Identical and inseparable twin sisters, Roya and Tala live in Tehran. When they fall pregnant around the same time, they dream of going through the same motherhood milestones together and raising their kids together, yet a freak accident destroys these dreams in a matter of moments. This is the backdrop of Nahid Rachlin’s latest novel, Mirage, a psychological thriller that reflects life in contemporary Iran.
Roya and Tala’s parents met as international students at university in the United States, their father from Iran and their mother from Argentina. Their father taught philosophy at the University of Tehran and their mother translated books from Spanish to Farsi. Roya describes a happy childhood.
Tala and I would go to the square near our house on Fridays, when a group set up a platform to dramatically tell the feverish love story of Layal and Majnun, written by an ancient Persian poet. Mum said it was the same as Romeo and Juliet of the Western world. As we grew older, we learned more from “forbidden books” and foreign movies.
But when the twins were still girls their mother passed away. The story begins when more tragedy would strike when the sisters were in their last weeks of their pregnancies. Tala convinced Roya to travel with her ninety minutes from Tehran to attend a tapestry exhibition at a castle in Rey. Both husbands advised against the trip, but Tala insisted. The sisters set off on an uncomfortable train ride, but when they arrived in Rey and saw the castle and the exhibit, it seemed worth the three-hour round trip.
Unbeknownst to the sisters, the castle had suffered damage from the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and had yet to be repaired. As they walked through the castle, part of it collapsed. The sisters both fell into the void left by the collapsed part of the castle and went into premature labor. When Roya woke up, she was in a hospital and learned the horrible news: her baby did not survive. Tala delivered a baby boy who somehow came out of the rubble unscathed. What’s almost worse, Tala all but stopped talking to Roya, both while Roya was in the hospital and after she was released.
For Roya, everything went wrong while her sister seemed to lead the perfect life. And from the outside, that appeared to be the case. Tala’s husband Anton, a Russian who had grown up in Iran, had wealth from an unknown business; the couple lived very comfortably. Roya’s husband, Reza, on the other hand, wrote under a pen name for an underground newspaper and the couple lived in fear that their neighbors would find out Reza’s true identity:
They would perhaps report Reza if they knew he wrote under a pseudonym for an underground newspaper critical of many beliefs and practices in our culture. Hossein, the publisher of Reza’s newspaper, had inherited a sum of money from his grandfather; instead of spending it on himself, he founded a newspaper. Aware of social injustice and superstitions of all kinds, he made it his mission to awaken people. He kept the entire production hidden; otherwise he would be arrested. The paper was distributed by members of the staff, including Reza, who left piles of them in the hallways of university buildings so that they could reach young people. The secrecy made it necessary for Reza and me to keep a distance from the tenants.
Roya eventually learns that Tala was keeping a secret she couldn’t even disclose to Roya. As Tala’s secrets grow, as Anton takes Tala and their son Tavoos to Russia, Roya becomes more and more worried about her sister and nephew: it’s evident that Tala’s life was not all she made it out to be and that perhaps she suffered even more than Roya when she lost her baby in the castle collapse.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.