried his hand at writing science fiction, the woman tells the man that he is a ‘mommy’s boy’, that he seeks, not love, but the pain of loving, and that it is just that pain that has made an artist of him. And when she dares him to jump in bed with her, he refuses and says he wished they lived in old times, when he could stand behind her window and play a serenade to her. In the course of the conversation, he goes on to say that in one of his dreams he had made love to her dead corpse. Here again, as soon as the narrator confronts, not love in the mind, but passion in the flesh, it fails to consummate, and the woman dies or is already dead.23
In the short story “Dead End” the story’s main personage is once again very different, and therefore alienated, from his friends and acquaintances, who are just like the rabble in The Blind Owl: “their passions had leaked from their lower organs to their jaws’. Belonging to a notable provincial family, when he finishes his studies in Tehran and returns home he marries his cousin. There has been no intimate relationship between them before, and in the night of the wedding somehow things go wrong. When they are alone in the room, the girl suddenly begins to laugh “a long and mocking laughter that wrecked Sharif’s nerves”. Why she breaks into that laugher cannot be read from the text, although it may be read into it. The poor man sits in the corner of the room, thinking, apparently for the first time, how much his bride resembles her mother and how she was bound to look as ugly as her once she entered the middle age, and imagining the baseless quarrels which would inevitably follow in their family life. It is not clear from the text, once again, why the groom could not have thought of any of this before he got as far as the wedding night. At any rate, he sleeps separately from the bride that night and next day leaves town without saying goodbye to anyone. And as we read in the text ‘his cousin created a scandal and his father paid a heavy fine [no doubt including his wife’s Mehr] for his indiscretion’ 24
The virtually unknown short story “Manifestation” or “Revelation” happens somewhere in Eastern Europe. Hasmik’s husband, another member of the rabble, “was running after money and collecting colored banknotes like a dog whose feet are burnt”. She has a lover and the lover takes music lessons from a talented violinist, who also plays in a café in the evenings. This man, Wasilitch, secretly loves Hasmik, but does not have the courage to make it known to her. One night she catches him approaching a street lady, who rejects him while shouting, “Get lost. Have you no shame. You miserable thing; you’re not a man. Even that one time that I came with you was too many. It’d be better off to go with a dog.”25 Hearing this, Hasmik, who has great admiration for the man as a violin player, first wonders how a man of his talent could have such needs, then thinks that he is a lonely and pathetic man, deprived of the joys of ordinary people. The story ends when Hasmik visits Wasilitch at his home by mistake, thinking that she would find her lover there, and Wasilitch, suddenly finding himself alone with the woman he secretly adores, utterly loses confidence, makes some disjointed remarks, and, quickly begins to play his violin to cover up his acute embarrassment. A few minutes later he realizes that the woman has left the room. He begins to cough and throws himself on his bed.
As noted, such portrayals of women, as also of men and their relationships, are found only in Hedayat’s psycho-fictions, which concern the lives and loves of people in his own social and cultural environment. Two of them, The Blind Owl and “Three Drops of Blood” use modernist techniques, but all of them involve different levels of subjectivity, where the emphasis is on characters rather than types, or, to put it differently, on a psychological type within a social category. Hedayat’s realist stories, on the other hand, are about various aspects of the lives of ordinary townsfolk. Although like any good novels and short stories written in the critical realist style their fictionality is not in question, they portray objective realities relevant to their context authentically, so that one can readily think of types of people and situations in real life corresponding to them. It follows that both women and men in these stories look like their real types in society. And whatever judgment readers may make about them, their lives, loves, ways and morals, they would not surprise their readers, nor would they engage his mind in complex questions. Indeed the readers would be delighted to enjoy reading a good story about interesting aspects of these people’s lives, and would have his or her hands largely free to form his or her own views about it.
In the comic short story ‘Alaviyeh Khanom’, a group of Mashad pilgrims are portrayed who display various human attributes such as kindness and charitableness as well as duplicity and sexual promiscuity. What goes on is something that they are more or less used to. These simple folk are so largely devoid of hidden psychological constraints that they normally speak and behave with utmost openness, and are not too embarrassed when they are caught at something that even they might think they should not have done. Their life certainly is not appealing to sophisticated people, but no impression is gained that it is not worth living.26 In the short story “Asking for Absolution”, all the three pilgrims of Karbala who are closely portrayed turn out in the end to have committed capital crimes. But the main story is the tragic experience of Aziz Agha, who, being barren, her husband had taken another wife. The new wife had given birth to two infant boys whom the wretched old wife had killed one after the other, being deeply depressed at the loss of her status in the household. Feeling remorse, instead of killing the third boy born to the younger wife, she had decided to get to the root of the matter and so killed the mother.27
