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    The Girl in the Hijab
    The Girl in the Hijab
    The Girl in the Hijab
    Ebook37 pages32 minutes

    The Girl in the Hijab

    By T. J. Robertson

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    About this ebook

    When Aram Boghosian rushes to the aid of Darya Hatemi, whom two drunken rowdies are hassling because she's wearing a hijab, he loses a tooth in the scuffle. Darya rewards him by joining him for lunch twice a week. He quickly falls in love with her. Although she enjoys his company and has feelings of affection for him, she refuses to say that she loves him.
    In frustration, he asks to see her more often but she turns down his request. When he persists, she tells him that she doesn't want to see him anymore and that she's going to marry Pasha Khan, a wealthy Iranian businessman. The latter, in a jealous rage, has two of his henchmen kidnap Aram and bring him to his suite in a swank Boston hotel. While he is relaxing in a bathtub, he warns Aram to stay away from her or else.
    Because Aram considers Pasha to be evil, crude, and old enough to be her father, he refuses to believe that a woman of Darya's beauty and intellect would willingly marry him. Convinced that he's a Svengali, Aram becomes hell-bent on finding out what his hold over her is.
    When a young man shows up at Aram's front door and asks him to stop seeing Darya, Aram assumes it's another one of Pasha Khan's henchmen. He turns out, however, to be Darya's brother, Naser. In a more gentle way, for the sake of the family, he asks Aram not to pursue his sister.
    The next day an FBI agent shows up at Aram's place of work and questions him about his relationship with Pasha Khan. When he starts asking questions about Darya, Aram gets upset and walks out.
    Although, because of Darya, he's been beaten, kidnapped, threatened, and questioned by the FBI, so great is his love for her that he'd endure those indignities again for her sake. "Something's rotten in the state of Denmark," he murmurs, "and I intend to find out what's causing the stench."
    One afternoon at lunch, he glances at the headlines of a newspaper and, to his shock, learns that the FBI has found copies of top-secret American weapon designs on Pasha Khan and charged him with spying for Iran. "Good riddance to bad rubbish," he mutters and hurries over to the Hatemi residence. After a tense meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Hatemi, during which Darya runs up to her room, tears streaming down her cheeks, Mrs. Hatemi breaks down and tells him why Darya agreed to marry Pasha Khan.
    In Iran, after the overthrow of the Shah, one of Mr. Hatemi's business competitors went to the secret police and told them he was spying for the United States. As a result, he was arrested and put into prison. Not long afterwards, Darya went to her school principal and, on behalf of her classmates, complained that their math teacher was teaching religion, not mathematics. Accused of blasphemy against the Supreme Leader and undermining the revolution, she, too, was arrested and thrown into prison. Pasha Khan, who had supported the Ayatollah Khomeini financially while he was in exile in France and had great influence with him, offered to intercede with the authorities on behalf of the Hatemis. Mrs. Hatemi remains convinced that had Pasha Khan not pleaded their case, both Mr. Hatemi and Darya would've been killed. No good deed, as they say, goes unpunished. Pasha Khan, true to his form, exacted his pound of flesh--namely demanding Darya's hand in marriage.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherT. J. Robertson
    Release dateAug 20, 2016
    ISBN9781370574179
    The Girl in the Hijab
    Author

    T. J. Robertson

    Although I’ve made my living as a teacher and guidance counselor, I’ve always had a passion for writing. Thomas Bouregy and Company published my novel, Return to Paradise Cove, under their Avalon imprint. Two of my one-act plays, A Different Kind of Death, and The Flirt, have been produced, respectively, in New Haven, Connecticut, and Sacramento, California. Short stories of mine have appeared in commercial magazines such as Action and True Romance as well as in certain literary and professional ones.

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      Book preview

      The Girl in the Hijab - T. J. Robertson

      The Girl in the Hijab

      by

      T. J. Robertson

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2016 T. J. Robertson

      Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. It may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided it remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed it, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for respecting his hard work.

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      The last thing I needed in my life was another woman; for, recently, I had extricated myself from an awkward relationship. Unbeknown to me, my mother and her best friend, Satenig Papazian, had decided that Satenig's daughter, Siranoosh, and I were made for one another. In Armenian, Siranoosh means sweet and that, indeed, she was along with being hard-working, frugal, and practical. All qualities which I confess to be lacking. Although I had reservations, to appease my mother and keep peace in the family, I finally agreed to go out with her. Soon, however, it became obvious to me that the two of us had very little in common. The die was cast, as the saying goes, the night, when, in casual conversation, I asked, Siranoosh, what do you think about Nagorno-Karabagh?

      She shrugged. I've never seen one of his movies.

      Need I say more?

      Following the break-up, my mother stopped making my favorite sweetmeat, baklava, Mrs. Papazian turned her nose up in passing me on the street, and Siranoosh never spoke to me again.

      But I digress; so let me get back to the gist of the story.

      Ironically, I work as an analyst at a large brokerage house in Boston's financial district. I say ironically because I was a founding member of the Occupy-Wall-Street movement there and, as such, spent several months at an encampment a stone's throw from the very office where I'm now employed. Oh, how many times back then did I curse the greed of the wall-street crowd and accuse them of causing the deep recession of 2008. Of course, as so often happens with impatient young idealists, I soon came to realize that making major changes quickly to the American political system was a lesson in futility; for, Kareem Serageldin of Credit Suisse was the only executive of those too-big-to-fail companies responsible for the nation's financial meltdown who ever served time. So, as the saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them. And join them I did; at an obscene salary, I must confess.

      One sultry morning

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