One book which has kept its spirit even after being made into a movie is “Not Without My Daughter” by Betty Mahmoody. The story is a true one about an American, Betty, who lives in America, marries Mahmoody and has a daughter Mahtab. She goes on a visit to Iran. On reaching there she finds she will not be allowed to go back. She has to stay there. She suffers injustice in many ways, with being beaten up being just one of them.
Someone has uploaded an interview with her on Youtube. The interviewer begins in Swedish but Betty speaks in English. The interview was recorded 22 years ago but still remains relevant. Her struggle also, though on the far end of the scale, gives a sneak view of what most mothers feel/do for their daughters. “The first few months after I found I could not leave, I felt sorry for myself, I cried, did not eat and lost 54 pounds,” says Betty. “His family was concerned I think but no one was helping me. One day I started to write something but found was too weak to write even my own name. Then it struck me that I will die but Mahtab will have to stay in Iran. That gave me some inner strength and I came up with the plan to help myself. I went to my husband and told him he wins and that I will stay here and forget about America. From that moment on I killed everybody in the country with kindness!”
It was not so easy for Betty to take that step for she was being beaten severely by her husband. Hastening to assure the listeners that this does not mean all Iranians are like that, Betty adds she has many friends, Muslim and Iranian, and even those who helped her escape were some Iranians. Further, the people who knew both of them feel bad Mahmoody did this to her. It is a personal saga.
“It is sad that my husband did this to me,” says Betty. “If I had known what I would have to face in the escape I may never have done it. People warned me that it was not possible for a womAn and a child...but since I took every moment as it came, I did it. I was talking to a six-year-old when I asked Mahtab if she was sure this is what she wanted to do. This meant she may never be able to see her daddy again. She was determined. During our escape our life was in the hands of total strangers. We had learned some amount of Farsi but we were with Turkish men in the escape. We did not understand them most of the time. Everybody had told me this is the most dangerous way to get out of the country. Rumours in Iran said these men would violate women...”
She recounts, “I just could not move even though they told me it was just another 10 minutes. And yet visions of the times when I begged people in Iran to just give me a chance to escape kept fleeting before my eyes. And I could not walk the last 10 minutes. This man picked me up and carried me beyond the call of duty.”
In the second part of the interview, Betty says that writing her experience was therapeutic. She also says, “No one should feel sorry for us for the experience has only made Mahtab and me stronger. After coming back I got many calls from persons who had their children taken away from them because they married someone from another country. In my case I got involved politically to change things, but in every case it was not political. So I wrote my next book on how their experience intertwined into my life...”
In keeping with this spirit, Mahtab, also interviewed, says she remembers both the good times and the bad.
Web links
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycMAc8IWUUs
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=119r0ZZCGxs
