Week 5 Story: Sarnevesht

Sarnevesht

When my son was born, it was love at first sight for me. I knew from the moment I first held him for the first time that I would do anything for him. He was my first child, after many failed attempts by my wife and I to have a child. Soon after he was born, I took my son to the mullah to have his horoscope read. I gave the mullah all the information of his birth, and waited anxiously while the man did his calculations and consulted his books. I wanted my son to have a good life, more than I had wanted anything before.
After a while, I watched a frown form on the mullah's face, deep furrows appearing on his brow as he checked, then double-checked his calculations.
"What is it?" I asked him anxiously.
The mullah shook his head, then said gravely, "I'm sorry, agha, but I can only see a violent end for your son."
"'A violent end'?" I repeated incredulously, "What does that mean? What does his horoscope say?"
He shook his head again, "I mean that fate has a very particular ending in store for him: he will be torn apart by a wolf."
I stood up, "That can't be, you must have done the calculations wrong."
"Agha, I have been doing this for over forty years, as did my father and my grandfather before me. I know how to read the stars, and this is what they are telling me about your son." His tone was serious, reproachful.
I felt shame for having questioned the man so harshly, and bowed my head in apology, "I'm sorry. Is there anything I can do to save my son?"
The mullah leaned back in his seat and shook his head once again, "You can try to keep him away from the outside, as the wolves sometimes come wandering into the village looking for livestock, but one can never outrun fate for long. Our destiny always manages to reach us, one way or another."
The mullah's words haunted me, but I refused to sit and wait for my son to be slaughtered. I went home that very day and started building a room under our house. I moved our son's things down there and told my wife to never let him out. She questioned me at first, but when I told her of the mullah's reading, her face went pale and she did as I asked.
We kept him down there for years, bringing in mullahs to teach him and food and water to keep him alive, visiting him as often as we could so that he wouldn't get too lonely. But as he got older, we knew it was time for him to have a wife, and to give us grandchildren that could take care of us when we got older, and to take care of him, since he would never be able to leave his room without putting himself at risk of violent death. A neighbor of ours had a daughter about our son's age, and we arranged a match for them. We celebrated the wedding for a week, my wife and I feeling some relief that our son had someone else to share his somewhat limited life with and to keep him company.
The final night of the celebrations, I brought my new daughter-in-law down to my son's room, and introduced them for the first time as man and wife. I took my daughter-in-law's hand and put it in my son's, folding his fingers over hers and squeezing them briefly before going upstairs to leave them alone for the first time. It was with a lighter heart that I went to sleep that night, sure that I had given my son some small happiness at least.

The village of Dalkhani in northern Iran (Source: Tasnim News Agency)

In the middle of the night I woke to the sound of a long, high-pitched howl. it almost seemed to be coming from below us, but that was impossible, so I assumed I had only heard the howl of a wolf outside the village and went back to sleep. The next morning after my wife had gone down to the underground chamber to check on the new couple, there was a blood curdling screech. I went running down there, and found a horrific scene, the limbs of my son strewn about the room, the wooden planks of the floor soaked with blood, remnants of his clothes tossed around the room, shredded to pieces. My daughter-in-law sat on the bed with her knees to her chest, her arms covered in blood and her expression one of horror. My wife was frozen by the stairs, the pot of tea she had been carrying down to them thrown onto the ground.
"What happened here?" I managed to ask. My wife was silent, but the girl, with tears streaming down her face, said, "I thought it was just a bad dream..."

All the men and women in the village came to the burial. After we had gathered what was left of my son, my wife had insisted we fill the chamber with dirt, never to be stepped foot in again. The mullah who had made my son's prediction came to the burial, and after he had paid his respects and turned to leave, he gave me a sad, knowing look, like he had been proven right but had been hoping he had been wrong the whole time. I nodded at him. He had been right, it was foolish to try to escape fate.

Bibliography: Persian Tales, translated by D.L.R. Lorimer and E.O. Lorimer and illustrated by Hilda Roberts (1919) - The Story of the Wolf Bride

Author's Note: So, some backstory here. My best friends since middle school are Iranian-American triplets whose parents immigrated from Iran in the 90s. That was why I chose Persian Tales for this week. Having said that, while many of these stories were kind of gory and dark, I did find them interesting. The message in this story is so powerful, the idea that we all have a predetermined fate and that you cannot escape that fate, that I didn't want to change that. At the beginning of my version, I did try to tap into the father's' emotions more, because it is only out of both deep superstition and deep love that one could believe this about his own son's life, and also that he would go to such lengths to protect him. He basically made him the Persian underground Bubble Boy for the sake of his own life. I'm still trying to find my storytelling style, and it feels a little weird to be writing stories in the first place, but I hope everyone likes what I did with this! I thought it would be a good twist to make it so that the girl didn't even remember turning into a wolf like she does in the story; if it really is some superior being or fate, it makes more sense to me that she is an unknowing instrument than to have remembered it at all. As for the title, the word "sarnevesht" is Farsi (the language spoken in Iran, distinctly different from the Arabic of the surrounding countries) for "fate" or "destiny." Shoutout to Baba (my friend's dad) for giving me the translation, because my Farsi skills are super limited.