Women Without Men

Set in Iran in the early 1950s, against the backdrop of political upheaval surrounding the 1953 coup d'état, the novella follows five women whose separate stories converge at a garden villa in Karadj, a small town outside Tehran. Blending realism with magic and allegory, the narrative traces each woman's path from confinement toward transformation.

The novella opens with Mahdokht, an unmarried woman who lives off her late father's inheritance and spends summers at the orchard of her elder brother, Houshang Khan. She fills her days knitting sweaters for his many children and performing small acts of charity. After discovering the teenage servant girl in a sexual encounter with the gardener in the greenhouse and being unable to act on her outrage, Mahdokht is seized by a sudden thought: Her virginity is like a tree. She resolves to plant herself in the earth by the river, fantasizing that she will grow into a tree spreading across the world, and breaks down crying, driven to the edge of madness.

On August 5, 1953, Fa'iza, a twenty-eight-year-old unmarried woman, visits her friend Munis to settle a grievance. Fa'iza harbors romantic hopes for Munis's brother, Amir Khan, and has cultivated the friendship partly to stay close to him. Over tea, Fa'iza recounts a bitter feud with Parveen, her brother's wife, who accused Fa'iza of sexual impropriety and told her to worry about her own virginity. Defending herself, Fa'iza insists virginity is not a membrane but an orifice. Munis quietly objects, but Fa'iza overrides her. When Amir Khan arrives, he dismisses their conversation and declares that women belong in the house.

Two days later, Munis stands on her rooftop watching crowds and tanks in the streets. Amir Khan has forbidden her to leave. She obsesses over the revelation that virginity is an orifice, not the delicate membrane she was taught at age eight to guard at all costs. A cold rage fills her as she recalls a childhood spent avoiding trees and hedges for fear of tearing her hymen. She closes her eyes, leans forward, and falls from the roof.

Munis lies on the ground believing herself dead but gradually rises. She wanders the city for a month as political chaos subsides, buys a book titled Sexual Fulfillment or How to Know Our Bodies from a street vendor, and reads it three times. Feeling transformed, she returns home. Amir Khan erupts in fury, beats her with his belt, then stabs her with a knife.

Fa'iza arrives to find Munis's body and Amir Khan holding the knife. Rather than recoiling, she seizes her chance: She consoles him, arguing he was right to kill his sister for family honor. Together they bury the body in the backyard. Fa'iza suggests Amir Khan should marry, but he chooses the young daughter of a local notable rather than her. Devastated, Fa'iza visits shrines and consults psychics for charms to disrupt the wedding, without success.

On the wedding night, Fa'iza sneaks to the deserted house to bury a talisman at Munis's grave and hears Munis's muffled voice underground. She uncovers the body, and Munis rises. Munis can now read minds: She knows Fa'iza helped bury her, considered her stupid because of her round face, and befriended her only to get close to Amir Khan. Munis's face has elongated, her pupils glow red. She vows to start an organization to stop brothers from killing their sisters. She pushes into the locked bridal chamber, reveals that the young bride is not the virgin Amir Khan believed, and orders him never to harm his wife. Munis and Fa'iza disappear into the night toward Karadj.

Separately, Farrokhlaqa, fifty-one, endures a suffocating thirty-two-year marriage to Golchehreh, who torments her with sarcasm and remarks about her approaching menopause. She has never stopped thinking about Fakhroddin Azod, an acquaintance with whom she had an eight-year affair and who died years ago. One day, when Golchehreh addresses her with sudden, genuine tenderness, she is so frightened by the unfamiliar sincerity that she punches him. He loses his balance at the top of the staircase and falls to his death. Three months later, Farrokhlaqa buys a garden villa in Karadj.

Zarrinkolah, twenty-six, works at a brothel in Tehran's red-light district. Naturally jolly, she keeps the other women's spirits up with comedy routines. Six months ago, she began seeing all her male customers as headless. After futile attempts at devotional self-cure, she feels weightless and heads to Karadj on a street vendor's suggestion.

On the highway to Karadj, Munis and Fa'iza are attacked and raped by a drunk truck driver and his assistant. A third passenger in the truck, a gardener traveling to Karadj who calls himself Kind Gardener, is not involved. The truck crashes shortly after, killing both attackers. Kind Gardener survives and walks toward Karadj.

The women converge at Farrokhlaqa's garden. On the riverbank stands Mahdokht, planted in the earth months earlier and rooted to her knees, impossible to remove. Farrokhlaqa sees the human-tree as a path to fame. Kind Gardener arrives seeking work, bringing Zarrinkolah, whom he found on the highway. He is the first man she has seen in six months with a head. Then Munis and Fa'iza appear, exhausted. Munis demonstrates her mind-reading ability, and Farrokhlaqa invites everyone to stay.

Over the following seasons, the women renovate the villa. Farrokhlaqa hosts elaborate Friday parties to cultivate political connections and tries to write poetry. Kind Gardener announces that the Mahdokht tree needs human breast milk to reach maturity and marries Zarrinkolah so that her future pregnancy will supply the milk. Meanwhile, he and Munis collect dewdrops each dawn to irrigate the tree, which by spring blooms and sings a haunting song. One Friday, the tree's song transfixes nearly a hundred guests: A green mist dissolves everyone into dewdrops in a shared mystical experience.

When Zarrinkolah becomes pregnant, her body turns translucent, like crystal. In midwinter she gives birth to a morning glory, which the gardener plants on the riverbank. Her breast milk feeds the Mahdokht tree. Farrokhlaqa's first completed poem disappoints, and Munis advises her to abandon poetry and instead commission a portrait to build her public profile. Farrokhlaqa adopts the strategy and eventually departs for Tehran. Munis recognizes she envies Zarrinkolah's effortless spiritual radiance. She feels she is rotting from within: The path to light is love, something she has never experienced.

The novella closes by tracing each woman's fate. Fed with breast milk, the Mahdokht tree undergoes an agonizing dispersal until it becomes a mountain of seeds scattered by the wind across the world. Fa'iza begins meeting Amir Khan in Tehran; they marry, though she insists on a separate household. Munis stays until the tree disperses. The gardener tells her to stop seeking pure light and instead become human: She must descend into darkness, where she will find light in her own hands. He warns that Mahdokht achieved her wish to become a tree but forfeited her humanity. Munis transforms into a whirlwind, crosses seven deserts over seven years, and returns as a schoolteacher. Farrokhlaqa marries Mr. Merrikhi, an old acquaintance who helps channel her ambitions: He enters parliament, she heads an orphanage, and they move to Europe for a diplomatic post. Zarrinkolah, Kind Gardener, and the morning glory embrace on the riverbank and rise to the sky in a puff of smoke.