In the short story ‘The Legalizer’, the man divorced his wife in a fit of rage and quickly became remorseful, since it was an absolute divorce and it was not possible for him to remarry his wife unless she had been married to and divorced from someone else. He used the familiar traditional technique, though with heavy heart, of paying another man to act as a mohallel, who would marry the divorced woman and divorce her later to make it possible for the original husband to marry her again. But the new husband took to the woman and refused to divorce her afterwards, a complication that did occur in real life from time to time. The two men meet by chance a few years later, while the first husband has become a wanderer from the grief of losing his beloved wife, and the second one has been abandoned by her.28
Such short stories as “The Ghouls” and “Hajji Morad” are generally in the same mould.29 The little-known short story “The Woman Who Lost Her Man”, the only fiction of Hedayat involving peasant life, has a different turn to it. Probably written with some modern psychological concepts and categories in mind, it describes the life of a peasant woman abandoned by her husband. She may not be a masochist, and sheer habit may have led her to associate her husband’s beatings and the smell of animal dung in his body with sexual pleasures. When she finds him in the end he denies any and all knowledge of her. Hitching a ride on another peasant man’s donkey, she wonders to herself if he too is a wife beater and smells of dung.30
The highly-admired short story “Dash Akol”, deceptively, but not unreasonably, looks like one in Hedayat’s critical realist style. But beyond the surface of an authentic, if tragic, story about the lives of the common people, there is the figure of the Dash, a psycho-fictional character, proud, self-regarding, uncompromising, charitable to the point of self-sacrifice, shy and self-effacing, deeply in love but incapable of communicating it. And just like the figures in the main psycho-fictional stories he does not belong to the common folk. Far from it, he comes from a leading family of the town who has turned luti. He morbidly loves the girl Marjan who exists in the story virtually by her name alone and is once again an ideal and therefore inaccessible woman. Dash Akol is eventually killed by the other big luti, who represents the familiar rabble of Hedayat’s psycho-fiction, on the night of the girl’s marriage to someone less than himself in every respect, which he has dutifully arranged. His parrot reveals the hidden truth after his death when he repeats ‘Marjan…Marjan…you’re killing me…your love is about to kill me’ 31
To sum up, there is dualism in the portrayal of women in Hedayat’s psycho-fictions, on the one hand as an ideal, unattainable angel, on the other, as a harlot. This corresponds to the portrayal of men: the lonely, misplaced, misunderstood, well-meaning, honest, sincere and moral narrators and anti-heroes who fail in every aspect of their living; and the rabble, who succeed in every aspect of theirs. His critical realist fiction about the lives of ordinary townsfolk is different: both men and women are shown as they normally are, even though their vices often seem to outnumber their virtues.
The question has been posed in recent times if The Blind Owl and similar stories imply male homosexuality. The matter of course is merely of critical and interpretive interest. Male (and female) homosexuality in Europe, which in recent decades has been translated into Persian as hamjens-bazi and hamjens-gera’i, normally refers to love affairs between adults of the same sex. Male homosexuality refers to men who have no desire at all of liaising with women at a sexual level. Such men may even be disappointed and frustrated in their desires for a deep bond with their ideal man, but unlike the narrator of The Blind Owl and similar Hedayat fiction, they would not desire women, whether ‘angels’ or ‘harlots’, let alone experience such extreme agony in being disappointed by them. If this is the normal meaning and implications of homosexuality, as it certainly is from its cultural source in Europe, then it would make no sense at all to attribute it to the narrators and anti-heroes of the psycho-fictions.32
NOTES
[1] Homa Katouzian is Editor of Iranian Studies (Journal of the International Society for Iranian Studies), St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.
[2] See Sadeq Hedayat, “Katiya” in Sag-e Velgard (Tehran, 1963), 72.
[3] See Sadeq Hedayat, “Arusak-e posht-e pardeh” in Sayeh Roshan (Tehran, 1963), 81-82.
[4] Ibid, 82.
[5] Ibid, 84.
[6] For a full discussion of the structural similarity between “Puppet behind the Curtain”– and others of Hedayat’s psycho-fictions – with The Blind Owl, see Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat, The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (London and New York, 1991) “Ravan-dastan-ha-ye Sadeq Hedayat” in Sadeq Hedayat va Marg-e. Nevisandeh, (Tehran, 4th impression, 2005).
[7] See Sadeq Hedayat, “Arusak-e posht-e pardeh”, 85.
[8] Ibid, 87.
[9] Ibid, 89-90.
[10] Ibid, 93.
[11] See note 5 above.
[12] See Sadeq Hedayat, Buf-e Kur (Tehran, 1962),11, and Homa Katouzian, Dabareh-ye Buf-e Kur-e Hedayat, ((Tehran, 5th impression, 2007): 1.
[13] Hedayat, Buf-e Kur, 18.
[14] Ibid, 22.
[15] Ibid, 23.
[16] Ibid, 61.
[17] Ibid, 68.
[18] Ibid, 76.
[19] See “Seh Qatreh Khun” in Seh Qatreh Khun (Tehran, 1962), 105-106
[20] See Sadeq Hedayat, “Zendeh beh gur” in Zendeh beh Gur (Tehran, 1962), 12-13.
[21] “Suratak-ha” in Seh Qatreh Khun, 105-106.
[22] Ibid, 160-162.
[23] See “S.G.L.L” in Sayeh Roshan.
[24] See “Bon-bast”, in Sag-e Velgard, 55.
[25] See “Tajjali” in Sag-e Velgard, 14.
[26] See Sadeq Hedayat , “Alaviyeh Khanom” in Alaviyeh Khanom va Velengari; Homa Katouzian, Tanz va Tanzineh-ye Hedayat (Stockholm, 2003): 6.
[27] See Sadeq Hedayat, “Talab-e Amorzesh” in Seh Qatreh Khun; Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: 6.
[28] See “Mohallel” in Seh Qatreh Khun; Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: 6.
[29] See Sadeq Hedayat, “Mordeh-khor-ha” and “Hajji Morad” in Zendeh beh Gur; Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: 3 and 6.
[30] See “Zani keh mardash ra gom kard” in Sayeh Roshan; Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat:14.
[31] See “Dash Akol” in Seh Qatreh Khun; Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: 6.
[32] See further, Homa Katouzian, “Nameh-ha va mas’aleh-ye Hedayat”, Iran Nameh: XIX, 4, fall 2001, 535-549.
