A True Story about a Man, a Pregnant Maid and a Shotgun Wedding!
Most people seem puzzled by the news of the recent days about Arnold Schwarzenegger having a son with the house maid of 20 years or the head of IMF chasing a hotel maid naked around the luxury suit. These acts are so dangerous and these men seem to be so careless to risk so much for a momentary pleasure.
And you see, back in Iran, the same things happened too. The only difference was that the neighbors and the relatives kept quiet about it and life went on as if nothing had happened. The pregnant maid would have been sent back to her village with a little money after the baby was born and the lady of the house raised the bastard child as one of her own, well kind of!
Down the street from us in the old neighborhood in Tehran lived an Army colonel, Sarhang Morteza. He was married to a nice and quiet lady and they had 3 young kids. It was his second marriage and nobody knew what had happened to his first wife. The rumor had it that she just left him one day and disappeared! They had a Gomashteh (a male conscript) from some faraway village. They guy was nice to us and whenever we kicked the ball over the wall to Sarhang’s large yard, he would bring the ball out and would kick it right back to us as if he wanted to join us!
After a while, Sarhang and his wife brought a young maid from a small town in Khorasan to help the lady of the house with the cooking and the cleaning. The maid wore a white chador with small flowers whenever she left the house to buy bread or groceries. She had very light features and was not too careful with her chador and would let it slip down as she walked up and down our street. In our old neighborhood only the maids wore chadors, the old ones wore black, the younger ones wore colors. I guess that was the dress code that was enforced to keep the men’s eyes away from them!
I am not sure how many months passed until one of the kids told the rest of us that his mom thinks that the young maid is pregnant. There were certain glow on her face and a bounce to her stride! We got all curious and stopped playing whenever she was walking by. Somehow the idea of a single woman getting pregnant without a husband was so intriguing! We would try to use our imagination and guess who could have had done it and then we knew that sooner or later the whole hell would break loose in the neighborhood! And that was so exciting! I was full of anticipation!
Then one early summer afternoon, I heard all the commotion on the street. I quickly went outside to see what was going on. Sarhang was cursing his Gomashteh and slapping and kicking him. “You mother so and so, how dare you touched this girl. You have no shame! How can she go back to her family with a child in her stomach?” And on, and on!
The poor Gomashteh kept saying while covering his face and body, “Swear to god and my mother and Prophet Mohammad that I have not done anything and my soul is unaware of all this!” Several of the neighbors finally jumped in the middle and saved the poor Gomashteh.
It did no take more than a day or two when a Molla came to their house and married the young pregnant maid to the poor Gomashteh and after another few days, they were on a bus heading back to his village. Sarhang’s wife gave her a suitcase full of her old clothes, a rug, a few pots and pans and some money. Sarhang kissed Gomashteh goodbye and gave him some money too.
At the end the tricky Sarhang again got away with it. The poor Gomashteh got a nice young wife and a child on the way and I am not sure what the young maid thought of all this!
As I look at this Arnold episode, I can’t help but wonder why an educated and accomplished woman like Maria Shriver from a top family would marry the Terminator! The only explanation that I can come up with is that as in the nature, the female species mate the strong males so that their off springs have good genes!
And the irony of this story as you see in the pictures above is that the only kid that resembles Arnold in the son of the house maid!
